One person’s paradise is another person’s hell.
The setting of State of Paradise by Laura van den Berg is bleak – rainy, flood-prone Florida of the future. An unnamed pandemic has struck and people rely on a virtual reality device and cheap novels to distract them from a society on the cusp of slipping into chaos, ignorance, boredom and authoritarianism.
The story follows an educated couple, unsettled and unfulfilled in their careers. The two live with the wife’s mother, due to the pandemic, after repeatedly moving in pursuit of temporary teaching posts. The academic husband struggles with his goal of writing an account of pilgrimages in medieval Europe and runs regularly, gathering unusual tales from his route in their neighborhood.
The wife once aspired to a writing career, settling for ghostwriting for a famous thriller author, wo is likewise on a constant prowl for stories. The wife is grateful for her own paid writing position but also feels loss. “When I landed the ghostwriting job, I told myself that becoming a ghost at least got me closer to my goal…,” she notes, expressing regret she participates in “creation of books that did not yet exist, even if they were not stories that I myself had imagined or would ever have chosen to tell.”
The ghostwritten novels are page-turners, intended for distraction rather than active thought. The protagonist has strong feelings about storytelling. “When a story is told to another person it takes on a life of its own; it spreads, contagion-like. The more times a story is shared the more powerful it becomes.”
Ghostwriting is not storytelling. “The novels I write are more like a mirage: they appear to be stories, but they are not. They appear to be stories, but are not. They are not stories, because there is no deeper impetus.” She longs to write such a novel with deep insights, yet struggles in her temporary setting.
So she visits the headquarters for producing the ghost-written novels and asks a supervisor whether the woman is troubled by producing books that “have nothing real or true to say about the world.” The woman in white replies, “Real and true are overrated, in this line of work. Haven’t you seen what it’s like out there? Real and true are what people read to get away from.” The woman dismisses any notion of the wife setting out to write her “own little books” that would be “far too esoteric for the masses.”
The plot suggests that people don't mind going through life deluding themselves. As the woman at the ghostwriting command center notes, “We only know what we perceive…. And we perceive so very little.”
The protagonist offers a partial list of reasons for telling stories:
“People tell stories to will lies into truth.
“People tell stories to bend truth into lies.
“People tell stories to carve for themselves a legible shape out of an inexplicable existence.
“People tell stories to atone for what they have failed to do in life.”
Of course there are other reasons, including the willingness to connect with others, participating in dialogue that might improve how we lie.
The book offers hope that the protagonist may find her way, if only because she is fully aware that the apocalyptic society oddly seems normal and mundane. She also recalls an earlier, more civilized world with fondness. “Distant, but not forgotten. No, no…. Now that world is like an old friend who comes to visit on occasion, but who can never stay for too long.”
There are choices. We can forget what makes us strong as communities and individuals, complying and adjusting to despair. Or, we can work nonstop to remember the good and, change the world. The tools can be as simple as stories, distributed once person at a time, reigniting hope, responsibility and a sense of caring.
