STATE OF PARADISE

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.