State of Wonder was published by HarperCollins in 2011. Dr. Marina Singh, a pharmacologist at a Minnesota pharmaceutical company, is sent to the Amazon to discover what happened to her colleague Anders Eckman, who died while visiting Dr. Annick Swenson — a legendary researcher who has spent years in the jungle developing a fertility drug based on a compound used by the Lakashi people, whose women remain fertile into old age.
The novel is a deliberate reworking of Heart of Darkness — the journey upriver, the search for a charismatic figure who has gone native, the collision between Western rationality and the jungle’s indifference to it — but Patchett replaces Conrad’s colonial metaphysics with a meditation on reproductive science, pharmaceutical capitalism, and what happens when Western medicine encounters indigenous knowledge. Dr. Swenson is not Kurtz: she is a brilliant, imperious scientist who has gone her own way not because the jungle has corrupted her but because the pharmaceutical industry’s demand for profitable products conflicts with the complexity of what she has found.
Marina’s journey is both physical and psychological: she confronts her fear of the jungle (she is terrified of insects), her unresolved relationship with Dr. Swenson (who was her teacher and whose surgical mistake cost Marina her ability to bear children), and ultimately her understanding of what medicine owes to the indigenous peoples whose knowledge it exploits.
Collecting State of Wonder
First edition (HarperCollins, New York, 2011): Hardcover with dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $15–$35
- Very good: $8–$20