Don't Drink from the Fountain of Youth

Doing these couple of reviews in reverse order:  I read State of Wonder by Ann Patchett before I skimmed through On Democracy.  I wish I had read it faster because the woman who lent it to me was home recuperating from surgery and she would have enjoyed the distraction of this good book.

Our book club selected a Patchett book, Bel Canto, at least a year ago.  When I read it, I thought it contrived, a plausible scenario, but a tad affected.  Canto does have an echoing reprise that stays in the memory like a haunting song.  I think I will remember State of Wonder long after I forget its title .... which I seem to have done already.

Patchett loads this novel with many themes and many philosophical questions.  It is a cross breed between Heart of Darkness and Alice in Wonderland.  The heroine sent into the Brazilian jungle seems too weak to tackle her assignment.  She drags a complicated history behind her:  a distant foreign father, and a failed first career.  A lab worker for a large pharmaceutical company, she is told to go bring back a renegade mad scientist and the body of a co-worker who failed himself to perform the same thing.  The terrain, the language, the culture, the economy, the geography, all are more than alien:  they make no sense to a woman who deals with knowledge, precision, proof and consistency.  She is placed in a tableau of obstruction and obfuscation.

The thoughts that Patchett plants in your mind to reexamine, if not completely refine, include what is motherhood, who is responsible for a child, how can cultures interact without contaminating or eroding important traditions, who owns health.

I probably should not have read the NY Times review of this book before I sat down to type because in it, the reviewer criticizes Patchett's rosy view of conflict resolution:  the villian dies, the lost hero is reunited with his wife, the Tinkerbell like child who acts as her guide returns to his tribe.  

My secondary motive to finish the book was to think about preventive medicine, fertility drugs and the possibility of drugs being tailored to genetic profiles.  What if a drug, with a specific limited market, had wider beneficial side effects but only to a restricted population, be it gender, blood type, etc.  I end to find some lectures in medical ethics.