Review by New York Times Review
ANN PATCHETT'S most characteristic subject is the hell turned unlikely paradise, a kind of reverse "Lord of the Flies" in which a group of strangers, shipwrecked into a disaster beyond their imagining, manage nonetheless to create a peaceable habitat where love and decency prevail. Patchett's best-selling 2001 novel, "Bel Canto," opened with a botched terrorist operation in a South American country, after which an American opera diva, a Japanese industrialist, a French ambassador, various Russian businessmen and their Marxist-Leninist guerrilla captors turned their long captivity into a peculiar sort of idyll. "State of Wonder," Patchett's eighth book and sixth novel, is no less multinational in its cast of characters, or high-stakes in its plot. Marina Singh, a medical researcher at a pharmaceutical company in Minnesota, is sent deep into the Amazon basin to investigate the circumstances surrounding the death of Anders Eckman, her lab partner. Anders had originally been dispatched to Brazil to bring back news of Dr. Annick Swenson, a charismatic but despotic professor who, on the company's bankroll, was developing a miracle fertility drug. Distressingly, Dr. Swenson had become uncommunicative about both the progress of her study and her whereabouts. "She found a village of people in the Amazon, a tribe," Anders had told Marina, "where the women go on bearing children until the end of their lives. . . . Their eggs aren't aging, do you get that? The rest of the body goes along its path to destruction while the reproductive system stays daisy fresh. This is the end of I.V.F. No more expense, no more shots that don't end up working, no more donor eggs and surrogates. This is ovum in perpetuity, menstruation everlasting. . . . Pretend for a moment that you are a clinical pharmacologist working for a major drug development firm. Imagine someone offering you the equivalent of 'Lost Horizon' for American ovaries." As the novel opens, a curt letter has arrived from Dr. Swenson, announcing that Anders has died of a sudden fever at her secret research station. He was buried on the spot; his few possessions are being kept for his widow, Karen. The pharmaceutical company's position is unequivocal: Dr. Swenson must be tracked down immediately, her drug rushed into development and prepared for submission to the F.D.A. Karen's position is equally unequivocal: she does not believe her husband is dead. Only Marina, it is decided, can perform the mission impossible - come home with evidence that will satisfy both parties. It's a task straight out of classical mythology: bring back the head of the Gorgon, the Golden Fleece, or, in Marina's case, the potion conferring everlasting fertility and the dead husband's watch. As in the myths, she must be ready to outwit tyrants, behead monsters, charm cannibal tribes. Although doggedly dutiful, Marina is by various counts the last person who should be sent into this Heart of Darkness. A die-hard homebody, she is rooted to her native patch of Minnesota, a suburb of Minneapolis called Eden Prairie. Added to this Midwesterner's almost genetic antipathy to the jungle are the psychological side effects of the antimalarial medicine she must take, which throw her back into the same harrowing nightmares that haunted her youth. (Successful dream sequences, it must be said, are even rarer in novels than good sex scenes; it is one of Patchett's more unusual achievements that Marina's nightmares are made to constitute a hypnotic, complex and weirdly funny counterpoint to the novel's waking life.) Most disabling of all, however, is that Marina is a former student of Dr. Swenson's. Indeed, unbeknownst to anyone else, Dr. Swenson played a significant role in a terrible accident that, 12 years earlier, compelled Marina to abandon her career in obstetrics and retreat to the safer shores of pharmacological research. "State of Wonder" is an engaging, consummately told tale. Patchett's deadpan narrative style showcases a dry humor that enables her to wed, with fine effect, the world of "Avatar" or the "Odyssey" with that of corporate board meetings, R&D reports and peer review. This unlikely marriage of the magical and the prosaic, of poison-tipped arrows and Fourth of July barbecues, informs every line of her prose. She refers to the "midmorning shift" of insects and describes how the Lakashi Indians - who when first encountered by Marina in the jungle are ululating, flame-brandishing bacchantes - appear in the morning as "a working-class tribe, a sober group of people who went about the business of their day without fanfare or flame." And if she succeeds in domesticating the exotic, Patchett's even greater gift is in defamiliarizing the homey, giving suburban housewives and Minnesota flatlands the aching beauty and primal force of elements found in a creation myth. Although "State of Wonder" tackles the larger Hippocratic quandary posed by scientific exploration - how does one extract whatever raw materials one has come for without destroying the habitat and the indigenous people who harbor them? - Patchett's interests are actually more private. At the book's true heart is the confrontation between Marina and her former teacher, one in which mild-mannered decency must win out over brute will masquerading as scientific imperative. In the end, Marina, whose imagination has "been systematically chipped apart by years of studying inorganic chemistry and charting lipids," who has "put her faith in data," will have to navigate through a realm where reason is of no use to her and enter "a circle of hell" that requires "an entirely different set of skills that she did not possess." Paradoxically, she will get what she wants only through an act of betrayal, by leaving behind what she loves most. "State of Wonder" is an immensely touching novel, although as with much of Patchett's work, its emotional impact is somewhat muted by her indefatigable niceness. Her corporate executives are invariably meek as lambs. Even the unscrupulous Dr. Swenson, Patchett's great shot at a megavillainess, turns out to be a woman blinded by love. In "Truth & Beauty," her 2004 memoir of her friendship with Lucy Grealy, a writer disfigured by childhood cancer who died of a heroin overdose, Patchett describes her own feeling that "the world was a blister of grief with only the thinnest layer of tightly stretched skin holding everything in place." Someday, perhaps, she will let that blister pop and unloose the rage and terror implicit in her stories. It isn't a writer's job to hold everything in place. Patchett's villainess is a brilliant but despotic scientist hiding out in Brazil, working on a miracle fertility drug. Fernanda Eberstadt's most recent novel, "Rat," is now out in paperback.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [June 19, 2011]
Review by Booklist Review
Marina Singh gave up a career as a doctor after botching an emergency delivery as an intern, opting instead for the more orderly world of research for a pharmaceutical company. When office colleague Anders Eckman, sent to the Amazon to check on the work of a field team, is reported dead, Marina is asked by her company's CEO to complete Anders' task and to locate his body. What Marina finds in the sweltering, insect-infested jungles of the Amazon shakes her to her core. For the team is headed by esteemed scientist Annick Swenson, the woman who oversaw Marina's residency and who is now intent on keeping the team's progress on a miracle drug completely under wraps. Marina's jungle odyssey includes exotic encounters with cannibals and snakes, a knotty ethical dilemma about the basic tenets of scientific research, and joyous interactions with the exuberant people of the Lakashi tribe, who live on the compound. In fluid and remarkably atmospheric prose, Patchett captures not only the sights and sounds of the chaotic jungle environment but also the struggle and sacrifice of dedicated scientists. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: The award-winning, New York Times best-selling author's latest novel is being supported with an author tour, a national advertising campaign, blogger outreach, and a reading-group guide.--Wilkinson, Joanne Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Patchett (Bel Canto) is a master storyteller who has an entertaining habit of dropping ordinary people into extraordinary and exotic circumstances to see what they're made of. In this expansive page-turner, Marina Singh, a big pharma researcher, is sent by her married boss/lover to the deepest, darkest corner of the Amazon to investigate the death of her colleague, Anders Eckman, who had been dispatched to check on the progress of the incommunicado Dr. Annick Swenson, a rogue scientist on the cusp of developing a fertility drug that could rock the medical profession (and reap enormous profits). After arriving in Manaus, Marina travels into her own heart of darkness, finding Dr. Swenson's camp among the Lakashi, a gentle but enigmatic tribe whose women go on bearing children until the end of their lives. As Marina settles in, she goes native, losing everything she had held on to so dearly in her prescribed Midwestern life, shedding clothing, technology, old loves, and modern medicine in order to find herself. Patchett's fluid prose dissolves in the suspense of this out-there adventure, a juggernaut of a trip to the crossroads of science, ethics, and commerce that readers will hate to see end. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
In this superbly rendered novel, Patchett (Run) takes the reader into the primitive world of the Amazon in Brazil. Pharmacologist Marina Singh from Minnesota works for the pharmaceutical company Vogel. Her colleague Anders Eckman dies in the jungle while trying to locate Dr. Annick Swenson, who has been working on a fertility drug for Vogel by studying the Lakashi people, whose women bear children into old age. Marina's journey to the Amazon to find the uncommunicative and intimidating Dr. Swen-son and to discover the details of Anders's death is fraught with poisonous snakes and poisonous memories, malarial mosquitoes and sickening losses, but her time among the Lakashi tribe is transformative. VERDICT Not a sentimental view of a primitive people, Patchett's portrayal is as wonderful as it is frightening and foreign. Patchett exhibits an extraordinary ability to bring the horrors and the wonders of the Amazon jungle to life, and her singular characters are wonderfully drawn. Readers who enjoy exotic locales will especially be interested, but all will find this story powerful and captivating. [See Prepub Alert, 11/29/10.]-Joy Humphrey, Pepperdine Univ. Law Lib., Malibu, CA (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Run,2007, etc.).Marina Singh is dispatched from the Vogel pharmaceutical company to Brazil to find out what happened to her colleague Anders Eckman, whose death was announced in a curt letter from Annick Swenson. Anders had been sent to check on Dr. Swenson's top-secret research project among the Lakashi tribe, whose women continue to bear children into their 60s and 70s. If a fertility drug can be derived from whatever these women are ingesting, the potential rewards are so enormous that Swenson has been pursuing her work for years with scant oversight from Vogel; the company doesn't even know exactly where she is in the Amazon. Marina, who went into pharmacology after making a disastrous mistake as an obstetrics resident under Dr. Swenson's supervision, really doesn't want to see this intimidating woman again, but she feels an obligation to her friend Anders and his grief-stricken wife. So she goes to Manaus, seeking clues to Dr. Swenson's location in the jungle. By the time the doctor turns up unexpectedly, Patchett has skillfully crafted a portrait from Marina's memories and subordinates' comments that gives Swenson the dark eminence of Joseph Conrad's Mr. Kurtz. Engaged like Kurtz in godlike pursuits among the natives, Swenson is performing some highly unorthodox experiments, the ramifications of which have even more possibilities than Vogel imagines. Indeed, the multiple and highly dramatic developments that ensue once Marina gets to the Lakashi village might seem ridiculous, if Patchett had not created such credible characters and a dreamlike milieu in which anything seems possible. Nail-biting action scenes include a young boy's near-mortal crushing by a 15-foot anaconda, whose head Marina lops off with a machete; they're balanced by contemplative moments that give this gripping novel spiritual and metaphysical depth, right down to the final startling plot twist.Thrilling, disturbing and moving in equal measureseven better than Patchett's breakthroughBel Canto(2001).]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
