State of Wonder (Revisited)

This book is a lesson in the craftsmanship of writing.  Patchett’s earlier book, Truth and Beauty, convinced me of the belief that her writing was penned by the hand of a grandmaster.  The opening chapter of this book is my case in point.  She writes a vignette about announcing her lab-mate’s death to his wife.  It’s a side issue but it allows her ample time to introduce all the characters and many of the plot lines without any expenditure of effort.  It’s like the chess game opening of P-Q4, perfectly solid, but a bit edgy, hinting at more than the normal challenges.

The next chapter continues at the leisurely pace of the first; no apparent hurry.  She paints in the back-story on Marina Singh, her MD career destroyed by a horrible error of judgment while doing her residency.  This is brilliantly handled through the device of her malarial-like delirium while asleep.  She dwells excessively on death and separation in her nightmare.

By almost halfway through the book, it is obvious that the real story is not about a “Rumble in the Jungle.”  That was just a literary device.  We’ve had 150 pages of exquisite character development.  Patchett adds three new characters with every chapter, never letting go of the rest.  It’s like a juggler’s act, adding in an additional ball, again and again, from 3 to 6 to 9.  The author keeps adding to the depth of the initial personae: Marina, Mr. Fox, and Anders.  She doesn’t let loose of Karen or Annick either.  A deep look at her mid-life crisis also includes Milton, Jackie, and Barbara. They round out her pre-jungle cast of characters.  Her waking moments of thought, like her nightmares, are all about paths taken, or not.

Just before they take off down the Amazon, there is a  “makes-you-wanna-go” description of Manaus.  She adds several more characters here, Tomo, Easter, and Nixon, all while still keeping up the threads with all the others.  It has become noticeable this deeply into the story that Marina only reacts to people and circumstances, she does no self-direction of events or activities.  She is a feather blowing in the wind: afraid to make decisions of her own.  She yields to Mr. Fox her older, married boyfriend, Dr. Swenson her Med School mentor, even Barbara her style guide.  Are they all parental figures like Milton?  Did she never take control of her child-parent relationship?

Into the thick of it at the Lakashi village, sharing their anthropological mores, everything wildly alien, the author again takes the time to delve into human individual differences; not with graphical moments and impossible flora and fauna; not with fearful creatures: spiders, snakes, birds and bats.  The reason I claim we are reading master craftsmanship in the written word is captured in her relating the scene where the tribespeople scam Marina out of her clothes – the shirt off her back, willingly.  Patchett captures the aversion most of us have to a stranger unbuttoning and striping off our shirt and trousers: the titillation of having a community watch as her breasts are fondled, as the natives think of maybe getting away with the bra as well.  Not a lot of adjectives and adverbs in this scene, but we are Marina: No!  O.K., no, yes, as she succumbs to their probing – yielding to the communal will.

The penultimate chapters deal with the half dozen moral questions that are brought up by the premise of the novel: the search for pharmacology as product; the marketing of said product; the impact on indigenous people of the search; the resolution of mid-life crisis by Marina Singh.  None of these ethical dilemmas receives any attention by the author until these moral chapters, where they are all vocalized: argued from all sides, and then positions are taken: malaria cure or menopausal avoidance: free cures or designer drugs or psychedelics; exploitation private or public; Life Part 2 safely as before or challenging the unknown.

Well, you don’t get rich off of masterful character development.  Ann Patchett has tossed in a pinch of comic-relief:

“Annick Swenson’s child will be raised by the Lakashi?!”  /../  “You went to Radcliffe!”
“If we were home I would take him for a CT.”
“If you were home he wouldn’t have been squeezed by an Anaconda!”

And that last line refers to a lengthy struggle between all our friends and an 18-foot Anaconda, won by Marina Singh.

There are several other moments of thriller intensity, but all this is nothing compared to the depths-of-despair / heights-of-glory final chapter where good and evil finally struggle.  Evil represented by the cannibalistic Hummocca tribe next door.  They usually shoot poison darts first, and then eat the dead.  Good is represented by our heroine, at last making her own decisions.  Pirating the pontoon boat, she goes with the boy Easter to the lair of the Hummocca.  There, as suspected, she finds Anders Eckman, hale and hearty and not dead which was the reason in the beginning for her trip to the Amazon.  She trades Easter for Anders, her number 2 and 3 solo decisions.  She sleeps with Anders that night back in camp and then takes him home to his wife the next day. [#’s 4 & 5].

The sixth independent decision would be going back to the jungle where she thrived, but Ann left that for us to decide.