Regular Feelings of Apocalypse in "State of Paradise"

By Jake Casella Brookins on July 31, 2024

The narrator of Laura van den Berg's State of Paradise, herself a writer, never names the novel's central characters, who are mostly members of her family. At first, this gives the work an air of lightly-anonymized autofiction, perhaps even metafiction, but, as the world within it grows stranger, it becomes less easy to map. After returning to Florida to care for her parents, the narrator and her husband become stuck there while natural and unnatural disasters break around them, as old secrets and alternate realities collide. If it's a difficult novel to summarize, that's also because it's almost fractally good—each chapter, each sentence is no less fascinating and bewildering than the whole.

Van den Berg's narrator thinks of herself as something of a failed writer, actually, making a living by ghostwriting airport-thriller slop for "the famous author," a mysterious figure who communicates only through a legion of assistants. These books, the narrator thinks, "are not stories because there is no deeper impetus." They're entirely artificial, plot-driven; by contrast State of Paradise alternately revels in and despairs of the haunting, plotless details of the world, and the life, of the narrator. Challenged by the famous author's assistants to write something real, the narrator struggles, even as her "Florida diary"—the book we're actually holding—teems with shaking imagery and observation on every page, even as her life seems to overlap with some of those same science-fiction-thriller concepts. There's a resonance here with Kaufman's adaptation of Orleans' The Orchid Thief, another strange Florida tale that mutates under its own explicit interest in narrative construction.

State of Paradise is vividly detailed: the narrator's focus is in a constant generative movement between external scenes—the antics of people, wildlife, and landscapes—and internal reflection on writing, on her past. There's a lot that's pretty dark here. Her father's death and the revelations about his past infidelities are the main movers for much of the plot, such as it is, and her reflections on her past suicidal ideation and institutionalization are both intense and elliptical: an approach seemingly borne of a long familiarity with dispassionate consideration and careful compartmentalizing. Not to say it's a cold novel—there's a deep well of feeling seeping in at the baseboards of every anecdote—but it's such a deeply thoughtful one that theory and reality often seem to stand, awkward uncanny doubles, in the same room. "The human mind is a great thicket of mystery," the writer reflects, "...And yet we are expected—in fact, required—to live our lives alongside this inscrutable entity that might, at any moment, turn on us."

In reading speculative fiction, a useful taxonomic approach is to ask how the speculative elements (the magical, science fictional, or surreal parts) are received within the work: if a unicorn, or aliens, show up, how do the protagonists react? With shock, horror, delight? Or with calm acceptance? State of Paradise disrupts that reading strategy entirely. More than that, it shows how the real world—and places like Florida, specifically—disrupts it: the world is too many things, mundane and bizarre stacked atop each other, to allow easy definitions. The setting here is drenched in believable oddities—the weather, the strange human characters, the lawn crawling with lizards—such that it becomes hard to say that the more supernatural elements are not, in fact, mundane. Virtual and alternate realities spill into each other—I was reminded a bit of the fruitfully psychological use of the multiverse in Aimee Pokwatka's Self Portrait with Nothing in parts of this novel—and it is rife with strange disappearances and reappearances and odd, rich details. (The narrator's belly button, for some reason, is developing into an ever larger chasm, perfect for holding spare change or chapstick.) The novel's storms and floods are at once utterly expected, Biblically weird, and deeply ambiguous—strangely, I can recommend State of Paradise both to people who like DeLillo's White Noise and to those who find it annoying—and what's most captivating is the narrator's reaction to it all: an equipoise or superposition wherein the strange doesn't stop being strange just because it's now ordinary and must be dealt with.

One of the many uncanny-but-normal threats in the novel is sinkholes: the fear that our house, our little world, might be swallowed up unexpectedly. Florida sits on karst, a porous stone prone to collapse as unseen forces move through it—well, so say we all. Part of State of Paradise's genius is how it expresses this moment of transition we're all in, this moment of mid-apocalypse, this uneasy imbrication of so many horrors and wonders, old and new, with more coming over the horizon. Although much of State of Paradise seems to spring from writerly despair—the blank page, the failure of the world to resolve to a compelling plot, even the novel itself lamented as "a pretty outdated technology"—this is no self-pitying abnegation. Every page is insightful, stunning; despite the lack of conventional plot, it's an astonishing page-turner. Van den Berg is pushing at the boundaries of the form and imploding questions of realism, but, however you classify this book, it's a brilliant read.