Beautyland, by Marie-Helene Bertino
Mattia Ravasi
Fast-forward a few years, and two fateful incidents set Adina on the course of her life’s mission. First, a fax machine is recovered from the neighbors’ trash by her resourceful (and cash-strapped) mother and placed in Adina’s bedroom. Later, after her deadbeat dad pushes her and causes her to fall and hit her head, Adina is “activated”: that night, she visits a strange classroom in her sleep where mysterious entities inform her of her true nature.
For Adina is an alien: sent to Earth by her species to report on the planet’s living conditions, climate, and inhabitants, acting as their very own Voyager 1. Every night she visits this dreamlike classroom, where she is taught the history of her own people, while during the day she is expected to report on her experiences by faxing her findings home. “I am Adina,” goes her first fax; “yesterday I saw bunnies on the grass.”
Her home planet responds: “DESCRIBE BUNNIES.”
Beautyland’s premise, and especially its fax-machine shtick, might make it sound like a work of satirical science fiction, something in the vein of Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Yet Bertino’s novel is much more subtle and peculiar. Adina’s identity as undercover alien works as a beautiful defamiliarizing device, allowing her to comment in irreverent and witty terms on many of the habits us humans take for granted. And these passages are funny – very much so:
When Jen, Jen, Janae, Joy, and Jiselle love something they say it needs to stop. That skirt needs to stop with those sequins. That piece of pizza needs to stop with that crust. Some things they hate also need to stop. She needs to stop with that fugly bracelet. The listener detects from context clues as to which usage is at play. This nuance of grade-school linguistics is challenging to articulate, though Adina tries in several faxes until her superiors reply: STOP
And yet much of the novel’s charm comes from the fact that it is never quite clear how much of Adina’s estrangement from her peers is the result of her alien origins, and how much is due to peculiarities that are, ultimately, still very human. Her difficulties with relationships later in life, for instance, are not helped by her efforts to keep her real identity secret, but they might also be the result of her own process of coming to terms with her asexuality. Adina’s best friends, siblings Toni and Dominic, both queer, appear at times just as foreign and misplaced as she is in their middle-American milieu. It is only the most harshly human among the characters – the high school divas, the abusive jocks, the obnoxious siblings who like to throw rocks at birds – who have no trouble fitting in.
Beautyland is one of those peculiar novels that exist on the borderlands between genres – and, by virtue of this ambiguity, somehow allow their authors to have their cake and eat it. It can be read quite naturally as a realist story about the limitations of a poor childhood, and about the fraught relationship between an introverted child and a strong-willed, hot-headed single mom. A testimony of a life where trips to malls are big treats; where flaunting one’s femininity is a must for a young woman. At the same time, the novel’s alien plot is much more than a gimmicky device or quirky note, and forms a crucial part of Adina’s makeup as a character.
Adina’s nightly lessons from her faraway “superiors” raise some very interesting questions about the nature of identity – her alien relatives don’t seem to have any – and the meaning of life: what will happen to Adina once her mission is over, and she has collected all the information her distant family needs? Will she still be Adina once she is returned to her home planet? Even more worrying, what will happen if the mission fails – if the problems that are plaguing her home world and caused her people to search for a new one finally overwhelm them?
The whole of Beautyland is dominated by this strange tension: between its alien and everyday plots, one extraordinary, the other humdrum, but both equally and strangely engrossing. It’s a tension heightened by Adina’s determination to keep her identity secret, and by the fact that, when she uses her gifts to her advantage (getting her alien relatives, of all things, to help her with her Italian lessons) the results are quick to backfire.
Beautyland follows the course of Adina’s life chronologically, and is very much a novel of two halves. The first half of the book presents the compelling, clear trajectory of Adina’s childhood. The second half, covering her adulthood, feels much more aimless and thankless – just as does adulthood itself. The questions Adina is faced with here are more open; her challenges lack a clear solution. Should she keep guarding her secret, or share it with the world? Should she change herself to fit other people’s needs? And is it worth living in New York in spite of its crazy parking rules? Leaving Philadelphia for the big city complicates not just her relationship with her Earthly mother: soon her alien home starts becoming unresponsive, and threatens to disappear altogether from her life.
Beautyland feels at once mundane and epic; a grand testament to the absurdity and mystery of everyday life. Even in the thick of its alien concerns, its plot is marked by a degree of clear-eyed honesty and truthfulness that can be hard to find even in the most realistic of “literary” fiction. Dreams often don’t come true; beautiful relationships sometimes wither; friends and pets pass away; people misunderstand our best intentions, and turn against us.
The novel title seems to encapsulate its enigma. As a report about life on Earth, Beautyland suggests a sense of fascination and awe for all the treasures the place has to offer. But “Beautyland” is actually the name of a rather un-beautiful place: a drab suburban mall selling discounted beauty products, where the staff are snooty and rude to Adina and her mom.
It’s unsurprising that this quietly charming novel is so obsessed with its leitmotiv of star and space exploration. Throughout its various narrative strands, Beautyland is ultimately a novel about humanity’s relationship with the vast, the awe-inspiring, and the extraordinary: about how we can embrace it and find in it great meaning, and how we can sometimes also come to fear and despise it, gripped as we are by the distractions of our earthly concerns. It’s a novel about the loneliness of a peculiarly crowded cosmos. A fantastic book about different ways of being alien.
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