State of Paradise: A Novel

by Laura van den Berg

Overview

Named a Most Anticipated Book by TIME, Oprah Daily, The Boston Globe, ELLE, Bustle, and Lit Hub

"A brilliant ghost story and a profoundly moving and atmospheric meditation on place, memory, and the very nature of reality, where everything is truly not as it seems." —Mona Awad, author of Rouge

"A wholly original and epically engaging novel from a master of episodic oddity." —Rachel Yoder, author of Nightbitch

A heart-racing fun house of uncanniness hidden in Florida’s underbelly from the celebrated Laura van den Berg

It’s another summer in a small Florida town. After an illness that vanishes as mysteriously as it arrived, everything appears to be getting back to normal: soul-crushing heat, torrential downpours, sinkholes swallowing the earth, ominous cats, a world-bending virtual reality device being handed out by a company called ELECTRA, and an increasing number of posters dotting the streets with the faces of missing citizens. Living in her mother’s home, a ghostwriter for a famous thriller author tracks the eerie changes. On top of everything else, she’s contending with family secrets, spotty memories of her troubled youth, a burgeoning cult in the living room, and the alarming expansion of her own belly button.

Then, during a violent rainstorm, her sister goes missing. She returns a few days later, sprawled on their mother’s lawn and speaking of another dimension. Now the ghostwriter must investigate not only what happened to her sister and the other missing people but also the uncanny connections between ELECTRA, the famous author she works for, and reality itself.

A sticky, rain-soaked reckoning with the elusive nature of selfhood and storytelling, Laura van den Berg’s State of Paradise is an intricate and page-turning whirlwind. With inimitable control and thrilling style, van den Berg reaches deep into the void and returns with a story far stranger than either reality or fiction.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374612207
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	07/09/2024
Pages:	224
Sales rank:	174,849
Product dimensions:	5.70(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Laura van den Berg is the author of three story collections, including I Hold a Wolf by the Ears, which was named one the ten best fiction books of 2020 by Time, and the novels Find Me and The Third Hotel, which was a finalist for the NYPL Young Lions Fiction Award. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Bard Fiction Prize, a PEN/O. Henry Award, and a MacDowell Colony Fellowship, and she is a two-time finalist for the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award. Born and raised in Florida, she splits her time between the Boston area and Central Florida.

Editorial Reviews

04/15/2024

Van den Berg (The Third Hotel) explores the unsettling new normal following an unspecified pandemic in her entrancing latest. The story takes place in Central Florida, where the unnamed narrator, a ghostwriter for an elusive thriller author, and her husband return to live with her mother. Both the narrator and her younger sister, who lives next door, have had the virus, referred to only as “the fever,” which causes surprising long-term effects (the sister’s eye color changes, and the narrator’s bellybutton converts to an “innie”). Dispatches from the husband’s long runs through the neighborhood include an episode in which a man on a bike inexplicitly slashes a truck’s tires while its owner sleeps in the cab. Meanwhile, the narrator’s sister forays into a virtual world called Mind’s Eye, which might be the cause of a rise in disappearances around town. The plot ramps up when the sister vanishes and the narrator’s search for her leads to revelations about the narrator’s employer and Mind’s Eye. In addition, Van den Berg develops stimulating metafictional connections to the material as the narrator attempts to write something of her own to document her relationship to the changing world. This off-kilter story is hard to forget. (July)

Publishers Weekly

"van den Berg holds a funhouse mirror up to a reality that many of us will recognize, one where multiple layers of mounting disaster—personal, political, climactic, and technological—whirl together into a perfect, uncanny storm." —Charley Burlock, Oprah Daily

"A ghost writer and her husband quarantine with her family in Florida, a place 'equal parts danger and magic.' Against this fraught backdrop, van den Berg skillfully swerves through trauma, mental illness, and memory, shifting from autofiction to thriller. This book feels like a powerful hurricane." —Lauren LeBlanc, The Boston Globe

Few people do weird as well as Laura van den Berg, and her latest really brings it . . . Flirting with metafiction, and just slightly off-kilter from reality, State of Paradise is a hurricane of a book." —Arianna Rebollini, Bustle

“Of her now seven books of fiction, this one is arguably her funniest, most playful, most innovative, and possibly my favorite . . . The book becomes not only an evocation of that year when so many of us stopped our lives, but also of dreams personal and universal, of pilgrimages, apocalypses, traumas, and tales." —Deb Olin Unferth, BOMB

“[A] strange, enthralling novel.” —Lauren Puckett-Pope, ELLE

"Wonderfully weird." —Shannon Carlin, TIME

"I will go wherever Laura van den Berg and her eerie, uncanny imagination lead, even to the much-maligned sunshine state in storm season . . . A wry, surreal, lushly atmospheric metafictional mystery, I fell under the swampy spell of this novel from the get-go." —Dan Sheehan, Lit Hub

"Subtly speculative . . . deadpan hilarious . . . van den Berg takes measure of the pandemic’s hidden impacts, escalating ecothreats, family traumas, and the nature of stories and our profound reliance on them." —Booklist (starred review)

“Readers who aren’t sure how a science fiction plot will meld with writing that sometimes reads almost like memoir needn’t worry. This is van den Berg, whose Lynchian sensibility and cool yet impassioned eye is somehow the perfect choice to examine what might be America’s most eccentric state and the ways that 'we are called back to the things we most want to flee' . . . If speculative autofiction wasn’t a thing, it is now; van den Berg is a pioneer.” —Kirkus (starred review)

"Entrancing . . . Van den Berg is a master at nudging the familiar world slightly off its axis . . . This off-kilter story is hard to forget." —Publishers Weekly

"Pitch perfect and exquisitely composed. Laura van den Berg is a gifted and audacious writer and she's written a novel of weight, power and beauty. I couldn't put it down." —Charles Yu, author of Interior Chinatown

"A brilliant ghost story and a profoundly moving and atmospheric meditation on place, memory, and the very nature of reality, where everything is truly not as it seems. With sharp, gripping prose, Laura van den Berg fearlessly conjures the fundamental wildness of being alive in the world as we know it, and the pull of the deeper wildness within." —Mona Awad, author of Rouge

"State of Paradise chronicles strange pandemic days, the rise of mindless electronic escape, and grief's otherworldly whims in a wholly original and epically engaging novel from a master of episodic oddity. I'll follow Laura van den Berg wherever she wants to take me, even Florida." —Rachel Yoder, author of Nightbitch

"Like a summer coastal storm, State of Paradise overtook me with its wildness and sorcery. I loved becoming entangled in it. The storytelling here is mind-dilating." —Ling Ma, author of Bliss Montage

"Van den Berg writes with unearthly beauty about the oddity of being, and the borderlands between despair and wonder." —C Pam Zhang, author of Land of Milk and Honey

"State of Paradise is deeply, thrillingly weird. With missing sisters, sinkholes, cults, and floods, the novel is as surprising and compelling as Florida itself. Laura van den Berg's brilliance is only further confirmed by every book she writes—this newest one will blow your mind." —Julia Phillips, author of Bear

"Laura van den Berg excavates the secrets and mysterious technological forces unraveling a family and a sleepy subtropical community with mind-bending, unsettling clarity and devastating resonance. A thrilling, cautionary portrait of Florida's surreal wildness, State of Paradise is an absolute knockout." —Patricia Engel, author of The Faraway World

"State of Paradise is a weird, wild, thrilling journey through cults, addiction, messed-up families, the pandemic, the weather, and the strangeness and beauty of the great state of Florida. Laura van den Berg's writing is razor sharp and full of depth and humor, and she has an incredible imagination. This book is freaking brilliant." —Jami Attenberg, author of All This Could Be Yours

"In State of Paradise, Laura van den Berg evokes a world and a family teetering on the edge of collapse. In her taut, precise prose, van den Berg juxtaposes global crises with personal ones. Amid a pandemic and Floridian super-storms, a family contends with a death and with past traumas. This innovative book is short but vast, an exquisite exploration of the ways we try to heal ourselves in the face of unbearable loss. State of Paradise is a mesmerizing new book from one of our boldest writers." —Helen Phillips, author of The Need

From the Publisher

★ 2024-04-20
A woman returns to the Florida of her childhood and is destabilized by the collision of her present and her past.

“How did we end up here, shipwrecked at my mother’s house?” This is the question the narrator of van den Berg’s new novel asks herself. On a literal level, the narrator and her husband—a historian working on a book about medieval pilgrimages—has moved back in with her mother in northern Florida to care for her dying father and then stayed on as the pandemic struck. (To complicate the dynamics, the narrator’s sister and her small family live right next door.) But this shipwrecking is as much emotional as geographical. Living in Florida means being surrounded by ghosts—the ghost of the narrator’s dead father, her niece’s “pet ghost,” her own job as a ghostwriter for a famous thriller author, and, most of all, “all [her] former selves for company.” These haunts eradicate the boundaries the narrator has put up between her current life and her younger years, some of which were spent institutionalized after a suicide attempt. Surrounding everything is the “equal parts danger and magic” of Florida, both agonizingly real—its politics, its weather, its wildlife—and speculative, as people in the narrator’s area begin to go missing and the rest of the population is transfixed by a sophisticated virtual reality technology called MIND’S EYE. Readers who aren’t sure how a science fiction plot will meld with writing that sometimes reads almost like memoir needn’t worry. This is van den Berg, whose Lynchian sensibility and cool yet impassioned eye are somehow the perfect choice to examine what might be America’s most eccentric state and the ways that “we are called back to the things we most want to flee.”

If speculative autofiction wasn’t a thing, it is now; van den Berg is a pioneer.

Kirkus Reviews