Jaylen's Reviews > State of Paradise

“The novel is a pretty outdated technology, but that is exactly why we need it. The form is so archaic that it can’t be fucked with.”

I’ve read almost all of Laura van den Berg’s work. She has an irreproducible style, one that marries the uncanny with the brutally real, contained in narratives that I find to be truly hypnotizing. Her previous book “I Hold a Wolf by the Ears” is my all-time favorite story collection. Here, through a rollicking story of Florida, a pandemic, ominous virtual reality devices, ghostwriting, mental illness, and a world on the brink of collapse, “State of Paradise” is a piece of weird fiction that at its heart is an exploration of storytelling; how stories provide form to the elusive aspects of living.

I’ve been drawn to contemporary literature that explores diaristic forms, a variant of autofiction that plays with an author’s physical act of keeping a diary, exposing the author’s seemingly private dialogue with themselves. Here, van den Berg uses this structure yet interestingly (and perhaps unconventionally) leans directly into the speculative. The “reality vs. fiction” distinction tends to be at the center of novels I love, and even when this story dips hard into the fiction, Van Den Berg’s skill is in keeping the reality lurking right over your shoulder, in often horrific ways. She has done this to varying extents in her previous work, but I loved the ambition of blurring all of these lines and leaning into genre to create a new, monstrous thing, which also happens be extremely fun to read.

“The more I read, the more, and the less, I understand.”

Read if you liked / Works brought to mind: Y/N by Esther Yi, Bliss Montage by Ling Ma, 2666 by Roberto Bolaño, Something New Under the Sun by Alexandra Kleeman, The Answers by Catherine Lacey, Weather by Jenny Offill