Paradise Fever

the long version

Ptolemy Tompkins is the son of Peter Tompkins, author of the cult bestseller The Secret Life of Plants, and one of the most colorful and influential avatars of the New Age. It is the '70s, a time of cosmic, sometimes alarming, optimism, which could justify all manner of scientific, and not so scientific, investigations. In such a transcendent spirit, Peter Tompkins surprises both his wife and son by introducing into the household a second mate, a Manhattan socialite named Betty. And, in 1974, he moves to Bimini, with Ptolemy in tow, to search for the lost continent of Atlantis. With the mercilessly keen eye of the child spectator and the mordant wit of an adult, Ptolemy Tompkins describes a childhood populated by such eccentrics as Quigley the calculator-eater and Cheryl the naked changeling. Growing into adulthood, Ptolemy embarks on his own route back to the Garden. But is it any surprise that there's trouble in paradise? When the prospect of living in the here and now fills him with fear and trembling, when his understanding fiancee threatens to decamp, and when a visiting aura reader tells him that his crown chakra is "dented," our narrator must finally come to terms with his father's legacy of outsized dreams.