STATE OF PARADISE, by Laura van den Berg
Recently a portal opened up in Manhattan. Well, not “a portal,” but an art installation concocted for maximum Instagrammability — a live camera feed, called “The Portal,” that connects New York City with Dublin.
On a sunny afternoon in May, a small crowd of people, myself included, peered curiously into the display, most holding their phones aloft and waving at the strangers on the other side, who waved back. I couldn’t help marveling at the uncanniness of this window into another world. What if you spotted a crime taking place on the other side? Or a ghost?
Perhaps my thoughts wandered in this direction because I’d been reading “State of Paradise,” Laura van den Berg’s discomfiting and surreal new novel, which features an unusually high portal-to-page ratio. A sinkhole opens in a park near the unnamed narrator’s hometown in Florida, where she and her husband have been living since just before the Covid pandemic. Everyone uses a new technology called MIND’S EYE, a “virtual reality meditation device” so immersive that people sometimes disappear while wearing it. And the narrator’s belly button turns into a kind of interior pouch: at first just big enough for a tube of ChapStick, but grows large enough to swallow her entire fist.
As a young woman, the narrator spent time in a mental hospital, a formative experience that preoccupies her. Now an adult, she works as a ghostwriter for a blockbuster novelist, churning out paint-by-numbers thrillers that rely on the old “everything is not as it seems” cliché. The line applies also to “State of Paradise,” albeit in a very different way.
Ostensibly, the story is driven by the narrator’s search for her sister, who disappears while using MIND’S EYE. But to call this scenario the book’s plot would be missing the point. Van den Berg rejects the very concept of narrative cohesion, plunging the reader instead into a series of dreamscapes. Moody and hallucinatory, the novel asks: How do we distinguish reality from its opposite — whatever that might be?
Van den Berg toys with this question on a meta level. The novel incorporates snippets of information — for instance, a discussion of a serial killer who pretended that a childhood drowning accident transformed his personality — that sent me to the internet to determine whether they were based in fact. (The items I looked up all were.) “The narrative cradle is cracking apart,” the narrator says at one point — a warning that the absurdist story line, which eventually nose-dives into an Alice-in-Wonderland-style dream world, isn’t attempting to tie this novel together.
But “State of Paradise” resonates on a deeper level as a metaphorical examination of post-pandemic existence. “Is our life just on pause or is this pause now our life?” the narrator wonders at the start of her Covid isolation. Despite the passage of time — in her world and in ours — things haven’t entirely gone back to the way they were. By forcing us to conduct so much of our lives via screens, the pandemic collapsed the space between the virtual and the real, opening up greater opportunities for the two to overlap.
The narrator ultimately grows to accept the way the ordinary and the abnormal coexist in her daily life: “One minute we need an inflatable raft to cross the street and another we’re eating pasta at my sister’s house.” It’s a juxtaposition that in recent years we’ve all had to come to terms with, streaming horrors from around the world more or less directly into our eyeballs at the same time as we prepare dinner or walk the dog.
Compared to The Portal, the novel form may be a “pretty outdated technology,” as the narrator laments. But once a writer like van den Berg gets its creaky gears turning, it can still do what it’s always done best: reflect our selves back at us and into the world, in all their wildness and weirdness.
STATE OF PARADISE | By Laura van den Berg | Farrar, Straus & Giroux | 212 pp. | $27
