The Brooklyn Rail

Adina is from Philadelphia, but she is also from someplace else, some planet tucked away in the ethers of our ever-expanding universe. She is both rooted in urban gardens and bargain department stores and ever-worming inflatable men, and beckoned by the stars, by ineffable societies of collective souls, by planets in peril. In Marie-Helene Bertino’s Beautyland, we are invited to reckon with a protagonist who claims to be an alien among us. While this seems a proposition that promises the speculative, Bertino prefers to ground the reader in the minutia of the human experience, allowing for a deeper excavation of the strange and wonderful and heart-wrenching realities of what it means to be alive down here on Earth.

Born the day Voyager 1 launches into space¹, Adina begins life under seemingly unremarkable circumstances: another Italian-American baby in a Northeastern city, born to young parents with vague hopes of something more. Except every moment is remarkable in the Bertino-Adina universe. Adina’s birth almost costs her mother her life, immediately setting the stakes for existence itself, how it so often comes at the mercy of another, and how quickly we forget; if the mother lived, why must we carry the burden of remembering she almost died? The focus of Adina’s life swiftly shifts to unfinished swings and a father who tried too little and left too soon. Her father’s absence (another pain so universal we needn’t linger on it) is quickly eclipsed by a more pressing revelation: Adina is an alien, sent from her true home planet to report on life on Earth. This is made clear to her through a lucid dream and a fax machine pulled from the trash.

What follows is a series of call-and-responses between Adina and her “superiors” as the years of her youth unfurl.

Yesterday I saw bunnies on the grass.
DESCRIBE BUNNIES…
Human beings don’t like when other humans seem happy.
WE ARE SORRY…
Carl Sagan is a polarizing astronomer who wears natty turtleneck-blazer combos and has been denied Harvard tenure for being too “Hollywood”...
YES WE KNOW ABOUT HIM AND HIS TURTLENECKS.

In one way, with Beautyland Bertino accomplishes what certain acclaimed novels bewilder us with: the ability to encapsulate an entire life within a few hundred pages. Works like A Little Life and Their Eyes Were Watching God come to mind, where we can map a life from adolescence into adulthood and leave with what feels like a birds-eye view of human complication. Is this what it feels to play God? To watch a life untangle from above, to witness the profound in the mundane?

But Beautyland’s greater triumph is capturing how time passes. Adina’s detailed observations of the world narrow in on our ironies², our insecurities³, our casually feral nature⁴, serving as flashpoints of what molds us as people, what propels us forward. A mother’s unwavering fragrance, a revolving door of tasteless chicken dinners, an unsettling sexual encounter, a friendship forged and then challenged: these experiences imprint on Adina, who is in a constant battle between feeling their emotional weight and compartmentalizing them as part of her extraterrestrial mission. Through these scenes—some flashes, some protracted—Bertino illustrates our aging agelessness, how we carry the unabating awareness and otherness of six-year-old Adina into our sense of her as a woman in her twenties, thirties, forties. Adina gets at this in a fax to her superiors, attempting to convey the way time passes in a human life: We’re all seven-year-olds hired to play the parts of adults. The pacing of Beautyland, which disregards a prescribed balance of how long we need to linger in any given moment of Adina’s life, replicates something close to a transcribed consciousness.

This warping of structure seems fitting within the Bertino canon, whose previous novel, Parakeet, played with surrealist modes to explore the trepidations of a woman on her wedding day. Beautyland finds itself in more speculative territory, though this designation exists more as a background hum then a driving force. The moments that concede to Adina’s understanding of her own identity—ongoing dreams in which her consciousness is transported to alien training sessions, her superiors’ regular responses to her reports—are decisive enough to support her claim, and fragile enough should Adina-world or our-world skeptics wish to pick it apart. In Beautyland, that which is wonky and uncanny reveals itself in the familiar details of everyday life, as Adina finds herself processing pre-teen rejection while traversing the beach in an oversize plastic ball, or later keeping her dead dog in the freezer in the throes of grief. Bertino’s use of the present-third person implicates the reader into a voyeurism loop: while Adina is watching us, we are observing Adina. This is where the sorcery lives, as Adina reveals the eccentricities of human nature, and we watch Adina reluctantly succumb to their emotional weight. When Bertino writes of magic, of science fiction, of the surreal, she is writing of reality.

Beautyland is about many things: about single mothers and chosen family and the power of observation and what it means to be from somewhere. But it is most discerningly about feeling outside of things. Adina is cerebral, is introverted, is exhausted, is sad. And maybe this is grief, maybe Something Else (as she puts it), maybe something haunting and sinking and sticky. But more probably, this is depression, a bodily invasion that plagues so many. The Something Else, which renders Adina’s body a “lumbering, boxy suit several sizes big” persists through moments of success and loss. This is an experience distinctly human, Adina notes, so tied to our corporeal form that Bertino seems to be reminding us that to be human is not just a marketplace of interaction, but a battle with internal turmoil.

But Beautyland is also about what makes life worth living: bagels and a community garden that takes over a city block, and communion with animals and with each other. It’s about good TV and bad TV and getting a response, and how all of this lives in our bodies and comes and goes too quickly.

Adina is tasked with reporting on human life. When the task feels purposeful and when the task feels meaningless and even when Adina wants to bail on planet Earth, Adina carries on. In this way, she finds herself entrenched in a prevailing truth of existence (human or otherwise): the only way out is through. What is this life that we are living down here? Who is it for? In Beautyland, perhaps it is for one another.

1. Carrying clues to human life etched on a record.
2. Human beings use makeup to feel great about themselves.
3. I require speech lessons and corrective lenses and most likely teeth braces. I am an expensive extraterrestrial.
   DESIGNED TO APPEAR NORMAL
   What’s normal?
   YOU TELL US
4. Human beings show their teeth when they are happy, in pain, repulsed, disappointed, surprised. Animals in the wild show other animals their teeth (canines) when they want to appear menacing.