SOURCE: “A Name on the Map,” in Times Literary Supplement, March 5, 1999, p. 24.

In the following review, Walters commends Barrett's convincing portrayal of the “intellectual universe of the mid-nineteenth-century naturalist” in The Voyage of the Narwhal.

Erasmus Darwin Wells is the unlikely hero of Andrea Barrett's impressive new novel The Voyage of the Narwhal. Already middle-aged, he is diffident, prickly and introspective, and convinced, at least in his frequent moments of depression, that he is a failure. He lives quietly in his family home in Philadelphia, with plenty of money, but “no wife, no children, no truly close friends,” and no real work. His beloved brother Copernicus, a landscape painter, is somewhere out west, and his unmarried sister Lavinia—attended by a hired companion, Alexandra—is nervous, bored and unhappy. Erasmus passes his time in desultory study, sorting his dead father's enormous collection of scientific curiosities. He often thinks...