State of Wonder by Ann Patchett

Ann Patchett’s sixth novel, State of Wonder (2011), tells the story of a pharmacologist, Dr. Marina Singh, who travels into the Amazonian jungle to spend time with the indigenous Lakashi people and search for information on her colleague who has been reported dead.

State of Wonder is heavy with literary parallels (to Henry James, to Greek myth), but its strongest literary links are to Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad’s 1899 novel (also the basis for the 1979 film, Apocalypse Now) which follows riverboat captain Marlow on his voyage through the African Congo at the height of brutal European colonialism, obsessed with meeting Kurtz, the trader who violently abuses his power. Patchett replaces Conrad’s cast of male characters with women. (Dr. Swenson is her book’s Kurtz and Dr. Marina Singh its Marlow).

Dr. Singh is a research scientist who does unremarkable research on cholesterol in Minnesota and is having an unremarkable affair with the company’s C.E.O. On the book’s second page, she learns that her research partner, Dr. Anders Eckman, has died of a fever in a remote part of Brazil.

The New York Times notes how “crystalline and exquisite” Patchett’s prose can be:

Marina suddenly grasps why people faced with sudden shock are often advised to sit down. “There was inside of her a very modest physical collapse, not a faint but a sort of folding, as if she were an extension ruler and her ankles and knees and hips were all being brought together at closer angles.”

I first read this novel on a family vacation soon after its publication. I read it at the urging of each of my daughters–who are separated in age by 15 years. By the second page, I was enthralled in the plot and the prose. Over a decade later and now dependent on audio books, I was delighted when our book group chose to read a novel which I thought I remembered completely. In listening, I became aware of just how much had slipped my memory, and I enjoyed revisiting Patchett’s glorious prose.

I really enjoyed the discussion of the novel with the book group, as each reader called attention to details that lingered in our minds. We raised questions, including whether or not Marina was pregnant when she reached home (Patchett in a UTube lecture at Duke University commented that the hint in the novel is Marina’s switch from craving the tree bark to leaving it behind when she left the Amazon as Lakashi women lose their craving for the bark when they become pregnant).

We discussed the conclusion’s inconclusiveness: wondering if Marina would continue working with Anders; deciding she would never tell him the child might be his; assuming the bland affair with Mr. Fox ended when he spoke of possibly losing two employees in the Amazon, revealing no differentiation between her and Anders.
We talked a bit about the young Bohemian couple whose job was to protect Dr. Swenson from the outside, particularly from the pharmaceutical company providing her funding.

While we were glad Dr. Swenson finally praised her former student, we judged her sharply for her lack of empathy and for her single minded focus on the Amazon research of her own menter, Dr. Rap.

Patchett has revealed in interviews that she wanted to write a novel with strong female characters that was not about romance or victimization. She wanted to portray a relationship between a student and her mentor and to leave her readers with unsolved questions about ethics and morality. 

Like the Times reviewer, we were, however,  in large part most taken not by the plot, or even these large questions, but by Patchett’s writing itself, which we found luminous and powerful. We agreed we were glad we read this novel, and we all preferred it to Tom Lake which we read last year.