Is it true for most people that the second half of a book feels better than the first? The opening salvo may hook me (The Tiger's Wife was a cracker), but it’s often the second half that has the pace and depth I look for in a reading experience. It keeps me up later. For me, this often happens simply because I find the rhythm of the book, I get to know the characters and understand where their journey is taking them and why it matters. It’s a bit like surrendering my expectations of a novel and accepting what it is I’m actually being offered.
The second half of State of Wonder is sharper in action, language and ideas. Marina is still driven by the desire to please, but at least in the second half this leads her to do some interesting things. She delivers babies, fights an anaconda, and learns to work with Dr Swenson, the woman whose involvement in her own past catastrophe had caused her so much anguish.
The language shifts, too. In the first half the language was passive and often vague. I can see how this inability to decide, to see clearly, to name things accurately or to be present in her own time and place exactly reflected Marina’s maladies, but it makes for tedious reading and made it hard for me to grab onto Marina as a character. Her ability to see and move is suggested by sentences like: “From where she stood they didn’t appear to have wings.” As a reader I was frustrated. Move closer! Have a look! And my frustration went from character to writer: if it’s worth having your character look at and tell us about – especially as the punchy final sentence in a paragraph – then get her to work it out: do they or don’t they have wings?
In the second half we get characters naming things: “It’s a fucking anaconda!” and it may be significant that when she’s finally leaving the Amazon, the person she’s traveling with sees and names something he’s wanted very much to see:
“’It’s a harpy eagle’… ‘Did you see that?’”
This might reflect great control on the writer’s behalf, but it was a laborious process as a reader.
The ideas presented in the second half are the kind that might make good dinner conversation, but they seem to sit unevenly in an uneven book. The question of whether or not women might want to be fertile forever, to have babies at 73, is explored through the experience of a woman who isn’t motherly and who clearly has and still does put work before having a child. The ideas of receiving a child, rescuing a child and then giving a child away are all explored through two women (Marina and Dr Swenson) who at one stage have a conversation in which both of them wonder quite academically whether they ever wanted one in the first place. It seems as if, with just a tiny twist in the characters’ make-up, this book could have torn hearts out, but it doesn’t.
Similarly, the idea of finding a cure for malaria is examined in a story where no one gets or dies from it. The urgency of finding a vaccine for something that Dr Swenson (in the book) says kills 800,000 children a year has (despite that number) no urgency. It is rather a scientifically and morally desirable outcome of their research, and even that may just be because their egos are better served by doing good than by serving the profit-mongering of pharmaceutical companies. And this beastly corporation? This morally bankrupt, multinational, hard-nosed, inflexible and corrupt leech? In State of Wonder, the pharmaceutical giant Vogel is represented by an anxious, unimpressive, slightly retiring 60-year-old executive.
So it’s finished. Maybe it’s a book that will suit fast readers: jet through it and use it to have a discussion about fertility or drug companies or malaria. Maybe some people will relate to the payoffs, which to me felt simplistic. After 20 years of anguish and a career spent in the shadow of the one she had abandoned, Dr Swenson says to Marina (approximately): “Don’t worry about it. It could have happened to anyone. You just rushed. Get over it.” And suddenly that’s it! Boo-yah! Marina is over it. She looks at her hands, wonders what they could have done had she kept going, then moves on. Maybe that would be the case if you were able to go to the source of the issue and have them give you the answer you’d been searching for, but I don’t think so: there was a blinded baby involved, surely an unhappy family, a judge in an inquiry who also gave some kind of verdict… There would be other knots to untangle. Maybe the question of career women and babies will be such a strong pull that for some readers that will create tension in itself – or at least a tension between the reader and the characters, but that’s different from having tension within a story.
Finally, I’ll say I have a morbid fear of Jodi Picoult novels, precisely because they seem to be the opposite of Ann Patchett novels. From a distance, they appear to be mapped out like hypothetical morality puzzles, but written with no energy in the language. As she produces more and more books, each one seems to confirm the formula. Here my grumbles have been about Patchett’s lack of tension, her apparent willingness to avoid giving her characters something to lose. I wouldn’t want Patchett to write to a formula, but I know she’d be interesting enough that I’d like to read it if she did.
I just want her to fulfill my desire (because it’s all about me) for the characters (and their situations) to be both believable (which is different from ordinary) and interesting. And it’s like Stuart Spencer says so well in The Playwright’s Guidebook, when he says that conflict isn’t about having people shouting at one another. Being interesting is about what’s at stake for whom and why. When I hand over my time and attention, when I give myself over to finding out what journey a writer and her characters are going to take me on, a great location and topical ideas don’t cover up the fact that these characters, in this situation, aren’t that interesting.
Overall: pasta not quite sticking to the kitchen wall.