In the foreword to Thomas Mann’s “The Magic Mountain,” he writes, “We are much more inclined to the view that only thoroughness can be truly entertaining.”

Andrea Barrett, author of “The Air We Breathe” (W.W. Norton, 297 pages, $24.95), would probably agree. Ms. Barrett is known for her passion for history and science, and for her ability to weave these fields seamlessly together within literary works. When she won the National Book Award in 1996 for “Ship Fever,” a collection of short stories about people who love and live with science, her erudition was praised as enthusiastically as her writing. Her latest novel again demonstrates her ability to meld various forms of expertise, but it lacks the light and delicate touch that made her previous amalgamations of literature, history, and science so pleasing.

The novel is set, like Mann’s, in a tuberculosis sanatorium around the time of World War I. The sanatorium is located in Tamarack Lake, a village in upstate New York, that houses the poor, tired, huddled masses whose various attempts to build new lives in New York City were curtailed by tuberculosis. Shipped by state authorities to this isolated public sanatorium, the patients are instructed to rest and told that they are lucky to be there, whether they realize it or not.

Boredom and malaise fill the antiseptic halls until a patient from a wealthier neighboring retreat descends upon the sanatorium proposing to initiate weekly gatherings where the patients will share knowledge from their past lives. One by one the characters take turns leading these meetings; one describes Chekhov, the next Stravinsky, one admires Carl Sandburg, the next the principles of cinematography.

If the range and depth of intellect among the patients seems a bit unlikely, the unreality is only compounded by further intellectual activity. The sanatorium’s radiographer busily explains the principles of X-ray technology to Eudora, an ambitious and curious underling (the Mann riffs are everywhere); news of the Zimmerman telegram and Rasputin’s death are eagerly discussed. When the radiographer takes her turn before the gathered patients, she expounds Einstein’s relativity theory, explaining that their concept of time is not as stable as they think. (Time, Mann wrote in his foreword, has a “problematic and uniquely double nature.”)

Ms. Barrett constructs this thorough, detailed portrait of the ideas and sentiments of a specific era with extraordinary care and attention. It’s a joy to find a novel in which the transmission of information rides the momentum of a compelling story line, but unfortunately this is not such a novel. There are moments when the author succeeds in this respect, such as when Eudora takes an X-ray of Leo, once a chemist in Odessa and now an enfeebled inmate, and the emotions between the two characters develop at the same time as the image on the film. But the incessant flow of informative detail is one of the books greatest flaws. It’s as though Ms. Barrett can’t exclude any scrap of history; her writing starts to feel like a series of eloquently phrased Wikipedia entries on the years 1916 and 1917.

“The Air We Breathe” is also encyclopedic in its cast of characters. Aware that her panoply is dizzying, Ms. Barret appends a family tree that includes characters that are never mentioned in the novel. (To be fair, some of these characters appeared in “Ship Fever” and to a more recent reader of the collection, the relationships outlined in the family tree might have more relevance.)

She wastes no time getting to the quick of these characters, and in the best instances a character’s actions precisely define his personality. When Dr. Petrie, the head doctor at the sanatorium, waits for a visitor, he’s confounded by the inevitability of wasted time: “If he picked [the pen] up and began again, Miles would certainly appear mid-sentence. If he sat here waiting Miles would never come, and he would have wasted a whole hour. If he got up and went to the window … either he’d see [the car] and be annoyed at their slow progress toward his office, or he wouldn’t see it and would grow more anxious.”

In the worst instances, the brief, compressed descriptions leave the characters flat, their passions dilute, and their decisions insensible. Brevity turns them into hyperbolic impersonations of real people. “Why can’t you behave? … Don’t you understand how sick you are?” asks the officious assistant director when a patient fails to sit still. “Why are women like you so stupid?” complains a discontented teenage girl to an elder.

Ms. Barrett’s intent seems to pump as much life as possible into her characters before her next informational digression, and as a result, they become merely extensions of timely theories. There are moments of beautiful, ethereal writing in “The Air We Breathe,” and for a fictional portrait of a sanatorium in upstate New York in the winter of 1916–17, you probably couldn’t find a more carefully constructed work of literature. Unfortunately, the shadow of Mann’s more thorough portrait of a similar place hangs over the novel, and “The Air We Breathe” doesn’t possess the levity to transcend it.

Ms. Schama is a graduate student at Cambridge University in England.