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beautyland, Written by Marie-Hélène Bertino
Abraham Lincoln said of his son, who died young, “He was too good for this earth.”
So it looks like it was Adina Tarbe Goodman. She survived a heart transplant, but died of cancer in 2018 at the age of 31 (her essay was published posthumously). Her accomplishments were recognized by Marie-Hélène Bertino at the conclusion of her astonishing third novel, Beautyland.
Bertino’s protagonist is also named Adina, which means “noble” or “delicate” depending on the source. “Beautyland” reminds us that before we went down the Internet rabbit hole to collect such information, we were fascinated by black holes. Never mind the flaws in our stars (although one of the characters gets cancer), this is a book that celebrates them.
The fictional Adina may be too good for this Earth, but more importantly, she’s not a good fit for Earth, and is somehow an endangered planet’s alien lifeform, a.k.a. It is said that he was put into her womb by her boss. They live here, but they are on the verge of extinction. In one of Bertino’s most clever conceits, Adina uses a fax to communicate with them from an early age. (What could be more useful for this antiquated but indestructible technology? The most fax-like thing about a fax is that it spits out a line of paper at the end indicating that the fax was not sent.) ?)
“Beautyland” begins in the late 1970s. At that time, the American space program had gone through high-profile stages such as Project Mercury and the moon landing, and was becoming a bit more ordinary. “Star Wars” was showing at a movie theater, and Johnny Carson was making fun of patron Carl Sagan. Adina faxes him as “a biased astronomer with a tacky turtleneck and blazer combination who was refused admission to Harvard University because he looked too Hollywood.” (“Yes, we know about him and his turtleneck,” his bosses replied wearily.)
Adina’s consciousness is expanding, but her orbit is narrowing. Although she lives as a human, she is a shellless mollusk and vulnerable, much like the ETs who are one of the cultural touchstones of this era. She grew up in a sinking house in Philadelphia’s Logan Triangle, thin, buck-toothed, nearsighted and sensitive to sound. Her single Sicilian mother drives her Volkswagen up the hill where she has to cook boiled chicken and say prayers.
“When deciding on formal food for a movie night.” Adina huffed towards her home office.Humans didn’t want something that didn’t make noises like figs or caramels, they wanted popcorn, which is the loudest thing on earth. ” This is the kind of humor that made Seinfeld millions, and Bertino also channels pathos.
Popular girls adopt Adina, but then avoid her. She gravitated to New York City, where one of her long letters was about the vagaries of side street alternate parking. When messages from her boss mysteriously start to slip away, the locals take a stand. “Trust this group,” the halal vendor told her. “Living in New York is like sitting at a blackjack table with 9 million people,” Adina writes in her notebook. We cooperate with dealers. ”
The story meticulously and lovingly traces her up-and-coming Sisyphean life, from the discovery of the interstellar asteroid ‘Oumuamua in 2017 to her first foray into Twitter. She has amassed 650,000 followers after writing her memoir about being an alien, the authenticity of which is hotly debated online. There are interesting gaps in the novel’s coverage of the universe. For example, Adina doesn’t focus on the Challenger or Columbia disasters. Perhaps because it was more realistic than a discovery mission? — and luckily it stopped right in front of Elon Musk and SpaceX.
Like the heroine’s name, there’s a reason Beautyland is titled “Beautyland,” and as author Amy Thorne pointed out, the book’s title says, It’s not just that ‘is a new ‘nation’.’ This is the name of the cosmetics store where Adina’s mother stocks up on her 8-ounce bottles of Jean-Her-Nate, just a little bit of glamor to spice up her job working in a disability facility. And this is where the arrival of John Frieda’s Friz Ease was announced as a big event around 1989. Perhaps we need aliens to remind us that so much of femininity is a disguise, an armor, a shell.
For Adina, the world is divided by gender, yes. When a group of more confident high-haired high school girls decide to eliminate you for laughing after your high school crush exposes his penis looking like an “angry mushroom” like. Instead of following his orders.
But otherness is a more central theme. Where humans zigzag, Adina zigs. She hates the Beatles and believes Yoko is a true artist. She cries as she watches the season finale aired on TV with a lobster trapped in an aquarium (“worst feeling”) or even vomit. She submits to her pianist boyfriend, who has synesthesia, because she suspects he too is from another planet.
There’s an indescribable sense of sadness and resignation to Beautyland, which refuses to give in to sentimentality, chance, or the idea that everything works out for a reason. This is his second novel I’ve reviewed in the last six months, and it quotes Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town.” The first novel, more obsessively, is Ann Patchett’s bestselling Tom Lake.
Adina is cast not as Emily, like Patchett’s heroine, but as the narrator, which feels very important. Being an alien here may just be a metaphor for the difficult blessing of feeling far enough from the pulse of life on Earth to report its events and tell its stories.
beauty land | Marie-Elene Bertino | Farrar, Strauss, Giroux | 336 pages | $28
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