Annals from the Literary Salon: Laura van den Berg reads from her new book State of Paradise

It starts as not a particularly outlandish night. The sun has escaped behind thick clouds, a few raindrops hit the windows, and the wind moving through the leaves is louder than the cars speeding through the slick streets – just another fleeting summer storm, nothing more, nothing less. Inside Riff Raff, PVD’s only bar-and-bookstore, a small, eclectic crowd grows under soft lights. Ice clinks around in glasses and the espresso machines whir. Conversations float between the bar stools and the bookshelves. Owner Lucas Mann steps on the small stage to announce that the readings will be beginning shortly. Quickly the lingerers find seats, a silence settles, and the lights dim except for one. A taller, thin woman takes the stage. Behind her, in the shadows, is an empty chair.

As Laura van den Berg begins to read from her new novel State of Paradise, I slowly realize that the summer storm is not just a summer storm, that the room, and its empty chairs, are full of ghosts.

State of Paradise has an unnamed protagonist, a ghost writer for a famous author who, she says, “I imagine wandering a castle in a silk bathrobe in some small, cold country – Switzerland, Austria – and slicing the air with a silver letter opener as he concocts his plots, even though I know the author lives in a mansion down in Palm Beach.” Van den Berg uses the natural setting of Florida to exaggerate the mysterious realms of her character’s interaction with reality.

During the novel COVID has happened, is happening. Florida was known for its strange dissonance and unorthodox policy. Even without COVID, Florida has a reputation for looseness, a Wild, Wild West of the East (think “Florida Man.”) So it is no surprise when sinkholes overtake highways, surprise monsoons cause kayakers to replace drivers, and wolves sit tied up in the backyard. The idea of portals is an undercurrent throughout, an idea I have since become obsessed with. These are portals of self, links between places we’ve been and the people we’ve been. Van den Berg writes in the chapter, “Portals,” “Sometimes I wonder what we are supposed to do with our memories. Sometimes I wonder what our memories are for. A latch slips and the past floods in, knocking us flat. We leave places and we don’t leave places. Sometimes I imagine different versions of myself in all the different places I have ever lived, inching through time in parallel.”

State of Paradise embarks on the metaphysical, an investigation of domestication in a world of wilderness. Van den Berg writes, “I started to wonder if the wilderness is not something a person can choose to leave. Rather it is a place that lives inside us. A landscape with its own intelligence and design.” Its characters are temporary and in a world full of missing people we find that the missing aren’t missing, they’re just somewhere else. And where that is, van den Berg leaves for us to find. •

Find more of Laura van den Berg at lauravandenberg. com and more events from Riff Raff at their instagram @ riffraffpvd.