It has occurred to me just how much reading one book by an author can shape how you read another book by the same author. Years ago – I don’t know how many – I read Bel Canto, which I thought was a fantastic book. I remember the beauty of the language. I remember being held in the still heavy air inside the room with a famous opera singer and all the other people attending an important Japanese businessman’s birthday. I also remember the contrasting gush of relief when finally we managed to get out into the gardens.
It was sweaty in a way that conjured up South America for someone who has (as yet) never been and therefore couldn’t be a good judge. It also did the same thing that Vikram Seth’s An Equal Music did beautifully, which was to make music seem transcendent. The Japanese businessman’s love of opera made sense, given the way Patchett described opera.
It was sweaty in a way that conjured up South America for someone who has (as yet) never been and therefore couldn’t be a good judge. It also did the same thing that Vikram Seth’s An Equal Music did beautifully, which was to make music seem transcendent. The Japanese businessman’s love of opera made sense, given the way Patchett described opera.
Reading State of Wonder, there’s a moment when it seems Ann Patchett is forcing her character to like what I suspect she likes, which is opera, in the way she likes it, which is both very much and for its transcendent qualities – its ability to lift her up out of whatever is happening and put her in some other, better world.
State of Wonder is the story of Marina, a 40-ish medical researcher who is the daughter of divorced parents and has recurring nightmares about being abandoned by her father. She is ordered, diligent and responds more than anything to motivations of guilt and obligation. She travels to South America after her lab-partner goes down to the Amazon and dies. He’d been checking on research being done by one of Marina’s former teachers and supervisors. She doesn’t want to go, and doesn’t want to be there when she gets there. It is presented as a confusing world she isn’t particularly interested in, one which is unbearably hot, sweaty and full of life-threatening but unidentifiable insects. The only reason she goes is because both her boss and the wife of her dead lab partner ask her to. In terms of structure, it seems both her boss and the dead man’s wife would have more at stake had Patchett chosen to send either of them to the Amazon. Either for the wife to confront the woman who killed her husband through her negligent refusal to give a shit, or for the boss who may be sending his career into ruins by being the only executive at any major drug manufacturer willing to subsidise research that isn’t producing anything of any marketable value. These would be different books (both from each other and from State of Wonder) but at least these books would have some drive. It seems that all Marina has to lose is her annoying habit of trying to please others.
As I said at the beginning, I’m only half way through the book and perhaps there is a storyline of emergence waiting for me, one in which Marina stops being a painfully limp, inactive lead character and starts moving forward. Perhaps this will be the triumph in the tropics either Thelma or Louise would have had if they’d been pharmaceutical company employees sent to the Amazon. Having her stop being annoying seems a small payoff, but in this case I’m having to trust that I’m in safe hands.
And given the clash of my previous reading of Patchett’s Bel Canto with one scene in State of Wonder, I am given cause to wonder just how safe I am.
Stranded in a small backwater port town on the Rio Negro, waiting to bump into the reclusive researcher, our plain and ordered lab researcher from Minnesota goes, against her will and in a dress and heels she finds both painful and embarrassing, to the opera. And loves it. It quietens the insects. Calms the heat. Silences her hordes of doubts and insecurities. Even though it is an ordinary performance of an ordinary opera (and I wonder when Marina found time to acquire her broad taste in operas) the experience of that hush and that kind of music is transcendent. The performance is in an Opera House, not a converted hall or a community centre or an opera house that doubles as a cinema on weekdays and an election centre every two years. It’s an Opera House, with stalls and boxes and lush carpets. The very existence of that music in that building is used as proof of the magical ability of opera to hold back the rush of chaos and corruption, and even the forest itself. Without it, apparently, the whole town would be swallowed within months by the uncivilised forces of sweat and nature.
What?!? Who? What? Where? Why? Why is this scene in this book other than because Ann Patchett likes opera? It makes no sense to me. But I realise that it makes no sense to me in this book precisely because it makes sense to me in the context of having read Bel Canto. Perhaps, if I hadn’t read the other book, that scene would have seemed magic, a gift from a storyteller who was capable of introducing elements I hadn’t expected. Perhaps I would have let the scene add layers to my understanding of Marina. Perhaps I would have thought: OMG! Marina loves opera! She’s actually cultured and interesting and I’d missed it because of all the descriptions of her doing nothing but reading books and trying to get good grades. She loves opera! She must be more than just an obedient little (42-year old) girl whose love for her much-older (60-ish) boss is illogical enough to suggest she’s falling for a pretty ordinary substitute for her own father. (Her boss’s name – Mr Fox – seems more ironic than suggested, as he appears to be equally boring. However, the fact that he’s unwilling to be open about their relationship but more than willing to send her to the same place her lab-partner just died suggests he’s worse than a merely boring father-substitute.) Maybe I would have read these scenes differently.
But I can’t tell; not exactly. I can’t un-read Bel Canto. But I can tell when a character is horse-poop boring. So much so that I’m reading on just to see if Patchett can turn it around. I must have too much time on my hands.