A Review of State of Wonder, by Ann Patchett

I picked up State of Wonder and was immediately transfixed.

In the beginning of the novel we learn with Marina Singh, a pharmocologist in Minnesota, that her colleague, Anders Eckman, has died of a fever in the Amazon. The next paragraphs, leading to the moment when she informs his wife, are slow and excrutiatingly paced, which accentuates the impact, so that I almost had to put the book down when it came to the moment that they were going to tell Karen Eckman that her husband was dead.

From there, Marina must fly to the Amazon to investigate the death and make a report of the progress of the fertility drug Marina's former professor, Dr. Swenson, is creating. Marina goes reluctantly, for personal and professional reasons. The transplant of a person from a northern climate to the humid, insect-run, verdancy of a tropical jungle is something I've experienced first hand, and though the Amazon is far beyond any jungle I've ever visited in India, the experience was remarkably familiar. I was right there again, gasping for breath in the humidity.

The story goes from there, and the plot continues to twist and surprise delightfully and skillfully. It's an incredible read, full of detail about the lives of the Amazonian indigenous group Dr Swenson lives among. Though Dr Swenson has her way of living among the Lakashi, Marina comes to develop her own way, much more symbiotic with the way the Lakashi live. The book is in depth, and many questions about research and relationships come to the surface. The effect of the jungle on Marina is foremost in the novel's development. Patchett's character development is wonderful and we are with her main character through her confusion, sorrows, redemption and mistakes. Even Dr. Swenson has her own arc, from an unbendable tyrant to someone we see as completely human, completely vulnerable.

State of Wonder seemed to have the perfect blend of the fantastic and the small, gritty detail. The world that Ann Patchett creates in her new novel takes flights of fantasy so wonderful you shake your head in amazement, but in the very next sentence she brings you into the scene with such gravity that you are sure she is telling nothing but the truth. The truth just happens to be wilder than you ever knew.

Which is perhaps the genius of the book, because the truth is that life is a completely different thing in the fertile, exploding-with-life jungle, and the degrees one needs to shift to understand it are not unlike the degrees between science and fantasy in this novel. 

Even after I put the book down, I kept having little pings of understanding in my brain, as I registered some subtle plot mechanism. Patchett's sentences flow effortlessly, her timing is perfect. The book lingered in my mind for a long time. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

A Review of "Caleb's Crossing."

In writing Caleb's Crossing, Geraldine Brooks took a sliver of history, some notations on a page, and gave them flesh. Brooks gives us a view of history, opens it to us so that the reader can feel, when she looks up from the last page, as though she has become someone else. Maybe a Puritan in the seventeenth century. Or a member of the Wampanoag tribe that is rocked under the heft of the colonists that landed on it.

Brooks does an excellent job of portraying the sorrow and hardships that both people faced in the time of colonization. She shows the difficulties of the colonists with acute vision and sympathy, while giving weight to their clumsiness and grave mistakes. She shows the beauty and simplicity of the Wampanoag way of life. In her words we feel the confusion of two peoples trying to live together, and all the misunderstanding and sorrow that ensues.

Brooks skillfully juxtaposes the hardness of the Puritan brand of spirituality, and the softness of the people themselves. One gets the sense, in Bethia's father, that he is deeply loving and kind, while still maintaining a kind of cultural disfavor toward something like the education of his daughter.

For me the high points of the novel existed within the description of the island. I was wrapped up in the beauty of Martha's Vineyard before it had been built up, civilized. Phrases like this were abundant. "...hot, sun scoured afternoons when the shore curved away in its glistening arc toward the distant bluffs." I am there.

I loved watching as Caleb taught Bethia his knowledge of the island, how to be at ease in the place that she lived. And the relationship between Caleb and Bethia was the best aspect of the book. In Bethia's words, "He was, quite simply, my dearest friend."

I had difficulty in the matter of Bethia's own crossing. I believed in her understanding and friendship with Caleb, in her love of the island and nature, in her attraction to ritual and dance, but certain events left me behind. I wasn't sure that a girl like her would go as far as she went. I won't give a spoiler now.

I don't believe that the ideas on religion were entirely unbiased. I believe the author meant to be, but I think the ideas were delicately flavored away from the ideas of the Puritans, which is perhaps difficult not to do when they cultivated such rigidity as allowed them to punish women by beating them.

To be friends from two races at that time was a dangerous thing. As Caleb crosses from one world to the other, Bethia questions whether her influence in his life was purely benign.

These questions, whether there is possibility of the transfer of ideals from one culture to another, form the framework of the book. The suffering and heartbreak are evident, and in the end I was filled with a keen wish that we could do it all over. Tread with softness and respect, more like Bethia, rather than stomping with boots like the men of the past.