‘BEAUTYLAND’
By Marie-Helene Bertino; Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 336 pages, $28.
The story closely and lovingly follows her Sisyphean life of promise — she is “gifted,” at both acting and writing, but quickly learns Earth is not a meritocracy — through to the 2017 discovery of the interstellar asteroid Oumuamua and her first foray onto Twitter, where she attracts 650,000 followers after writing a memoir about being an alien, but the veracity of which is hotly debated online. There are interesting gaps in the novel’s cosmic coverage — Adina doesn’t take notice of the Challenger or Columbia disasters, for example; maybe because they were more pragmatic than discovery missions? — and stops blessedly short of Elon Musk and SpaceX.
Like its heroine’s name, “Beautyland” is titled “Beautyland” for a reason, and it’s not just because, as writer Amy Sohn has noted, “‘Land’ is the new ‘Nation’ ” in book titles. It’s the name of the cosmetics supply store where Adina’s mother stocks up on eightounce bottles of Jean Naté, a dash of glamour to sweeten her job working at a facility for the disabled; and where the arrival of John Frieda’s Frizz-Ease, circa 1989, is announced as a major event. It takes an alien, perhaps, to remind us how much of femininity is a disguise, armor — shell.
For Adina the world is divided by gender, yes — as when that clique of more confidently coifed high school girls decides to exclude you for the sin of laughing after your high school crush reveals his penis, which looks like an “angry mushroom,” rather than doing his bidding.
But otherness is a more central theme. Where humans zag, Adina zigs: hating the Beatles, believing Yoko the true artist. Bound lobsters in tanks and season finales on TV make her cry (“the worst feeling”) or even vomit. She submits to a boyfriend, a pianist with synesthesia, only because she suspects he too is from another planet.
An ineffable sadness and sense of resignation hang over “Beautyland,” which refuses to give in to sentimentality or serendipity or the idea of everything working out for a reason. It’s the second novel in mere months that invokes Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town,” the first being Ann Patchett’s “Tom Lake.”
Adina is cast not as Emily, like Patchett’s heroine, but as the narrator, which feels deeply significant. Being an alien here might just be a metaphor for the difficult blessing of feeling enough apart from the thrum of life on Earth to report on its goings-on: to tell a story.