Harare Review of Books

224 pages.

First published July 9, 2024 (Farrar, Straus & Giroux).

Fiction.

Dreamy, lush, surreal in all of the best ways: State of Paradise is the book I couldn’t stop reading this week. Strange storms (which, you know, Florida). Sinkholes. Ghosts. Time at an in-patient treatment centre—which might feel gratuitous in a novel of this nature, but is really not. A “relatively benign” cult. Cats—so very many cats. Also a wolf or two. Events that are, well, pretty mundane, but that manage to make the hairs on the back of your neck rise.

But that’s not all: a company, ELECTRA, makes VR headsets that seem to be linked to people disappearing. Not to mention having their eye colour change, and generally becoming a little disconnected from our common plane of existence. It all makes sense—because this is a pandemic novel, and escape is a theme (you’ll remember what that felt like).

Read a certain way, State of Paradise is a love letter to Florida in all of its weirdness, and an open letter of protest about its leadership (or lack thereof) in the face of climate change. So it’s cli-fi; but then it’s also a novel about complicated human families. For writers, State of Paradise is also an exploration of the process of ghostwriting, and veneration of “The Author”. (Handy device, because the protagonist is something of a ghost herself.) It’s also, to go back to the treatment centre, a searching examination back through time of the fractures of self—who takes advantage of that, and who’s damaged by it. As the novel says about itself: it’s about “states of suffering and states of paradise”; dystopia and a yearned-for utopia.

• If you liked No One Is Talking About This x Patricia Lockwood, you’ll love State of Paradise.
• Also, check out lovely marginalia from Paul Yoon, the author’s husband; it will enhance your understanding of this speculative memoir.