Book review of “State of Paradise” by Laura van den Berg

Laura van den Berg understands all this. The novelist and short story writer, born in the Sunshine State, has Her birthplace is an integral part of much of her work. In several story collections and now three novels, van den Berg has portrayed Florida not as a freak show meme generator but as a serious place, populated by authentic characters with recognizably human concerns. In her stories, relationships falter and break for familiar reasons, and when circumstances become extraordinary, her characters respond in believable ways.

Things get weird in van den Berg’s Florida, just like stories set anywhere. The supernatural, or the suggestion of it, covers her stories like a damp blanket. Sometimes her characters encounter real ghosts. Sometimes, she told Poets & Writers magazine in 2020, she approaches the haunting “from an unexpected angle,” telling an “offbeat ghost story” in which “the haunting is more of a state of being, both in the self and in the surrounding world.”

Van den Berg’s new novel, State of Paradise, combines these approaches to create a macabre tale in which the living interact with the dead, and the most sinister souls are those with a pulse. For the ghostly protagonists of her previous novels, Find Me and The Third Hotel, Florida served as a symbol of escape and a source of disturbing memories, respectively. State of Paradise is the first book by van den Berg, who lives in New York’s Hudson Valley, set entirely on the peninsula, and it makes her one of Florida’s keenest observers.

Like fellow Florida native Karen Russell, van den Berg understands that the state’s true character – the source of all these supposed oddities – lies not in its residents’ penchant for chaos, corruption and absurdity, but in their close and often dangerous connection to nature. “In Florida, dangers don’t reveal themselves until it’s too late,” says a character in van den Berg’s 2020 collection, “I Hold a Wolf by the Ears.” “The alligator lurking in the shallows, ready to devour your pet or child. The snake hiding in the undergrowth. The surf current cutting across the postcard-perfect Atlantic. Sinkholes. Encephalitis. Brain-destroying bacteria that thrive in overheated lakes. Quicksand.”

These are not exaggerations. After all, Florida is a state with a major highway called Alligator Alley and a county that is considered the shark-bite capital of the world. “Sometimes I can’t believe there’s a place like this,” says the narrator’s non-Florida husband in “State of Paradise.” Writers have explored such sentiments since the time of the first manatee sighting. But too many have become so invested in the idea that they can no longer see around the unbalanced, distorted Florida that exists only for those who buy into the distortions.

“State of Paradise” is not without its fantastical detours, but much of it feels real enough. The narrator, a 36-year-old ghostwriter for “a very famous thriller writer” she’s never met, is stuck in central Florida after returning from upstate New York to care for her ailing father. Shortly after his death, a Covid-like pandemic broke out, claiming an unspecified number of people, wiping out the husband’s college job back home and causing “strange physical symptoms” in survivors.

The horrors mount: the narrator’s outward-bulging belly button becomes an inward one, growing deep enough to hold a bar of soap. Her sister experiences eye-color changes she claims aren’t happening. Her mother becomes a leader of the “Voluntary Human Extinction Movement.” (“HORN IF YOU THINK HUMANS ARE THE PROBLEM,” one of her signs reads.) Relatives thought dead may return.

Meanwhile, a state-approved Miami-based tech company distributed free virtual reality headsets during quarantine in a “supposed act of public service.” The devices would help housebound people combat loneliness, but users of the addictive MIND’S EYE are disappearing without a trace.

Florida’s lying politicians only add to the nightmare. The regressive governor, “who bears a striking resemblance to a Cro-Magnon in a suit,” declares the pandemic over and assures residents that life will return to normal. He dismisses reports of militias formed by his followers in the swamps and signs a public school law that replaces American history classes with Bible studies. “This is what it feels like to break free from tyranny,” he claims. A reader doesn’t need to put on elevators to recognize the character’s real-life inspiration.

“State of Paradise” is the second novel van den Berg sets during a pandemic. Her first, 2015’s “Find Me,” is about a grisly, brain-eating virus that kills hundreds of thousands of Americans in a matter of weeks. Because the pandemic in “Find Me” predates Covid, it seems more shocking and less inevitable than the one in “State of Paradise.” While the contagion certainly upends her life, the new novel’s narrator, a recovering alcoholic, has spent many years “living with the feeling of being lost in a vast wilderness — wandering and wandering until you’re so tired you just want to lie down and sleep.” Florida’s stormy summer weather, meanwhile, has conditioned her to “a regular feeling of apocalypse.” However monstrous its effects, the pandemic in “State of Paradise” is happening simply because pandemics happen. The world always ends, after all.

Towards the end of the novel, the once hidden dangers of a fascist nature become more and more obvious. Travel warnings warn against travelling to Florida. The state is “the first point on the map that seems to be in the early stages of some kind of disintegration,” writes van den Berg. “Whether this is temporary or permanent remains to be seen.”

Why, then, would anyone want to spend the end times in Florida? Van den Berg wisely doesn’t give her narrator a simple answer to that question, but the character stays in Florida. As the virus recedes, she too finds herself in a position very similar to ours: stranded between the world she knows and the world she thought she knew.

“The strangest thing about this time are the parts that still seem normal,” she says. “Ordinary and non-apocalyptic.”

Jake Cline is a writer and editor in Miami.

Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 224 pages. $27.