E-book Assessment: ‘State of Paradise,’ by Laura van den Berg

STATE OF PARADISE, by Laura van den Berg

Lately a portal opened up in Manhattan. Nicely, not “a portal,” however an artwork set up concocted for max Instagrammability — a dwell digicam feed, known as “The Portal,” that connects New York Metropolis with Dublin.

On a sunny afternoon in Might, a small crowd of individuals, myself included, peered curiously into the show, most holding their telephones aloft and waving on the strangers on the opposite facet, who waved again. I couldn’t assist marveling on the uncanniness of this window into one other world. What in case you noticed against the law going down on the opposite facet? Or a ghost?

Maybe my ideas wandered on this course as a result of I’d been studying “State of Paradise,” Laura van den Berg’s discomfiting and surreal new novel, which options an unusually excessive portal-to-page ratio. A sinkhole opens in a park close to the unnamed narrator’s hometown in Florida, the place she and her husband have been residing since simply earlier than the Covid pandemic. Everybody makes use of a brand new expertise known as MIND’S EYE, a “digital actuality meditation machine” so immersive that folks typically disappear whereas carrying it. And the narrator’s stomach button turns right into a type of inside pouch: at first simply sufficiently big for a tube of ChapStick, however grows giant sufficient to swallow her whole fist.

As a younger girl, the narrator frolicked in a psychological hospital, a formative expertise that preoccupies her. Now an grownup, she works as a ghostwriter for a blockbuster novelist, churning out paint-by-numbers thrillers that depend on the outdated “all the things just isn’t because it appears” cliché. The road applies additionally to “State of Paradise,” albeit in a really completely different approach.

Ostensibly, the story is pushed by the narrator’s seek for her sister, who disappears whereas utilizing MIND’S EYE. However to name this state of affairs the e-book’s plot can be lacking the purpose. Van den Berg rejects the very idea of narrative cohesion, plunging the reader as a substitute right into a collection of dreamscapes. Moody and hallucinatory, the novel asks: How can we distinguish actuality from its reverse — no matter that is likely to be?

Van den Berg toys with this query on a meta stage. The novel incorporates snippets of knowledge — as an illustration, a dialogue of a serial killer who pretended {that a} childhood drowning accident remodeled his persona — that despatched me to the web to find out whether or not they had been primarily based actually. (The objects I seemed up all had been.) “The narrative cradle is cracking aside,” the narrator says at one level — a warning that the absurdist story line, which ultimately nose-dives into an Alice-in-Wonderland-style dream world, isn’t trying to tie this novel collectively.

However “State of Paradise” resonates on a deeper stage as a metaphorical examination of post-pandemic existence. “Is our life simply on pause or is that this pause now our life?” the narrator wonders firstly of her Covid isolation. Regardless of the passage of time — in her world and in ours — issues haven’t solely gone again to the best way they had been. By forcing us to conduct a lot of our lives through screens, the pandemic collapsed the house between the digital and the actual, opening up higher alternatives for the 2 to overlap.

The narrator finally grows to just accept the best way the unusual and the irregular coexist in her every day life: “One minute we’d like an inflatable raft to cross the road and one other we’re consuming pasta at my sister’s home.” It’s a juxtaposition that in recent times we’ve all needed to come to phrases with, streaming horrors from world wide roughly straight into our eyeballs similtaneously we put together dinner or stroll the canine.

In comparison with The Portal, the novel kind could also be a “fairly outdated expertise,” because the narrator laments. However as soon as a author like van den Berg will get its creaky gears turning, it could actually nonetheless do what it’s all the time accomplished finest: mirror our selves again 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