What Kind of Paradise

by Janelle Brown ★★★★★

When we first meet Jane Williams, the narrator of What Kind of Paradise, it's present day, and she receives a knock on the door of her house in the woodlands of Marin, one that she's been dreading. Sure enough, it's a reporter from The San Francisco Chronicle. After years of hiding in anonymity, Jane has at last been found. "All these years later, I still wasn't sure I fully understood what had happened," Jane narrates. But she realizes it might be time for her to confront her past and try to make sense of it all.

From there, we flashback to November 1996. Jane is seventeen and living with her father, Saul, in a remote cabin the Montana wilderness. It's been just the two of them living this way for the past thirteen years, ever since Jane's mother, Jennifer, was killed in a car accident. "As a child, I had no understanding that our lives were not normal—it was simply the way things were." But at seventeen, Jane has started to question the isolation and long for a greater connection with the outside world. She's allowed small bits of contact. Once a month, she and her father travel to a bookstore in nearby Bozeman to deliver his hand-produced pamphlet "Libertaire"—twenty-four pages of essays railing against the government establishment. There she gets to briefly interact with the one person she knows her own age, the daughter of the shop owner, Heidi.

At the same time, she has almost no frame of reference for what "normal" should look like. Her solitary existence with her father—a Harvard grad who homeschools Jane on anti-establishment philosophers and survival skills—is all she knows, and despite the isolation, she is mostly happy. Things start to change more dramatically when she stumbles upon an old picture of her and her mother in her father's desk while he's away. On the back it's captioned "Esme and Theresa. February '83." It's clearly Jane and her mother Jennifer, so why are the names different? Jane calls Heidi with the news, and Heidi prompts Jane to consider the potential implications. "I mean, Jane, if he lied to you about that, then you have you ask yourself if he's lied to you about other things too."

What if Ted Kaczynski—the Unabomber—had a daughter? Author Janelle Brown roughly puts that premise to the test. The connection between Brown's fictional Saul Williams and the real-life Kaczynski is loose but clear, and Saul is perhaps the most interesting character in the book. He's equally brilliant and deranged, a father who clearly loves his daughter and wants what is best for her, but his version of the best is obviously flawed. Jane's recounting of her childhood is regularly filled with the conflicted emotions and the challenge of separating her understanding now versus how she felt in the moment. "I grew up fully aware that my father was a brilliant man, whose expertise I should never ever ever question. Did I believe he was a good man? That's another question entirely. He wasn't without goodness." That nuance and multi-dimensionality elevates the story significantly.

We know from the prologue that things are going to head in a bad (or worse) direction. "Behind my lids I saw the same familiar ghosts flicker past, my life's movie on perpetual rerun. Blood spatters across a shiny red dress. The cold heft of a gun in my palm. A tower of flames, bright against the night sky." But by the time we get to the event referenced by the memory, we have a multi-layered portrait of a father-daughter relationship, one in which you dislike Saul the father regularly, and just as you're about to tip over to despising him, he does something sweet or generous for his daughter. It's really well done.

To say more would likely spoil too much of the story, and so I'll leave it without commenting on any additional plot details. The novel evolves in some interesting and mostly-believable ways, and it's thoughtfully constructed such that the reader is pulled in multiple directions. One can't help but root for Jane, of course; but I think many will also feel some small sliver of sympathy for Saul, who at his core believes he's doing what is best for his daughter and all of humanity, even if his mental demons have taken him off the rails. It's another strong effort from a consistently entertaining author.