Ann Patchett’s most characteristic subject is the hell turned unlikely paradise, a kind of reverse “Lord of the Flies” in which a group of strangers, shipwrecked into a disaster beyond their imagining, manage nonetheless to create a peaceable habitat where love and decency prevail. Patchett’s best-­selling 2001 novel, “Bel Canto,” opened with a botched terrorist operation in a South American country, after which an American opera diva, a Japanese industrialist, a French ambassador, various Russian businessmen and their Marxist-Leninist guerrilla captors turned their long captivity into a peculiar sort of idyll. “State of Wonder,” Patchett’s eighth book and sixth novel, is no less multinational in its cast of characters, or high-stakes in its plot.  Marina Singh, a medical researcher at a pharmaceutical company in Minnesota, is sent deep into the Amazon basin to investigate the circumstances surrounding the death of Anders Eckman, her lab partner. Anders had originally been dispatched to Brazil to bring back news of Dr. Annick Swenson, a charismatic but despotic professor who, on the company’s bankroll, was developing a miracle fertility drug. Distressingly, Dr. Swenson had become uncommunicative about both the progress of her study and her whereabouts.  “She found a village of people in the Amazon, a tribe,” Anders had told Marina, “where the women go on bearing children until the end of their lives. . . . Their eggs aren’t aging, do you get that? The rest of the body goes along its path to destruction while the reproductive system stays daisy fresh. This is the end of I.V.F. No more expense, no more shots that don’t end up working, no more donor eggs and surrogates. This is ovum in perpetuity, menstruation everlasting. . . . Pretend for a moment that you are a clinical pharmacologist working for a major drug development firm. Imagine someone offering you the equivalent of ‘Lost Horizon’ for American ovaries.”  As the novel opens, a curt letter has arrived from Dr. Swenson, announcing that Anders has died of a sudden fever at her secret research station. He was buried on the spot; his few possessions are being kept for his widow, Karen.  The pharmaceutical company’s position is unequivocal: Dr. Swenson must be tracked down immediately, her drug rushed into development and prepared for submission to the F.D.A. Karen’s position is equally unequivocal: she does not believe her husband is dead. Only Marina, it is decided, can perform the mission impossible — come home with evidence that will satisfy both parties.  It’s a task straight out of classical mythology: bring back the head of the Gorgon, the Golden Fleece, or, in Marina’s case, the potion conferring everlasting fertility and the dead husband’s watch. As in the myths, she must be ready to outwit tyrants, behead monsters, charm cannibal tribes.  Although doggedly dutiful, Marina is by various counts the last person who should be sent into this Heart of Darkness. A die-hard homebody, she is rooted to her native patch of Minnesota, a suburb of Minneapolis called Eden Prairie. Added to this Midwesterner’s almost genetic antipathy to the jungle are the psychological side effects of the antimalarial medicine she must take, which throw her back into the same harrowing nightmares that haunted her youth. (Successful dream sequences, it must be said, are even rarer in novels than good sex scenes; it is one of Patchett’s more unusual achievements that Marina’s nightmares are made to constitute a hypnotic, complex and weirdly funny counterpoint to the novel’s waking life.)  Most disabling of all, however, is that Marina is a former student of Dr. Swenson’s. Indeed, unbeknownst to anyone else, Dr. Swenson played a significant role in a terrible accident that, 12 years earlier, compelled Marina to abandon her career in obstetrics and retreat to the safer shores of pharmacological research.  “State of Wonder” is an engaging, consummately told tale. Patchett’s deadpan narrative style showcases a dry humor that enables her to wed, with fine effect, the world of “Avatar” or the “Odyssey” with that of corporate board meetings, R&D reports and peer review. This unlikely marriage of the magical and the prosaic, of poison-tipped arrows and Fourth of July barbecues, informs every line of her prose. She refers to the “mid­morning shift” of insects and describes how the Lakashi Indians — who when first encountered by Marina in the jungle are ululating, flame-brandishing bacchantes — appear in the morning as “a working-­class tribe, a sober group of people who went about the business of their day without fanfare or flame.” And if she succeeds in domesticating the exotic, Patchett’s even greater gift is in defamiliarizing the homey, giving suburban housewives and Minnesota flatlands the aching beauty and primal force of elements found in a creation myth.  Although “State of Wonder” tackles the larger Hippocratic quandary posed by scientific exploration — how does one extract whatever raw materials one has come for without destroying the habitat and the indigenous people who harbor them? — Patchett’s interests are actually more private. At the book’s true heart is the confrontation between Marina and her former teacher, one in which mild-mannered decency must win out over brute will masquerading as scientific imperative.  In the end, Marina, whose imagination has “been systematically chipped apart by years of studying inorganic chemistry and charting lipids,” who has “put her faith in data,” will have to navigate through a realm where reason is of no use to her and enter “a circle of hell” that requires “an entirely different set of skills that she did not possess.” Paradoxically, she will get what she wants only through an act of betrayal, by leaving behind what she loves most.  “State of Wonder” is an immensely touching novel, although as with much of Patchett’s work, its emotional impact is somewhat muted by her indefatigable niceness. Her corporate executives are invariably meek as lambs. Even the unscrupulous Dr. Swenson, Patchett’s great shot at a megavillainess, turns out to be a woman blinded by love.  In “Truth & Beauty,” her 2004 memoir of her friendship with Lucy Grealy, a writer disfigured by childhood cancer who died of a heroin overdose, Patchett describes her own feeling that “the world was a blister of grief with only the thinnest layer of tightly stretched skin holding everything in place.” Someday, perhaps, she will let that blister pop and unloose the rage and terror implicit in her stories. It isn’t a writer’s job to hold everything in place.  Fernanda Eberstadtâs most recent novel, âRat,â is now out in paperback.
Ann Patchettâs heroine, on the trail of a reclusive scientist in the Amazon, faces demons real and imagined.