It’s hard to categorize State of Paradise, and that’s part of why it didn’t work for me: it starts like a strong piece of contemporary fiction with themes of substance abuse, mental illness, and family dynamics, which is wildly compelling stuff. The characters have depth, the narrators voice is dry, somewhat cynical and unique, and funny.
Laura van den Berg‘s unnamed narrator is a ghostwriter for a James Patterson-type drugstore novel author. As a result of the pandemic, she’s living with her husband in her mother’s house in Florida, next door to her sister. Those family relationships are complicated, and the narrator slowly reveals her own history of addiction and treatment. It’s page-turning stuff, with welcome fringes of weirdness. A VR headset/meditation app company is up to something, some people are disappearing unexpectedly, and, well, Florida.
That’s a lot for a shortish book, and it’s all in the first 150 pages or so. In the second half, the book brings in more ideas – climate change, cults and conspiracy theories, alternate universes and the nature of reality itself. These all come crashing in like unexpected guests, and for me the book came fully off the rails. By the end of the book I was fully uninvested in the story, relieved to be done it.
Laura van den Berg is a fantastic writer with creativity in spades, and I will definitely seek out more from her, particularly her short stories. Many of the things that made this novel not work for me are ideas that would be ideal for a shorter form, but in this format it felt overstuffed and unpredictable in a chaotic and difficult way.
Further Reading
Book Marks page
New York Times review
