There’s a pharmaceutical company. A researcher approaches them, saying she can develop a big-bucks drug if they’ll send her to Brazil with gobs and gobs of funding. So they do. And then she’s pretty much out of communication for a few years, so they send someone after her, to find her and make sure she’s making adequate progress. And he dies. So they send someone else after her. Ann Patchett’s “State of Wonder” follows that someone — the lonely, somewhat wounded Dr. Marina Singh — as she navigates a wildly unfamiliar territory.

Reading this book reaffirmed something I already knew: I am not cut out for life in the jungle. The book put me in a weird place, mentally, like I was not quite connected to the real world any longer, and it gave me crazy dreams about fighting giant spiders. (Although, spoilers!, there are no fights with giant spiders in the book. There are, however, more spoilers!, fights with other horrible beasts.) It’s very much a modernized “Heart of Darkness,” and it made me feel like I was falling down the rabbit hole. I know that’s kind of a cliche within a cliche, but reading this made me feel like I was stranded in the jungle right there with Dr. Singh. So at least they’re appropriate cliches, I guess.

I love Patchett’s phrasing —

“There was inside of her a very modest physical collapse, not a faint but a sort of folding, as if she were an extension ruler and her ankles and knees and hips were all being brought together at closer angles.”

for example, and also

“The outside air was heavy enough to be bitten and chewed.”

— and the pace of “State of Wonder” swept me up from the first page. It felt, though, like Patchett was holding the characters at a distance somehow.

So. I didn’t love “State of Wonder” like I loved Patchett’s “Bel Canto,” but I definitely liked it quite a lot.