Fans of Ann Patchett's best-selling "Bel Canto" should welcome "State of Wonder." The story again ventures south of the border, this time to the jungles of Brazil, placing her characters on unfamiliar turf, with events occurring outside of their control.
Marina Singh, working for a major U.S. pharmaceutical company, is sent to Brazil after a letter arrives revealing that her partner, Anders, sent to investigate the progress on a fertility drug by her former professor, Annick Swenson, has died mysteriously.
From the beginning of Singh's search, Swenson comes across like Joseph Conrad's Kurtz, impossible to find unless she wishes to be found.
Patchett's attention to detail places the reader smack in the middle of the lush jungle with the Lakashi tribe, whose women maintain lifelong fertility, the subject of the research. Singh quickly acclimates to these mysterious people, becoming attached to Easter, a young deaf boy from a nearby tribe.
Cut off from communications by the unpredictable mail, and without luggage or her cellphone, she bides her time picking up clues from colleagues and moving in the village rhythm, eventually partaking in their mysterious rituals.
As in "Bel Canto," cultural lines blur. Singh, daughter of an American mother and Indian father, tans quickly in the jungle and, dressed in the clothes available to her, is mistaken by tourists for a Lakashi woman.
Although sent to check the progress on the research, Singh's main goal is to find satisfactory answers about her lost colleague. The clues she picks up in bits of writing from his fevered stay, squirreled away by Easter, can take her only so far.
While Patchett's novel addresses the politics of medicine and the effects of intrusion on nature, the relationship between the characters remains the novel's spellbinding focus. Although the plot may turn on surprises, they are carefully crafted into a believable, captivating tale taking readers on a journey deep into the jungle, without losing sight of home.
