Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino

Beautyland

By Marie-Helene Bertino

Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2024

When Adina, the main character in Marie-Helene Bertino’s new novel Beautyland, first meets her best friend Toni in fourth grade in suburban Philadelphia, they joke about being from alien planets. But Adina means it; she was born when Voyager 1 blasted into space, and even at her young age, she believes she’s regularly communicating with extraterrestrial beings via a clacking old fax machine. 

These aliens, through a spokesbeing named Solomon, have tasked Adina with the ongoing mission of observing ordinary human life on Earth, she believes. “They remind her: She is not meant to have a regular childhood or adulthood,” readers are told. “She must do her job – collect data and have experiences and report back and leave when they say.”

It keeps her at mental arm’s length from her caring single mother, from her friends and classmates, and from any deep sense of belonging, although she overcomes this inner awkwardness to form the occasional deep relationship – with Toni, for instance, and with her little dog Butternut. But there’s an awkwardness at the heart of the character that Bertino uses with equal skill for deadpan humor and at times heartbreaking pathos. 

Adina is always yearning. She respects her mission, but she yearns for connection, both with her enigmatic alien taskmasters and with the inhabitants of this world she doesn’t believe is her own. Naturally, her attention – and a regular reflex of the narrative – is drawn to extraterrestrial phenomena and their worldly champions. Given the centrality of Voyager 1, Carl Sagan crops up, featuring both in Adina’s dispatches to Solomon & Co. and in their sometimes po-faced responses. She sends:

Carl Sagan is a polarizing astronomer who wears natty turtleneck-blazer combos and has been denied Harvard tenure for being too ‘Hollywood.’ He says human civilization is so far behind that if extraterrestrials were to make contact, they’d have to speak slowly. Is that why you sent a fax machine? … He says Voyager 1 launched a cosmic message in a bottle into the universe. He is looking for us!

Then touchingly adds: He believes in me. 

To which she gets the peremptory response: YES WE KNOW ABOUT HIM AND HIS TURTLENECKS.

Eventually, Adina moves to New York City and writes a book, Alien Opus; A Memoir in Stories, going public with her identity and relating her experiences. The book causes a sensation; arguments flair, critics and talk shows discuss the finer points, popular magazines and online forums buzz with theories and counter-theories. 

The more she’s enveloped by ordinary life, the more distant and uncommunicative her alien superiors become. Almost against her will, almost while she’s not paying attention, Adina becomes human whether she understands it or not, and Bertino’s strange, memorable narrative becomes increasingly moving. 

By the time the human experience of grief reaches her, readers have been so caught up in her watery strangeness that these scenes hit like a freight train, combining sharp insight with Bertino’s unblinkingly observant prose. “Perhaps, finally,” Adina hopes at one point, “grief has released its grip” – followed by a long list of particulars everyone who’s ever been through it will instantly recognize:

As long as no one charms the waiter. As long as no one corrects anyone else’s use of lie and lay. As long as no one listens to her story wearing an expression of bemusement and concern, waiting until she’s finished to say, There’s a lot of answer in those questions. As long as snow doesn’t fall from the gutter to the ground. As long as nothing shines. As long as there are no dinners of fried chicken and honey. As long as no one asks the waiter, If this isn’t the most popular pizza, what is? As long as the elevator remains silent between floors. And no one prefers a rainy day to a sunny. Or dances in place while waiting for the train, Or says no without looking up … as long as non one plays ‘90s hip-hop. As long as there is no music at all. 

Beautyland offers no easy conclusions, either to Adina’s story or humanity’s, but it works with increasing strength as a portrait of the weirdly widespread alienation of the 21st century. Perhaps it’s fitting that Adina herself never quite coalesces as a character, despite how badly she wants to.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News