State of Wonder
Modern hearts of darkness in Ann Patchett's novel
This is the fifteenth chapter in a long-simmering miniseries called “Narrative Architecture” about storytelling choices in fiction. There are many ways to tell a story, and in this series, I’ll examine the literary choices a particular author made and their impact on the story at hand. This week, I’ll engage with Ann Patchett’s novel State of Wonder, an upmarket adventure novel in the tradition of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Spoilers ahead, so beware.
This post is a revised version of an essay I composed as part of my MFA program at UNR.
In the climactic pages of Ann Patchett’s State of Wonder, the protagonist Marina, an Indian-American scientist, trades a deaf-mute Native American boy to cannibals for a captured white married man whom she wants to sleep with. Yeah, I can’t believe I wrote that sentence, either. But such is the bizarre nature of State of Wonder, a book that presents itself as a modern, feminist update of Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse Now but instead leans further into the absurdity of such a narrative and also indulges in the problems of those earlier narratives without a more balanced attempt at a corrective. This is an adventure novel with very little adventure that also somehow perceives itself as high literature. The result is a spectacular mess. Her book is thus a lesson in “what not to do” in writing a modern adventure novel.
Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is one of those classic, paradoxical novels that condemns imperialism while also dehumanizing the people the book laments that imperialism is oppressing. Francis Ford Coppola’s epic Vietnam War film Apocalypse Now borrowed the frame narrative of that story while also implying modern Vietnamese were cannibals. Alas. But the tried-and-true setup is that Marlow, an agent of a colonial conglomerate, is sent upriver in a jungle to track down Kurtz, another Western agent who has gone rogue. In State of Wonder, Marina works for a shadowy biotech company in Minnesota that has sent Dr. Annick Swenson into the Amazon jungle to study a population of native women that do not experience menopause because they chew a mysterious tree bark; Swenson’s assignment is to develop a fertility drug from this bark. But then the shadowy doctor goes rogue and stops listening to the company, and we have our Heart of Darkness setup.
A first agent is sent, Marina’s colleague Anders, who is soon reported dead. Marina, who is romantically attracted to Anders and is also having an affair with the CEO of the company, Mr. Fox, is sent to Manaus to find out about Anders’ body.
I first read State of Wonder in high school, and all I remembered was that I didn’t like it very much. When I read it again for this assignment, I remembered why. The first chapter is inspired, and roars through the inciting incident of the news of Anders’ passing and Marina’s acceptance of the quest. But such a quick start means that we have to endure an entire chapter of flashbacks through the device of Marina’s malaria medication, which happens to give her nightmare-flashbacks as a side effect. Why can’t a character just have nightmares, or just have flashbacks? No malaria drug is required; in this genre we know flashbacks are necessary, and given the circumstances, nightmares might be justified on their own. The device is forced and overused, and is diluted by the sheer quantity of flashbacks and backstory we receive in Chapter 2. Not only is Marina grieving the apparent loss of her colleague, but the long-ago death of her father, her traumatic failure in performing a Caesarean section in medical school under the supervision of Swenson, and her rumination over her toxic relationship with Mr. Fox. It’s too much, all at once.
The book goes precipitously downhill when Marina encounters Swenson on page 124, and engages with her in extended dialogues for the remainder of the book. If Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse Now were built upon teasing out the mystery of Kurtz, State of Wonder fails spectacularly by giving the game away too soon. Swenson talks like a robotic villain; worse, the extended dialogues between Marina and Swenson, which might be interesting in small doses, are overexposed, overwrought, and sap the narrative of tension since confronting the mysterious doctor repeatedly is much less interesting than had she been held back in the shadows.
Most of the doctors in the Amazon sneer at Western medical ethical norms like cartoon villains in James Cameron movies, challenging the believability of the narrative. When Swenson persuades Marina to supervise the delivery of a native baby despite extremely poor medical conditions, Swenson shrugs off all the ethical problems and pressures Marina (who dropped out of medical school) into submission:
Marina sat back on her heels. “The point is we don’t have anything approaching sterile conditions. The chance of her dying from a postoperative infection is enough to indicate that turning the baby is worth a try. I don’t have a nurse to help me with a surgery, I don’t have an anesthesiologist.”
“Do you think we have an anesthesiologist around here?” [Dr. Swenson said].
“What do you have?”…
“Ketamine. And don’t go throwing gloves away. This isn’t Johns Hopkins.”
“Ketamine? Are we planning on sending her out to a disco later? Who in the world uses Ketamine?”
“Here’s the news, Dr. Singh, you get what you get, and I was lucky to get that.” (279)
Western doctors, even doctors in the field, would never discuss such shortcomings in conditions so casually. And while the Hippocratic oath might support their action in delivering this child, it certainly seems like they are doing more damage than good.
And whenever the science of the story indicates a plot hole, the book name-drops a vague concept to magically solve the problem, sort of like how the “electromagnetic pulse” cliché is abused by screenwriters in thriller films:
“What about the blood samples?” Marina asked. “Can you actually read hormone levels on such a small amount of blood?”
“Nanotechnology,” Budi said. “Brave new world.”
Marina nodded. (265)
One word of nanotechnology and the subject is dropped. Glad that was cleared up. Because the whole tree-bark fertility concept involves an unlikely process of symbiosis in the Amazonian ecosystem, perhaps had Patchett just avoided the mention of hormone evaluation in the jungle might be a better solution than name-dropping “nanotech.”
Soon, at Swenson’s Amazon base, Marina learns that Swenson has taken the drug herself—and that she’s pregnant. “How quickly we put our medical ethics aside,” Swenson says. “I developed the drug. If I believe in it, and clearly I do, then I should be willing to test it on myself” (247). This is campy, straight out of an Alien movie, but the novel plays it dead serious. It gets even campier when Mr. Fox arrives in the Amazon and Dr. Swenson informs him that she is pregnant:
For a moment Mr. Fox was too far behind. He had missed the rodent trails, the studies in higher mammals. He had no knowledge of a first efficacious dose or the multidose safety studies. He had seen no reports on the probability of technical success, and then suddenly he was six months into the first human dose… Given all there was to absorb it took a moment for the news to settle in, but when it did the look on Mr. Fox’s face was as tender and pleased and surprised as it had been on a night thirty-five years before when his own wife Mary had made a similar announcement. He took a few tentative steps towards Dr. Swenson. He softened his voice. “How far along?” (307)
Like a Weyland-Yutani corporate mole from the Alien franchise, Mr. Fox becomes a corporate villain despite his sympathetic characterization from earlier in the novel. It’s kind of hilarious that Mr. Fox would excuse all the lack of scientific protocol for drug development and instead was just sinisterly intent on the successful impregnation of an elderly woman, à la Ripley’s eventual succumbing to the xenomorphs in Alien 3. And I could excuse this campiness if the book was campy and played up the cartoon elements. But State of Wonder remains so self-serious that the book appears to be in earnest.
What makes this earnestness more problematic is that the native population being experimented on is mostly treated as window-dressing, not totally divorced from their infamous treatment in Heart of Darkness. For example: “At some point during the night the fire juggling, fiercely screaming Lakashi had been replaced by a working-class tribe, a sober group of people who went about the business of their day without fanfare or flame” (195). And also: “Two small girls came by wearing shorts and no shirts, each of them with a tiny monkey around her neck that held on to its own prehensile tail with its hands to form a clasp” (196). While these wide shots and close-ups might be expected for the introduction of the natives into the narrative, the novel never really goes deeper into the natives or singles them out apart from Easter, the deaf-mute native child which Dr. Swenson has adopted and Marina falls in love with. And also betrays.
This leads us to the aforementioned climax, when Marina gives the deaf-mute boy up for Anders. At first, when Marina arrives in a canoe with Easter on the edge of the cannibal tribe’s territory, the potential dilemma is pretty compelling. Anders, who is alive, says the cannibals want them to exchange the boy for him. Very little time is spent on this dilemma, or the dark nature of Anders’ request. Exchange the boy (whom Marina has become attached to) for Anders (the married colleague she is here to rescue and who she has a crush on)?
In the end, Marina assents to Anders’ demand quite easily and gives the boy to the cannibals. Patchett plays the moment to horror: “The look on the boy’s face as his eyes went from Marina and Anders and back to her again was one of terrified misunderstanding” (341). And yet Marina remains passive. She feels guilty as she and Anders escape (“she had taken him [Easter] into the jungle and given him away and there was nothing that anyone could say in face of that”), but not so guilty, as she immediately seduces Anders as soon as they return to the base (342, 349-350). The devil’s bargain is short-lived, as Anders returns to his wife and Marina is left alone in Minnesota. The end.
I wonder what the conclusion would have been like if Marina rejected Anders’ advice and escaped with Easter. That would be the more poignant choice. She would have been active in her fate, and betrayed the man she (sort of?) loved because of her love for the child.
My edition of State of Wonder features a post-script interview with Patchett. Originally a short story writer, Patchett explained that once she became a novelist, there was no going back:
I had come to know the pleasures of space and time, of watching my characters make mistakes and then giving them the chance to try and rectify their circumstances. I had developed a fondness for describing things, for adding back story. I had let a reckless number of minor characters wander into the landscape, and now I didn’t want to give them up (6).
This quote is revelatory for several reasons. Patchett writes in an improvisational manner, with few details planned in advance. She loves her characters, and her love of Dr. Swenson burdens too much of a compelling idea through overuse. Marina’s backstory is, dare I say, overdeveloped. In this novel, there is a reckless number of minor characters who don’t go anywhere. With State of Wonder, these problems burden what could have been a straightforward genre structure. At least Patchett, unlike some of the other authors I’ve written about for these annotations, is self-aware about her process, if not in terms of the novel she wrote.
Perhaps the best lesson from State of Wonder is that a little self-awareness in the narrative goes a long way.
Works Cited
Patchett, Ann. State of Wonder (HarperCollins: New York, 2011).