State of Paradise

April 15, 2024
Van den Berg (The Third Hotel) explores the unsettling new normal following an unspecified pandemic in her entrancing latest. The story takes place in Central Florida, where the unnamed narrator, a ghostwriter for an elusive thriller author, and her husband return to live with her mother. Both the narrator and her younger sister, who lives next door, have had the virus, referred to only as “the fever,” which causes surprising long-term effects (the sister’s eye color changes, and the narrator’s bellybutton converts to an “innie”). Dispatches from the husband’s long runs through the neighborhood include an episode in which a man on a bike inexplicitly slashes a truck’s tires while its owner sleeps in the cab. Meanwhile, the narrator’s sister forays into a virtual world called Mind’s Eye, which might be the cause of a rise in disappearances around town. The plot ramps up when the sister vanishes and the narrator’s search for her leads to revelations about the narrator’s employer and Mind’s Eye. In addition, Van den Berg develops stimulating metafictional connections to the material as the narrator attempts to write something of her own to document her relationship to the changing world. This off-kilter story is hard to forget.

Starred review from May 15, 2024
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.

COPYRIGHT(2024) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Starred review from June 1, 2024
Van den Berg follows her short-story collection, I Hold a Wolf by the Ears (2020), with a subtly speculative novel narrated by a ghostwriter for "a very famous thriller author." She and her historian husband were visiting when COVID-19 hit, and now they're stuck in swampy Florida, living with her retired social worker mother, next door to her unhappy insurance adjuster sister. They are plagued with sinkholes, lizards, grasshoppers, cats, and flooding storms. A tech company, ELECTRA, has handed out free virtual reality headsets featuring MIND'S EYE, to which her sister has become addicted, while their mother's planetary concerns lead her to inadvertently start a cult. As the bizarreness intensifies, van den Berg's deadpan hilarious narrator reflects on her troubled past and the weird physical transformations the virus caused (including the strange reconfiguration of her belly button), chafes at being one of "a fleet of ghosts" receiving curt instructions from the famous author's cryptic assistants, and wonders if MIND'S EYE might have something to do with all the disappearing people. As memories waver, identities morph, the truth turns slippery, and the wisecracking, vigilant "ghost" thinks about confronting the elusive famous author, van den Berg takes measure of the pandemic's hidden impacts, escalating ecothreats, family traumas, and the nature of stories and our profound reliance on them.

COPYRIGHT(2024) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Starred review from July 1, 2024

Out running, a jogger sees a biker approach a van by the roadside and plunge a knife into its tire. That's the start of this novel: no context or follow-up, just one quick violent incident. Van den Berg (I Hold a Wolf by the Ears) is known for writing about weird places and happenings, the very weirdness of her narratives forcing readers to rethink present-day reality. Here, a writer moves home to Florida to ghostwrite for a famous novelist whom she later discovers is long dead. His acolytes have placed him in cryostorage while they oversee the continued churning out of books under his name; there's no him anymore. That's one of the less-creepy occurrences in van den Berg's continually unsettling novel. For instance, the writer's sister becomes addicted to a virtual reality device called MIND'S EYE, supplied free to the town's citizens to provide solace during the pandemic. The sister vanishes, and when she is recovered, she claims to have been living in an alternate reality. Meanwhile, the writer's mother leads a cult of locals campaigning for No More Babies. All the time, the weather becomes steadily more unpredictable and dangerous, and missing-persons signs dot the town. VERDICT An unputdownable novel of a world spinning rapidly out of control.--David Keymer

Copyright 2024 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.