State of Wonder

 State of Wonder

By Anne Patchett

Anne Patchett must have a penchant for South America. (I cannot be the only one who has delighted in the

paring of Patchett an penchant.) The last novel of hers I read, Bel Canto, told the story of an attempted coup in an unknown South American country. This one, though it starts in Minnesota, has as its climactic backdrop the Amazon basin. Patchett's bio reveals little about any time spent there, so she must have one heckofa imagination.

The basic plot is this: An American pharmaceutical company has heavily invested in a researcher who appears to have found a compound that would extend fertility well into a woman's 70s in the Amazon. But that researcher is fairly prickly and not prone to answering calls/e-mails/letters. So to protect that investment, they send down an eager employee, likely drawn there by his love of birding, who reportedly dies as a result. The president of the company, Jim Fox -- also a name of a former Valley News editor -- therefore turns to his employee-turned-lover Marina to find the researcher and the truth about what happened. Complicating Marina's trip is not just the danger and remoteness of the Amazon, but also the fact that the researcher, Dr. Annick Swenson, was her former medical school teacher, whose gruffness in the wake of a botched c-section led her to eschew working with patients in lieu of pharmacology. 

What Marina finds in the Amazon is, of course, not what she expects. I wouldn't want to give too much away to my phantom readers, so I'll just say that the most important surprise to Marina is her own competence. So when Swenson, in a plea to keep her in the Amazon, tells Marina, "Trust e, you won't fit in there anymore. You've changed," she's right. I suspect there is more to this story, particularly around fertility as a symbol for...something. I can't say my critical reading eyes are as sharp as they should be.

All in all, a great read.