'State of Wonder': Nightmarish mystery in the Amazon

By Ann Patchett

Harper. 353 pp. $26.99

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Reviewed by Rhonda Dickey

The letter that launches this wondrous novel arrives at the pharmaceutical company Vogel from the Amazon as a fragile blue Aerogram. The letter's tone is one of mild annoyance, its news devastating. Vogel research scientist Anders Eckman is dead.

The letter's recipients - the Minneapolis company's chief executive, Jim Fox, and Anders' research partner, Dr. Marina Singh - are shattered by the news, and stunned by the offhand way Dr. Annick Swenson delivered it.

"Is she calling Anders a setback?" Marina asks after a second reading of the letter, which begins with a weather report before dealing with the matter at hand.

For Marina and Mr. Fox, the letter from the imperious Dr. Swenson contains the seeds of all sorts of unfinished business. Dr. Swenson has holed up with a small team somewhere on a tributary of the Rio Negro in Brazil, doing research on a tribe whose women are able to get pregnant into their 70s. A drug that makes that possible for every woman would be a blockbuster for the company.

Anders had been sent down on a Vogel fact-finding mission. But Dr. Swenson hates having Vogel looking over her shoulder and has resisted the progress reports on the research that Vogel wants.

Mr. Fox sends Marina on a twofold mission: She must go to Brazil to find out both what happened to Anders and what Dr. Swenson is doing.

Marina has her own secrets. One is her love affair with the chief executive, which they are so discreet about at the office that even away from work, in intimate moments, she thinks of him as Mr. Fox.

Another secret is Marina's history with Dr. Swenson, and it's not a happy one. Dr. Swenson taught Marina at Johns Hopkins University Medical School and had a role in a ghastly surgical error that pushed Marina out of medicine and into research.

Marina travels to Brazil, landing in the frontier town of Manaus, where her burden has been lightened by the misdirection of her luggage.

At the Teatro Amazonas in Manaus, she joins a couple of acquaintances to see the opera Orfeo and Euridice. "While she sat in the dark, Marina started to think that this opera house, and indeed this opera, were meant to save her. . . . She was Orfeo, and there was no question that Anders was Euridice, dead from a snake bite. Marina had been sent to hell to bring him back."

Marina is guided up the river to Dr. Swenson's research compound on a pontoon boat piloted by Easter, an endearing deaf boy of about 12, of uncertain tribal identity, who becomes a proxy child for several of the characters.

At the jungle compound, Marina is relieved of even more of her belongings, even her own clothing, and must dress as the Lakashi women do. At least in appearance, she goes native.

Patchett's 2001 novel Bel Canto had a dreamy, almost stately, feel. State of Wonder is more the stuff of nightmares, and the jungle setting inspires several of them. (There are a couple of scenes that the squeamish reader won't linger over.) State of Wonder has the urgency of a murder mystery, which it is, in the wider sense.

Patchett keeps peeling the layers, and she subtly builds the suspense. We want to know who these people are, what they've done and why, and what will become of them. We want to discover the secret source of the experimental fertility drug - which contains its own secret benefit and set of dilemmas.

The characters' trade-offs are horrific, in obvious and subtle ways. One of the issues the novel raises is the limits of science. What good does it do to have a child in your 70s if you won't live long enough to rear her? The Lakashi tribe has close-knit generations that can care for the offspring of the elderly, but if it takes a village to raise a child, what good will that do if you don't live in one? Even the malaria medication that Marina takes gives her nightmares so bad that she dreads them as much as the disease itself.

Marina herself doesn't realize what the reader does: She's incredibly brave. She actually does go through hell in search of what happened to Anders. He was her coworker and became her mission. Her courage may be the final mystery of the book, one that is made clear for the reader, but not at all evident to its heroine.