Laura van den Berg’s latest novel, State of Paradise, is a deeply imaginative and unique novel about pandemic life. The narrative begins when a woman employed as a ghostwriter for a popular mystery writer moves back to her native Florida to live amongst her mother and sister. Her husband is researching migrations, and becomes a local celebrity in their small town for his daily running practice. The novel is full of strange and mysterious happenstances— the raging pandemic causes bizarre dreams, a global tech companies’ VR headset technology is causing strange disappearances, and Florida is hit with violent and powerful storms.
Van den Berg’s novel feels like a memoir in the style of David Lynch, with dreamlike and sci-fi touches that disorient the reader in fascinating ways. The novel also has a Lynchian dark humor, and a poignancy that is difficult to describe. It would be a mistake to try to rephrase the plot, as the novel is full of unpredictable twists and turns that diverge in different directions. But State of Paradise‘s center is the narrator’s relationship to her family and her work. Her family is still struggling to understand themselves after the death of their father: the narrator’s mother finds herself the leader of a pseudo-cult with nihilistic beliefs, while her sister disappears into her VR headset and eventually goes missing in the “real world”, and the narrator reminisces about her time in a psychiatric institution and the orderly who abused her.
The novel is so much about creating narrative, both in terms of personal arcs and in terms of imagined worlds. As the the narrator explains, “We are all existing in the cradle of a great narrative design.” Van den Berg is always aware of the the universe in which she is positioning the reader, and never loses sight of the crucial threads that connect her plot even as unpredictable events occur. The novel also has a fascinating element of climate sci-fi, exploring how our planet is changing in dystopian ways.
As with all of Laura van den Berg’s work, the novel exists in a liminal space where narrative conventions don’t exist and characters are free to explore the darker parts of their psyche that are omnipresent. Van den Berg is a master of speculative fiction, and in State of Paradise she transcends the form and infuses an autobiographical element that grounds the narrative in reality in such fascinating ways. A truly beautiful story about myth making, the supernatural, and our ability to create worlds.