State of Paradise Review
A novel by Laura van den Berg
Laura van den Berg’s State of Paradise is a work of speculative autofiction written with a sophisticated fragmentary style that intersperses innovative meta meditations on language and storytelling with a plot that is interested in exploring these meditations. The work is highly experimental, and for that reason in and of itself, makes the novel worth reading. As far as the composition of the text goes, my copy, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, is presented with a font size, that wouldn’t have occurred to me to use, but I think actually works well in the way that it makes the work very accessible for any level of reader.
The language of the novel is lush (abundant, voluptuous, appealing to the senses) like the Florida landscape it represents; the energy van den Berg creates with her prose reflects that of the content itself. She mirrors the strange, vivid, and mysterious content of her recount of her personal experience in Florida (dealing with family traumas and an extended period of time at a treatment center for adolescent acloholism) in her style by using dense paragraphs that teem with varied and unusual descriptive language; this is demonstrated by her proclivity in the text to regularly apply language often reserved for the natural world to the man-made one. She layers the events of the narrative, by means of the way in which she structures the time sequence, with an achronological albeit generative sequence of events. The novel begins in a stormy pandemic Florida, thrusts the reader back twenty years to the narrator’s time in a treatment center that is called “The Institute,” and then returns the reader back to the present time of the novel. In an interview at Green Apple Books, a well-loved independent bookstore in San Francisco, van den Berg described the essence of why she writes fiction as “the search for a narrative form that can match what it feels like to live the story.”[1] In the interview, she referenced the work of speculative fiction writer Sofia Samatar as an inspiration and van den Berg’s novel is unmistakably inspired by Samatar’s ideas about writing that embodies the human sensorium, or the whole spectrum of human sensory experience. It is this quality that van den Berg manages to capture with her language in the novel that makes it “lush,” as described above. An example of this aforesaid descriptive language: “Each time he sinks his teeth into a glistening wedge, juice rains down onto the pages.”[2]
Another defining aspect of this novel is the powerful manner in which van den Berg deploys theme as a literary device. The motifs that she selects are reoccuring and relevant throughout the text, referred to in thoughtful and unexpected ways. These include but are not limited to: knives, wilderness, portals, craters, sinkholes, disappearances, and the inscrutable. They appear literally in the real world but also are accompanied by appearances in the narrator’s dreamlike meditations. The motif of sinkholes is one that I want to highlight because of how particularly fascinating her application of it is. She writes:
“The meteorologists are now concerned that all this saturated earth will be susceptible to sinkholes…Two large sinkholes have opened up on the golf course of a nearby retirement community. One resident is quoted in the local paper as saying that, from a distance, the two craters resemble eyes.”[3]
And so here we see these sinkholes in their literal, physical manifestation. However, they appear again, several pages later, in a dream:
“Tonight, in bed with my husband and dog, I dream once again about digging, only this time I’m in the wilderness where my sister was last seen, sinking my hands into the soil. Here, the earth is supple. It gives and it gives and soon it is as though I have made a large hole in a great ceiling and now, I am looking down into a room from another world.”[4]
In the narrator’s dreamscape the sinkholes take on new meaning. At first, they exhibit the uncanny and wild atmosphere of the novel’s Florida setting, a place that is charged with pain and confusion for the narrator who at one point suffered from family trauma and extreme substance abuse there. Their presence in dream form makes these sinkholes come alive as a metaphorical vehicle with which to contemplate both time (the past, memory, family memories) and reality (observing what she has unearthed from a new vantage point) anew. With the twofold application of the sinkhole motif in its literal and metaphorical form, van den Berg beautifully situates the novel’s place and setting in the context of her exploratory meditation on storytelling through thematic pulse.
State of Paradise is very much a book about the writing process and about one woman’s journey, that of the narrator and too the novelist, to learn how to harness the power of language effectively as an individual in order to write most directly from authentic experience and the “mind’s eye.” In the book, the narrator is a ghostwriter who ghosts for a famous thriller author. She is struggling with the capacity to tell her own story. For a living, she uses her words to tell other people’s stories (as a ghostwriter). The journey the ghostwriter traverses over the course of the novel is one of learning how to tell her own story of her past.
Van den Berg experiments tirelessly with time in the narrative. She explained her stance on writing about and with time in the interview with Green Apple Books I referenced above:
“Writing narrative is so much about putting experiences in a narrative sequence which is to say that part of our project is dealing with time and shaping time and molding time, and I had this weird feeling about why I write. I hadn’t been aware that the gaps in my memory were so significant, and I wondered if I gravitated towards telling stories as a way to heal my relationship to time or to restore my relationship to time in some capacity. That’s something that I was thinking a lot about when I was working on this book.”[5]
As readers, we observe her fascination with time in the following occurrences in the novel. In a multitude of places in the text standard chronological time is disturbed. Firstly, much of the novel is set during a pandemic, that while fictionalized, resembles the COVID-19 pandemic, both events which overturn completely the normal rhythms of daily life. In the novel the narrator asks, “Is our life just on pause or is this pause now our life?”[6] While at the Institute for addiction treatment the narrator explains to the audience that “I lost all sense of time, or at least I lost my understanding of time as it exists in the wider world.”[7] Many of the motifs that I discussed above serve as mechanisms that warp time. The many portals that van den Berg injects into the book are one of these: “During ‘anger work,’ [at the Institute] the patient was blindfolded. The counselor believed the blindfold to be a portal; it would help us teleport back in time, to the moment of the original wound.”[8] Just like the sinkhole in the narrator’s dream that allows her to essentially “look through time” into another world, the presence of the portals serve as part of the experiment the author is working with to understand the gaps in memory she holds in the story she is telling.
At the start of this review, I describe the meditations on storytelling and language that are embedded into the plot. I want to take the time here to discuss some of these as they are a major part of this novel’s project. The meditations that van den Berg includes fall into a variety of categories including stream of consciousness reflection and impersonal anecdotes related to language and storytelling. Here are three excerpts from the book that demonstrate meditation on storytelling:
“Throughout his life, the serial killer Christopher Wilder told people that he nearly died in a childhood drowning accident, and when he came out of the water, he was not the same. He emerged with a mind that trembled with glistening, murderous thoughts. After FBI profilers interviewed his family, however, they determined the drowning story was likely an invention. Christopher Wilder’s family claimed that he was terrified of bodies of water as a child, refused to go near them.”[9]
And also, this section…
“Why do people tell stories? Here are some reasons I have come up with:
People tell stories to will lies into truth.
People tell stories to bend truth into lies.
People tell stories to carve for themselves a legible shape out of an inexplicable existence.
People tell stories to atone for what they have failed to do in life.
I don’t regard my work as a ghost as storytelling, by the way. The novels I ghostwrite are more like a mirage: they appear to be stories, but they are not. They are not stories, because there is no deeper impetus.
I long to write a story with a deeper impetus.”[10]
And another…
“Recently my husband told me that he had lost his way with the book he was writing, so much so that it had turned into something else.”[11]
Upon reading all three of these, one can discern that each meditation, in its own way, touches upon the inscrutable nature of narrative’s malleability, and at times, its dislocation from reality. The mystery of the wildness inherent in narrative is an interrogation that the book foregrounds. The meditations on language are also interrogating the slippery, elusive, flexible, and wild quality inherent in language. A meditation on language presented during the narrator’s experience with a dictionary at the Institute:
“The challenge was to use the word of the day correctly in a sentence…It was during these exchanges that I became a writer. I thought, at first, that we were engaging in a cut-and-dried exercise. The night shift orderly would use the word either correctly or incorrectly. Over time, I began to understand how flexible language could be. How ambiguous, how porous, how dense. Like a bucket without a bottom. Still, that bottomless bucket could hold the deepest feelings and the most inexpressible realities. A word could be wrong and somehow the meaning could still be right. For example, on the night he called me ‘lucernal’ my hair had recently been cut into a bob that did indeed resemble a triangular lampshade.”[12]
In this meditation the author alludes to the ways that the inscrutability inherent in language can be dangerous and misleading, but also generative, and even sometimes if you will, “magical.” That though establishing hidden, deeper meaning through language can be difficult, wrestling with the “bottomless bucket” of working with words can also yield rich and unexpected meaning for the courageous thinker and writer.
The plot itself, aside from the memoiristic recollections and the periods of meditation on language and storytelling, is highly clever. The inclusion of alternate realities in the plot – mysterious simulated portals to other worlds through which people go missing by means of the MIND’S EYE headset Virtual Reality technology – is in conversation with the ideological project of the novel which is exploring the wilderness that lies within the self and within one’s own mind. In State of Paradise, van den Berg is exploring how this wild inner landscape of the self can transmute memory over time and also how our shifting and evolving relationship to memory affects the way we tell stories and the language that we use to tell them. By means of the metaphorical power of thinking of our memory and inner landscape as a wilderness, she poses an innovative way to encourage readers to reflect on how they tell stories with the language that they use as a result of the relationship they hold with certain memories. Towards the end of the book a woman character working at the mansion of the author whom the ghostwriter works for states, “These ELECTRA coders are the real storytellers. They are writing stories we can actually live inside. As much as we try and keep the plots au courant, the novel is, I’m afraid, a pretty outdated technology.”[13] While State of Paradise uses futuristic VR (Virtual Reality) technology to help guide its plot and maintain a contemporary vista, I would argue with the woman at the mansion, that for all the reasons above, van den Berg’s work holds its own as a strong defense of the novel.
[1] Laura van den Berg with Meng Jin: State of Paradise.” YouTube, uploaded by GreenAppleBooks, 17 July 2024,
[2] Van den Berg, Laura. State of Paradise. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2024, p. 48.
[3]Van den Berg, State of Paradise, 116.
[4] van den Berg, State of Paradise, 125.
[5] Laura van den Berg with Meng Jin: State of Paradise,”
[6] van den Berg, State of Paradise, 5.
[7] van den Berg, State of Paradise, 110.
[8] van den Berg, State of Paradise, 111.
[9] van den Berg, State of Paradise, 59.
[10] van den Berg, State of Paradise, 65.
[11] van den Berg, State of Paradise, 139.
[12] van den Berg, State of Paradise, 147.
[13] van den Berg, State of Paradise, 167.
Star Rating: 4.5 out of 5
Read this book!
Link to purchase: https://www.amazon.com/State-Paradise-Laura-van-Berg/dp/037461220X