State Of Wonder by Ann Patchett
Bloomsbury $36.99
Ann Patchett's new novel dreams along, somewhat as its title suggests, until the moment its main character, 42-year-old pharmacologist Marina Singh, arrives at her destination up a secret tributary of the Rio Negro and, at last, comes face to face with her bete noir, her old medical professor Dr Annick Swenson.
The journey up until then - from a small lab at Minnesota pharmaceutical company Vogel, via the Brazilian city of Menaus (shades of Werner Herzog's Fitzcarraldo - the epitome of unwise, obsessive ventures), and up the river - is strange, a little unfocused, overshot with the terrible nightmares Marina suffers as soon as she begins taking anti-malarial medication.
It is an adventure story - there's a fight with an anaconda, and a tribe of cannibals - yet, like all Patchett's novels (which include the Orange Prize-winning Bel Canto), it is redolent with emotional complexity and ideas - about medical ethics, First and Third World relations, and, perhaps above all, our contemporary power struggle with biology.
At its core, thanks to Marina's finely balanced embodiment of need, loneliness and inhibition, lies a quietness, a silence that perhaps has something to say about the atominsation of American life, especially compared to the communality of the Amazon tribes.
