The characters in this novel are varied and complex, with much about them hidden. The relationships between the characters are also layered, although they first appear opaque, like the surface of the river.
When Marina looked down she saw nothing, just a line where her torso vanished into the water … “How do you know what’s under there?” [she asks Milton]
“You don’t … You don’t want to.” (p.102)
Through their interactions, they grow (or not), change (or not), and work (or not). We witness the tensions between them and watch how they interact with the raw environment of the Amazon. For this reason, the individual natures of the characters can best be considered in their groupings.
• With trepidation, the dutiful and compliant Marina embarks on a journey to the Amazon to track down and report on the progress of the elusive Dr. Swenson. Marina’s anxiety has much to do with the prospect of encountering the formidable Annick Swenson who, as Marina’s former obstetrics professor at Johns Hopkins, instilled both awe and terror. Thirteen years earlier, when Marina was chief resident and Dr. Swenson was the attending physician, Marina disobeyed Swenson’s orders and proceeded with a Caesarean birth that left an infant scarred and blinded in one eye. The event drove Marina out of obstetrics for the safer field of pharmacological research, and has haunted her ever since.
• With Dr. Swenson’s surprise appearance at the legendary opera house in Manaus, Marina is quite shaken by the fact that her former teacher doesn’t seem to remember her. After all, Marina had lost her belief in herself and changed her life’s direction because of the incident.
• When Dr. Swenson orders her to leave Brazil and return home, Marina musters up her grit by ignoring the edict and instead boards the boat to travel down the Amazon with the intimidating doctor and her young companion, Easter. Marina quickly adapts to the jungle environment and eventually the two women, so different in personality and professional approach, come to a sort of truce.
• Annick pushes Marina to do a Caesarian section on a Lakashi woman. Although her motive may be self-serving (to test and prepare Marina for the eventual delivery of her own unborn child), Marina proves herself medically competent and overcomes her old terror of surgery.
• Marina realizes it’s time to go home, not only when she suspects she is becoming addicted to the Martins, but when Dr. Swenson makes repeated references to “our” delivery date. The thought of being responsible for the safe delivery of the 73-year-old’s baby unnerves Marina. She also realizes that she is being manipulated by the imperious Swenson who has decided that her former student is a suitable replacement for herself as protector of the Lakashi people. Dr. Swenson comes to believe that Marina’s arrival in the jungle has turned out to be a blessing.
As a student back in Baltimore, Marina quits rather than fighting for herself. This seems to fit her personality as we see it initially. Do you feel Marina changes? If so, what brings about this transformation?
• Annick Swenson was first a student of and then the long-time mistress of the famous ethnobotanist Dr. Martin Rapp, who died nine years ago from melanoma. He was in his 80s. Scientist Nancy Saturn contends, “To know Martin Rapp was to know Annick Swenson.” (p.227) Teacher and student are single-minded in their pursuit of their scientific objective and share the same outlook and values.
• The greatest lesson Dr. Swenson says she learned from Dr. Rapp was to “never be so focused on what you’re looking for that you overlook the thing you actually find.” (p.246) The methodology no doubt aided Dr. Rapp with his discovery of the hallucinogenic mushrooms that grow beneath the Populas (fertility trees). Named after the great botanist, the Rapps are considered to be the greatest single discovery in mycology and are found nowhere else in the world. The same approach led Dr. Swenson to discover a potential vaccine for malaria while developing the long-sought fertility drug.
• Dr. Swenson tells Marina that Dr. Rapp felt no responsibility for others. With the many who insisted on joining his expeditions, he made his policy clear.
“Once they were out on the trail they fell like flies…Dr. Rapp never stopped for them. He remained beautifully consistent: he was there to work and he would continue to work. He would not ferry back the weak and the lame. They had chosen to get themselves in and they would simply have to figure the means to get themselves out.” (p.151, 152)
• Dr. Swenson adopts her mentor’s philosophy and tells Marina that it is important not to become too involved with the Lakashi nor interfere with their lives more than necessary. She admits making that mistake when she first came to the jungle with Dr. Rapp by inadvertently displaying her medical skills, resulting in a stream of sick tribesmen paddling up the river to receive her care. But among them was Easter.
Consider the doctors’ theory of intervention vs. non-intervention. Given the circumstances of their environment, what role should intervention play?
• With Dr. Rapp’s death, Dr. Swenson carried on with his scientific work and inherits the role of protector of the Lakashi people — something Dr. Swenson hopes to pass on to her former student, Marina.
What was it that made Dr. Swenson and Dr. Rapp so devoted to one another? Consider their relationship as teacher and student, and as lovers, in comparison to the other relationships in the story.
• Researcher Alan Saturn idolized his former mentor and recalls his first day of Harvard lectures when the great Martin Rapp made his appearance: “‘Gentlemen, close your books and listen. We have nothing less than the world to consider.’ We were awestruck, every last one of us…What I saw in front of me was the character of a man. It was the most remarkable thing, and I’ve never had that experience before or since. It was some sort of aura he had. From ten rows away I knew exactly who he was and I knew I would follow him anywhere.” (p.228)
• Dr. Rapp’s magnetism was what also attracted Annick to him, but we are given another side of the charismatic scientist by Nancy Saturn. Through her we learn that Dr. Rapp abandoned Alan Saturn, at age 19, to a tribe of Indians in Peru when he fell ill with a raging fever. Nancy also describes the married Rapp as a “lifelong philanderer” (p.232) whose mistress (Annick) accompanied him, time after time, along with a dozen of his male students, on his expeditions to South America.
• State of Wonder shows that teachers can have a profound and lasting impact on their students. While Alan Saturn and Annick Swenson’s relationships with Martin Rapp are marked by a single-minded devotion, Marina is eventually able to exert her own authority over her relationship with her former teacher.
What do you think enabled her to move beyond her idolization and intimidation? What kept the others locked in their narrow perspective? How much of a long-term impact (negative or positive) does a teacher have on a student?
• Marina had been briefly married once, a long time ago. Now she is involved with the widowed Mr. Fox, CEO of the company at which she works, Vogel Pharmaceutical. First drawn together because of their mutual fondness for baseball, Jim Fox worries about their 18-year age difference: Fox is 60, and Marina is 42. Although they have been lovers for some time, they have kept their relationship secret.
• Distressed by the death of Anders Eckman, Mr. Fox asks Marina to take up the quest of obtaining a progress report on the work of Dr. Swenson. Marina reluctantly agrees to go for the sake of her friendship with Anders and at the emotional bidding of Karen, Anders’ wife.
• Once Marina enters the rainforest, she too loses touch with Vogel. Not one, but two cell phones vanish into the opaque jungle, a fact that fits into the isolated environment. Mr. Fox goes in search of her. Whether it is because of his personal reasons (love) or the economic reason (Vogel’s investment), he arrives in the Lakashi Village looking “so out of place in his lightly embroidered white shirt and khaki pants, as if he had dressed up for a party whose theme was the Amazon.” (p.305)
• His visibly stiff physical appearance and the awkwardness of his clandestine relationship with Marina further fits in with Patchett’s themes. Both Mr. Fox’s inner persona and his love affair have been pushed beneath the surface of open and conscious knowledge. These two parts of Mr. Fox emphasize the gravity of Vogel’s mission in the jungle.
What secrets are being kept, and will continue to be kept, once the fertility drug is developed? What are the dangers and implications of this secrecy?
• Annick points out the dangers of Vogel’s (and Mr. Fox’s) choices. “… you endanger them yourself! You throw a person in the river and then make a spectacle of jumping in to save them.” (p.306) This could apply equally to Marina as to the innocent women who will be using the new fertility drug. Fox leaves the Amazon happy, knowing that the fertility drug is viable and that it would soon be in production, with the Vogel stock exceeding expectations and his reputation intact.
• Marina is conscious of their now restrained relations and is dismayed when Mr. Fox raises no objections to Dr. Swenson’s plan to have Marina stay in Brazil to deliver her baby. “The drug worked, that was all he had ever needed to know. He didn’t care about the paperwork, the trees, he didn’t need to see Marina. He could get back on the boat tonight.” (p.307, 308)
What do you think Marina sees in Fox and what does she get out of the relationship? Does the clandestine nature of their involvement indicate something deeper within the personality of each of them?
Consider the open and ongoing question in the novel: Will Marina reconnect with Mr. Fox when she returns to Minnesota?
• Focused on the work at hand, Dr. Swenson treats the scientists who carry out her research with startling condescension. At first, Dr. Swenson bitterly resents Anders and the disruption he creates with his arrival, his sudden sickness, and his disappearance. This attitude tempers somewhat with Anders’ genuine interest in the work at hand and his attachment to Easter.
• Barbara and Jackie Bovender have an innocent loyalty to Annick Swenson. Traveling around the world, they came to Brazil looking to ride the waves. Instead, they find themselves navigating the complex streams and tributaries of big business. It is Barbara’s vision of her father that leads to the startling conclusion that Anders is alive.
• Before his disappearance in the Amazon jungle, Anders and Marina were close colleagues and lab partners at the Vogel pharmaceutical company, as well as friends. This relationship becomes complex when Marina is challenged over her feelings for Anders. When Barbara Bovender asks Marina if she is in love with Anders, Marina doesn’t have an answer.
• A response of sorts comes on the heels of the day’s tense and dramatic event. Safely back in camp but exhausted, Marina and Anders end up in a single bed, going over the events of the day. As they talk, she kisses him, “because their mouths were so close, because he was in fact alive, because she could not explain any of it … She loved him now, but only now. On this one night, after a day of the most extraordinary circumstances that either of them would see for the rest of their lives.” (p.349, p.350)
• Marina and Anders make love but the act is described as a way “to calm the fears they had endured. It was a physical act of kindness, a comfort, a sublime tenderness between friends.” (p.350) The night they spend together is an intimacy that they promise will never again be acknowledged.
Were you sympathetic to Marina and Anders’ act of love or did you see it as a morally wrong — a betrayal to Karen Eckman and Jim Fox? Is Marina in love with Anders or Fox? At this stage in her life, is she capable of being in love with anyone?
Is Patchett juxtaposing the strange ethics in each of these relationships with the ethics of the workplace? Is she making a judgment, and if so, what is that criticism?
With issues of childlessness filtering through most of the novel’s themes and relationships, children hold a special place in Ann Patchett’s story.
• Eight years earlier, the very ill Easter was left on the doorstep of Dr. Swenson. She nursed him back to health and made the decision to keep him as her own. Telling his cannibalistic tribe, the Hummocca, that he had died, Easter’s birth parents lost their child. Easter has lived amongst the Lakashi people ever since and is parented by the previously childless Dr. Swenson who protects and nurtures him as her own.
• Although Dr. Swenson sees Easter as the child she never had, the boy was everyone’s child — from Anders, who treated him as one of his own sons, to the Bovenders, the Lakashi, and Marina, who like Anders, harbored thoughts of taking Easter back with her to the United States. When Marina accuses Dr. Swenson of taking Easter, someone else’s child, Annick counters that Marina was the one who let Easter go. “He was mine… He was my boy…” (p.346)
• All are devastated with the loss of Easter who, in many ways, is a symbol. His name connects to Christ’s resurrection (Easter is twice reborn).
• It is also interesting to note that Easter is a moveable feast with the calendar date changing from year to year. Easter and Passover are also tied in time and in event, and in some languages, the word for Easter and Passover is the same. In the end, Easter is passed over to his parents — from hand to hand.
• Other children in the novel — Anders’ three young sons and the Lakashi children — are all highly cherished and well cared for by their parents, as well as by their extended community. This is in contrast to the missing fathers in the story, especially Marina’s dad. (see Love/Loss/Trust/Betrayal, p.33)
• The female scientists, all childless, chew the bark of the Martins — possibly to leave their options open and one day have children as late in life as they desire.
What does Easter mean to each of the characters who love him so much? Why did Patchett create him as a deaf child? Will Easter find a way to return to the Lakashi, as Swenson predicts?
What are your thoughts about Annick Swenson’s instincts as a mother? Was she a good mother to Easter? If her unborn child had lived, what sort of mother do you think she would have been?
Is Marina pregnant, and what might that mean if she is?
Aside from Easter, the relationship between the indigenous people and outsiders is mostly distant and expedient.
• Although Dr. Swenson sees herself as protector of the Lakashi and their natural environment, she has tamed them to suit her scientific needs and is quite disparaging towards them as people. “They are an intractable race. Any progress you advance to them will be undone before your back is turned.” (p.162)
• The Lakashi seem to be little more than guinea pigs to the other scientists as well. The native women are constantly monitored and prodded with little concern for their privacy or well-being. The Lakashi men are given Cokes while they are infected with malaria.
• While the Lakashi submit to the administrations of the scientists, the only one they seem to embrace and admire is Marina, who finds them fascinating in return. Like her, Anders Eckman also seemed to have a genuine interest in the Lakashi.
Consider the different relationships that Patchett presents in connection to the theme of intervention. Is there a balance to her perspective on the subject? Has this author put forth pertinent and new questions that readers might be mindful of?