Stranger In A Strange Land: Bertino’s Novel ‘Beautyland’
An alien’s profound, oddball way of looking at life on Earth gives this newly released novel some rocket power
There’s no shortage of alien characters in popular sci-fi storytelling. But Marie-Helene Bertino puts an original spin on the concept in Beautyland, a recently released book that combines quirky humor with heart-aching poignancy.
The protagonist, Adina, believes that she is an extraterrestrial from a planet 300,000 light years away. She was dropped into Philadelphia in the late 1970s, apparently the natural born offspring of a loser dad and an Italian American mother who’s hard pressed to make ends meet.
The story’s momentum is partially derived from two questions that are likely to arise in most readers’ minds: Is Adina really an alien or simply a wee bit touched? And will she ever tell the people around her what she believes herself to be?
From the time she’s quite young, Adina is sucked into dream-like sessions deep in the night with fellow aliens, her superiors. They explain that she has a mission to understand life on Earth, because their home planet is in danger, and they’re trying to find out if they can survive on the third rock from the sun.
PROFOUND, ODDBALL THINKING
That premise is enough to give a book some rocket fuel. But there’s another aspect to Beautyland that held me in its charming grip: how Adina sees commonplace human situations in peculiar and sometimes profound ways.
“Human beings … produce water in their eyes when they are sad, happy, or sometimes just frustrated. Water!” Adina writes in one of the many reports that she sends to her alien superiors on Planet CricketRice, as she comes to call her place of origin.
Adina communicates back-and-forth with them via a fax machine that her mother rescued from the trash. While Adina keeps her alien status and all the transmissions a secret from her mother and her friends, eventually her unique way of looking at the world spills out in observations meant for humans.
The editor of the school newspaper discovers this when Adina reports on a lacrosse game. Rather than typical sports-news highlights, Adina writes: “The girls pretend not to notice the other team when they take to the field but it’s clear they are awash with jealousy … The late season sunlight makes the grass glow like milk.” At first, the editor is frustrated, but then he comes to realize how much his readers enjoy reading her weird stories.
At its foundation, Beautyland is a universal story — about how an oddball navigates through a world where it’s so easy to be marginalized or misunderstood if you aren’t part of the mainstream. And this is echoed in the people that become her closest friends, who are outliers in more normally understood ways.
There’s a deep longing and hope in Adina as she waits to find the community of aliens where she knows she belongs. That comes out through her fascination with the controversial astronomer Carl Sagan and his search for alien existence.
BERTINO’S BIG TASK
For Bertino, this was not a simple character, or book, to write. In an interview on Barnes & Noble’s PouredOver series, she explained that the novel was sprung from the hip of a short story that explored life from an alien’s perspective. In the process of turning the story concept into a full-blown book, she spent years jotting down observations about mundane situations that humans experience — imagining how they would be perceived by an alien.
While those observations are at times funny, endearing, and insightful throughout the book, they become more sophisticated and wise as Adina matures.
As a young adult, Adina writes: “When they are in pain, human beings sing ‘Amazing Grace.’ It has transcended religious, cultural, and racial context and is about the basest of human cultures, which is suffering. The more we live, the more we lose, the more we believe we are lost. The song says, if you remain elegant you will be found. It might take a while. You may have to chill in misery for longer than you feel is necessary … Grace is unmerited kindness. Unmerited because you are a wretch which is a synonym for human which is a synonym for flawed. Grace, a place to store loss.”
Thoughts like that echo the sadness that Adina comes to feel, not only because of her own personal challenges as a strange being in a strange land, but because of what other people experience — people whom she loves.
Like those of us who have reason to believe we are purely human, she carries currents of emotions that change and change again — but they are always grounded in a sense of waiting to belong. Because there is such vibrancy in how she looks at and moves through life — in spite of, and because of, her distant, lonely state — I’ll be thinking about Adina and Bertino’s admirable book for some time to come.
