Added to this Midwesterner’s almost genetic antipathy to the jungle are the psychological side effects of the antimalarial medicine she must take, which throw her back into the same harrowing nightmares that haunted her youth. A die-hard homebody, she is rooted to her native patch of Minnesota, a suburb of Minneapolis called Eden Prairie. He was buried on the spot his few possessions are being kept for his widow, Karen.Īlthough doggedly dutiful, Marina is by various counts the last person who should be sent into this Heart of Darkness. Swenson, announcing that Anders has died of a sudden fever at her secret research station. Imagine someone offering you the equivalent of ‘Lost Horizon’ for American ovaries.”Īs the novel opens, a curt letter has arrived from Dr. Pretend for a moment that you are a clinical pharmacologist working for a major drug development firm. This is ovum in perpetuity, menstruation everlasting. No more expense, no more shots that don’t end up working, no more donor eggs and surrogates. Their eggs aren’t aging, do you get that? The rest of the body goes along its path to destruction while the reproductive system stays daisy fresh. “She found a village of people in the Amazon, a tribe,” Anders had told Marina, “where the women go on bearing children until the end of their lives.
Swenson had become uncommunicative about both the progress of her study and her whereabouts.
Annick Swenson, a charismatic but despotic professor who, on the company’s bankroll, was developing a miracle fertility drug. Anders had originally been dispatched to Brazil to bring back news of Dr. Marina Singh, a medical researcher at a pharmaceutical company in Minnesota, is sent deep into the Amazon basin to investigate the circumstances surrounding the death of Anders Eckman, her lab partner. “State of Wonder,” Patchett’s eighth book and sixth novel, is no less multinational in its cast of characters, or high-stakes in its plot. Patchett’s best-selling 2001 novel, “Bel Canto,” opened with a botched terrorist operation in a South American country, after which an American opera diva, a Japanese industrialist, a French ambassador, various Russian businessmen and their Marxist-Leninist guerrilla captors turned their long captivity into a peculiar sort of idyll. Ann Patchett’s most characteristic subject is the hell turned unlikely paradise, a kind of reverse “Lord of the Flies” in which a group of strangers, shipwrecked into a disaster beyond their imagining, manage nonetheless to create a peaceable habitat where love and decency prevail.
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