SOURCE: “Nor Good Red Herring: Novellas and Stories,” in Georgia Review, Vol. 50, No. 4, Winter, 1996, pp. 808–18.

In the following excerpt, McGraw explores the unifying thematic material in Ship Fever.

The stories and novella in Andrea Barrett's Ship Fever are bound by a clear thematic unity: all of the book's characters are, in some fashion, scientists, and in every tale science provides both the framework and a metaphor for the action. “The Behavior of the Hawkweeds” centers on a genetics professor's wife, “Birds with No Feet” on a chronically unsuccessful collector of rare natural specimens in the nineteenth century, “Rare Bird” on an eighteenth-century would-be naturalist frustrated in her ambitions because she is female.

It is not coincidental that the stories focus on minor characters, science's also-rans: Even in “The English Pupil”—the collection's one offering that features a famous figure—botanist Carl Linnaeus' body is already doddering, and his...