State of Wonder by Ann PatchettMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
I have an embarrassing confession to make: I’ve never enjoyed the novels of either Hemmingway or Conrad, even though both men are held up to authors as literary gods. Conrad came to mind recently as I read State of Wonder, by Ann Patchett. Like Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, which I tried a couple of times and couldn’t finish, Patchett’s novel features an unadventurous bureaucrat sent into the jungle to track down an employee who has gone rogue (or perhaps merely AWOL). Both books consider the moral ambiguities of colonialism, and the difficult decisions sometimes required merely to survive. State of Wonder however, struck me as far more engaging.
I knew of Patchett from The Dutch House, which was a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and her earlier wonderful novel, Bel Canto, about a hostage-taking in Peru. That novel featured a complex relationship that develops between two of the captives: a famous opera singer and the CEO who has long been a fan of hers and who had hired her to perform at the event where they were taken hostage.
State of Wonder also features complicated, multi-layered personal relationships. In it, a drug company has spent years funding research on a remote tribe in the Amazon hoping to learn the secret that enables their women to be fertile for 20 or 30 years beyond human norms. The lead researcher is the reclusive Dr. Annick Swenson, who has refused to let anyone from head office see what she’s up to. Exasperated by the lack of updates and under pressure from his board, the CEO sends an employee to try to find out what’s actually going on but soon gets word that the man he sent died while there. He then sends another company researcher (who is also his lover), Dr. Marina Singh, to try again.
We watch Marina transform from being reluctant to even accept the mission and impatient to get back home, to slipping gradually into the rhythms of jungle village life. There are multiple layers of secrets and a deep exploration of complicated decisions about if and when to challenge local cultural norms.
Although I got frustrated with Marina’s willingness to be pushed around at times (especially in the first half of the novel), I really enjoyed it overall. The ending involved a particularly difficult moral choice, which lingers in my mind.
If Goodreads allowed half-stars, I’d give it 4.5.
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