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A Must Read: Nylon, The Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle, Chicago Review of Books, Literary Hub, The Millions, Kirkus Reviews, BookRiot
A wise, tender novel about a woman who doesn't feel at home on Earth, by the acclaimed author of Parakeet.

At the moment when Voyager 1 is launched into space carrying its famous golden record, a baby of unusual perception is born to a single mother in Philadelphia. Adina Giorno is tiny and jaundiced, but she reaches for warmth and light. As a child, she recognizes that she is different: She possesses knowledge of a faraway planet. The arrival of a fax machine enables her to contact her extraterrestrial relatives, beings who have sent her to report on the oddities of Earthlings.
For years, as she moves through the world and makes a life for herself among humans, she dispatches transmissions on the terrors and surprising joys of their existence. Then,...

Review

When the Voyager 1 spacecraft lifted off from Cape Canaveral in September 1977, it carried a golden record intended to explain humanity to whatever intelligence might one day intercept it. At the same hour, in a Philadelphia hospital, Adina Giorno was born premature, and Marie-Helene Bertino’s Beautyland begins precisely here, in the coincidence. Adina, we are told immediately, is no ordinary child but an emissary from Planet Cricket Rice, a world so distant its name is the sound of a cricket landing on a plate of rice, dispatched to Earth to observe and report on human beings via a salvaged fax machine. The twin missions—one public and technological, its golden record curated by Carl Sagan and his team to compress a planet into grooves, the other private and fleshly, played out in a row home across from Auto World—unspool in parallel across five decades, five sections named for stellar evolution, and a narrative voice of such exacting tenderness that it makes the ordinary radiant. But where Voyager’s record compressed human diversity into greetings and whale songs, Adina’s dispatches attempt something far more difficult: to capture the texture of a single life, the specific weight of love and grief, in language she knows, from the beginning, will never be adequate. The result is a novel of extraordinary formal intelligence and emotional force, a work that uses science fiction’s oldest trope not for the cheap thrill of estrangement but as a sustained, painful argument about whether belonging is possible for someone whose vocation is to watch.

Bertino’s central gambit is defamiliarization so thorough that the reader is forced to re-see what is most ordinary. Adina’s faxes treat human behavior as field data. Popcorn, she notes, became the official food of movie-watching despite being “the loudest sound on Earth.” Roller coasters are “a series of problems on a steel track” invented for fun. Hobbies, in one of the novel’s most devastating passages, are explained as a way for the mind to “say: Look over here. But it can’t stop the inevitable. Hobbies are a way of staying present so humans do not have to think about death. Yet the inevitable looms and grows.” This is Russian Formalist ostranenie by way of a Northeast Philadelphia starter home, and it works because Bertino marries the estranging eye to a social realism of such granular precision that the two modes become inseparable. The same voice that dryly catalogs Snoopy enthusiasts as evidence of the human compulsion to fill time also registers exactly what it costs Térèse Giorno, Adina’s single mother, to buy the eggplant-colored coat from the House of Bargains, or what it means when the beauty supply clerk at Beautyland—a neighborhood store whose name turns out to be the novel’s thesis in miniature—curtly redirects them to the cordoned-off perfume floor, a moment of class contempt so quiet and so violent it echoes across the rest of the book.

The novel’s five sections map a life onto the birth and collapse of a star, and the structure is not merely decorative. Each section tightens the tension between Adina’s observational mission and her growing, unwelcome entanglement with the humans she is supposed to be studying. “Stellar Nebula” gives us her childhood: the premature birth that nearly kills her mother, the gift of the salvaged fax machine that becomes her lifeline to her superiors, her friendship with Toni and Toni’s brother Dominic, and the first of many humiliations. The J girls—Janae, Jen, Jen, Joy, Jiselle—recruit her into their clique and then reject her after Adina is assaulted in a car by her crush Amadeo Calvi, a trauma the novel handles with the same flattening anthropological distance Adina brings to everything, which only makes it more brutal. Across the street, the Auto World Flying Man, an inflatable promotional figure, rises each evening and collapses each morning, a quotidian resurrection and crucifixion that becomes one of the novel’s recurring refrains. At night, Adina attends the Night Classroom, where a shimmering mentor named Solomon teaches her that extraterrestrials “are humans, visiting from the future. Us, later”—a panel depicting a big-headed future human—and that her planet is dying. Her mission is reconnaissance: is Earth a viable refuge?

“Massive Star (SCHOOL)” places Adina and Toni on scholarship at a suburban private high school, and here the class analysis sharpens. Adina’s sudden fluency in Italian, acquired through stones the Night Classroom gives her, is met with an accusation of cheating by Professoressa Gillespie, whose handbag reveals set the social order of the classroom. The unfairness is so predictable it barely registers as drama; what registers is Adina’s refusal to explain herself, her stubborn insistence on presenting only the surface. Her triumph comes as the Narrator in Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, a role she earns through obsessive preparation and an audition monologue from In the Name of the Father. The casting is a quiet masterstroke: the Narrator is a figure who stands outside the action and comments on it, who watches the dead and the living with equal detachment, and Adina’s inhabitation of the role is as close to self-revelation as she will ever come on a stage. But the sweet-sixteen season ends with Dakota, a rival, winning an acting scholarship by fraud—accepting it without having applied—and Adina’s devastation is rendered in an image of perfect compression: “Adina is a leaf falling from a high building.”

“Red Supergiant (WORK)” follows her through waitressing at the Red Lion Diner and a brief community college stint. Carl Sagan dies in 1996, and for Adina this is a paternal loss; Sagan has been, alongside her absent biological father and the planet Cricket Rice itself, one of her three fathers, the one whose Voyager mission made her own intelligible to her. The diner regulars—Lottie, who orders scrod “piping hot, dry as a bone” and dies of kidney failure—become the material of her ongoing reports. A crude remark from a man in her section, the death of Mrs. Leafhalter (the retired meter maid who taught her the soft cross, hard fold, and ankle cross), and a growing depressive force she will later call “the Something Else” push her toward a breaking point. When she finally tells her mother the truth about her mission, Térèse rejects it outright: “You came from me. I almost died. There was a light.” The competing origin stories are left unreconciled for the rest of the novel. Adina buys a Tercel and drives to New York.

“Supernova (NEW YORK CITY)” is the novel’s densest, richest section, and the one in which the faxes and the realist narrative achieve their fullest fusion. Adina works as a receptionist at Landry Business Solutions, where her boss Santino is a Snoopy enthusiast whose incompetence is fully exposed on 9/11. Bertino’s treatment of the attacks is characteristically oblique and devastating: “Even fear cannot halt New York City forever. ASP regulations return.” Alternate-side parking, the petty tyranny of street cleaning, becomes a synecdoche for the city’s refusal to stop being itself. Adina adopts a papillon named Butternut, dates a pianist named Miguel who has synesthesia and whom she briefly, desperately hopes is another “Other,” and reconnects with Toni, who has come out, become an editor, and begun transforming Adina’s fax transmissions into a manuscript. The book that emerges, Alien Opus, becomes a cult phenomenon, and Adina acquires six hundred fifty thousand Twitter followers, a development the novel treats with the same anthropological bemusement as everything else. Then Toni is diagnosed with late-stage breast cancer, and the novel’s emotional center gives way.

There is nothing a human can’t craft an opinion about.

The line is from a fax about Snoopy enthusiasts, but it radiates outward. Toni’s death is the loss that detonates the rest of the book. Adina witnesses it as a light spreading from Toni’s chest to fill the entire universe, and afterward nothing holds. Butternut dies suddenly under her desk while she sleeps. Miguel, who cannot believe in her alien identity and urges her to accept it as trauma, breaks with her. Her superiors fall silent. The “Something Else” intensifies, and Adina enters the year-long bed-ridden depression of “Black Hole,” seeking out movement teachers and life coaches, receiving a diagnosis of misophonia from a doctor who tells her she is having panic attacks, not cardiac problems, and finding no relief in any of it. Her rage at the platitude “You are not alone” becomes one of the book’s most articulate arguments: solitude is not a condition to be cured but the permanent fact of a consciousness housed in a single body, and denying it is its own form of cruelty.

The discovery of the interstellar object Oumuamua—the Hawaiian word for “messenger” or “scout”—convinces Adina that her planet has not merely gone silent but died, and that the object was a vessel sent to collect her. A final fax demands she summarize Earth in one word and prepare for deactivation. What follows is the novel’s most audacious and troubling sequence: a triumphant final reading at a packed synagogue, where she is greeted by warring signs—“I BELIEVE IN YOU” and “YOU ARE A FRAUD”—a single “THANK YOU” posted to her followers, and a journey to the Staten Island Ferry, where she will ride into the winter harbor and depart. The closing pages echo the novel’s opening and The Little Prince simultaneously: “It will look as if I’m dead, the Little Prince said to the pilot. But that won’t be true.” Adina imagines “the absolute corridor where death is merely a diminishment of a solo perspective,” a sensation “of one light joining many. A glittering, infinite expanse.” And with a final “In the beginning there is Adina and her Earth mother,” the circle closes.

The question the novel refuses to adjudicate is whether deactivation is transcendence or suicide, rescue or annihilation. Adina presents it as a homecoming, but she is a woman with a broken heart riding a ferry into an icy harbor because no one is actually coming for her. This undecidability is the novel’s greatest strength and its most significant liability. Bertino has structured Beautyland so that every element of Adina’s alien identity can be read literally or metaphorically: she is an extraterrestrial, or she is a traumatized, neurodivergent woman whose conviction of exile is a way of making sense of grief; the Night Classroom is a visitation, or it is a coping mechanism; the faxes are transmissions, or they are a private writing practice that happens to have found an audience. The novel scrupulously supplies evidence for both readings and never tips its hand. Miguel insists her story is trauma and her symptoms are panic. A teacher diagnoses her as autistic. Térèse counters the birth story with the obstetrical facts. And a character named CelestialJane, a figure from the novel’s online readership, offers the formulation that seems to be Bertino’s own position: Adina can be “100 percent mortal, 100 percent everlasting.” The novel wants to hold both truths in suspension, and for most of its length it succeeds brilliantly.

But the final section strains this suspension. The deactivation sequence asks the reader to invest emotionally in Adina’s departure as a genuine metaphysical event—the return of a soul to its people—while simultaneously maintaining the possibility that it is the rationalized suicide of a deeply depressed woman. A novel can, in principle, do both. In practice, the tonal demands of these two registers pull against each other. The “Welcome home” finale, with its images of light joining light, risks sentimentalizing what the rest of the book has insisted is irreducibly painful: that to be a person is to be alone in a body, that love does not undo this, and that the desire for collective, bodiless belonging is as dangerous as it is understandable. Planet Cricket Rice, described as “a polyphonic collective of billions of evolved souls that has lost its body and now communicates through intuition,” is a utopian vision that the novel’s own realist commitments have spent three hundred pages complicating. The aspen colony Pando, a genetically identical organism in Utah that Adina recognizes as a metaphor for her people, is offered as an image of the singular plural, but the novel’s deepest sympathies have always been with the individual body—with Adina’s cherished “only her in the room,” with the specific weight of Butternut’s small body under the desk, with Toni’s particular, irreplaceable voice. The collective sublime flattens what the novel has taught us to value.

This tension is not a failure of craft. It is an honest expression of an unresolved argument within the book, and the argument is worth having. Beautyland belongs to several intersecting traditions, and the way they tug against one another is part of its interest. It is a work of magical realism in the lineage Toni jokingly attributes to a “Gabriel García Márquez” father figure: the miraculous and the mundane are rendered in the same deadpan register, and a fax to outer space coexists seamlessly with alternate-side parking. It is also an existentialist novel, Camus-inflected, in which the human condition is exile and finitude, meaning is made rather than found, and hobbies are distractions from death. It is a feminist working-class novel in the tradition of American social realism, built from Jean Naté, control-top pantyhose in Misty Taupe, and the exact cost of humiliation at the swim club. And it is a Sagan-era secular-humanist cosmos-fable, in which the Voyager golden record and the SETI Institute provide the spiritual vocabulary that religion cannot. These traditions do not always harmonize, and the friction between them—between the realist’s commitment to the specific and the fabulist’s hunger for the universal, between existentialist acceptance of finitude and the Little Prince’s promise that “what is essential is invisible to the eye”—is the friction that gives the novel its heat.

The book’s formal achievements are substantial. The faxes, formatted as numbered dispatches and met with terse, often dismissive replies in capitals—“THESE OBSERVATIONS ARE UNSURPRISING AND MEDIOCRE. ARE YOU ILL?”—dramatize the loneliness of broadcasting into an indifferent void. The asymmetry between Adina’s careful observations and the curt responses from her superiors mirrors both prayer to a silent god and the human ache to be answered by the universe. Late in the novel, when the replies devolve into “WE ARE ATTEMPTING NOT TO DIE,” the dread is real and earned. The recurring motifs—the Auto World Flying Man who “reaches” each night and lies “dead on the grass” each morning, the refrain “I’ll figure it out,” the twinned opening and closing lines—enact the novel’s commitment to memory and loyalty. Adina prefers Columbo to Three’s Company, she explains, because Columbo “remembers” its past cases; the novel, by the same logic, insists on remembering its own, binding decades into a single consciousness so that the final echo hits with the force of a circuit completing.

Yet for all its formal control, Beautyland sometimes reads as though its emotional life is happening just offstage, reported rather than rendered. Adina’s observational stance, so fruitful for comedy and estrangement, can become a liability when the novel needs to access grief directly. Toni’s death is described more than inhabited; the image of light filling the universe is beautiful, but it is an image from Adina’s alien vocabulary, not from the language of human loss the novel has been carefully constructing. The confessional mode that breaks through in the final sections—“I quantum miss you. I miss you in the deeper level of reality where distance has no meaning”—is powerful precisely because it abandons the anthropological distance that has governed most of the book, but it arrives late, and the novel does not entirely trust it. Adina’s deepest loves and sadnesses, she tells us, “fell outside the realm of articulation and never reached the fax machine.” This is a devastating admission, and it is honest to the book’s thesis about the limits of language. But it also lets the novel off the hook. If the truest things are unsayable, what has the novel been doing for three hundred pages?

The strength of Beautyland is that it knows this is a problem and makes the problem its subject. Adina’s mission fails not because she is a bad observer but because the assignment is impossible. The word “human,” she realizes, means “flawed,” so a flawless report on humanity is a contradiction in terms. Language is a human invention; how could it capture what exceeds the human? The book’s final, one-word transmission to her dying planet is not revealed to the reader, and the withholding is correct. Any word she could send would be a betrayal of the complexity the novel has assembled. The love she feels for her mother, her dog, her dead friend, and the strangers she has watched for decades is real—the novel leaves no doubt about that—but it is real in the way that a life is real, which is to say it is recalcitrant to summary, irreducible to a transmission, and meaningful precisely because it ends.

There is a reason, Toni tells Adina early on, that the word is “alien-ated. Because I am an alien, I am alone.” The pun is too neat, and Adina knows it, but the book earns it across decades. Beautyland is most urgently a novel for anyone who has ever suspected that the deepest things they feel fall outside the reach of articulation, that belonging is a manufactured longing—something you are sold the feeling of—and that the people who love you most may never believe the one thing you know to be true about yourself. It is a book that earns its grief and earns its wonder, and if the final bet on the adequacy of love over language feels partly like hope and partly like wishful thinking, that ambivalence is itself the honest report of a lifelong observer who never quite learned how to simply be here. Bertino has written a rare thing: a comic, cosmic, deeply local novel that takes the problem of belonging so seriously it risks leaving its reader as lonely as its narrator. That it succeeds as often as it does is a testament to the precision of its voice, to the stubborn, improbable grace of its central faith, and to its willingness to let the questions it raises remain unanswered.

Notable Quotes

Sometimes people don't like when other people seem happy.

Adina's mother consoles her after a humiliating encounter with the clerk at Beautyland who shamed them for sampling perfume — class, cruelty, joy, motherhood

When it was time to decide the official food of movie-watching, human beings did not go for Fig Newtons or caramel, foods that are silent, but popcorn, the loudest sound on Earth.

One of Adina's faxed observations to her superiors about the absurdity of human customs — sound, human behavior, observation, humor

It is impossible to be unhappy on a swing.

Four-year-old Adina watches her father build a swing in the backyard, longing for the weightlessness it promises — childhood, joy, innocence

What is essential is invisible to the eye.

Adina faxes this quote from The Little Prince to her superiors after an overnight fluency in Italian transforms her understanding of the parable — perception, meaning, language

The human life span was perfectly designed to be brief but to at times feel endless. A set of years that pass in a minute, eternity in an afternoon.

Adina reflects on the nature of time near the novel's end, considering how brevity and eternity create the conditions for love and sorrow — time, mortality, love, human condition

There's a reason it's called alien-ated. Because I am an alien, I am alone. When you are alone, there is no one to tell: There is a bird whose call sounds like hoo-where-la-hoo!

Adina sits alone after dropping out of college and losing touch with Toni, meditating on the connection between her identity and her isolation — alienation, loneliness, language, identity

As long as there are budgets and finite human life spans, human opportunity is a pie. This is unlike a father or friend pie because you cannot control it and there are only a certain number of slices. Humans who insist opportunity is not a pie have usually enjoyed the majority of slices.

Adina reflects on Dakota winning the acting scholarship with a purchased essay, and the structures of privilege — class, inequality, opportunity, meritocracy

By far those who cause the most damage are humans who promise to be some kind of home and are not.

From Adina's final public reading, one of the climactic observations of her career as an alien reporter — belonging, betrayal, home, human nature

Dogs are the best we can do.

Adina faxes this to her superiors while lying on the couch with Butternut pressed against her, savoring his sleeping recalibrations — love, dogs, companionship, simplicity

Good theater is about what an actor doesn't do.

The Acting teacher's instruction during a lesson on Madeline Kahn in Young Frankenstein, which becomes a foundational principle for Adina — art, restraint, performance, observation

I was sent here to report on the human experience and have failed. I haven't used my life enough. Even the word itself, human, means flawed. It means everything is technically correct but some unanticipated trouble has fouled it up.

From Adina's final reading at the Brooklyn synagogue, reflecting on the impossibility of her mission — failure, humanity, imperfection, purpose

Death's biggest surprise is that it does not end the conversation.

A fax transmission Adina sends during the period of grief after losing Toni and Butternut — death, grief, memory, continuation

If he'll do that in public, what do you think he's like at home?

What Adina knows her mother would say about the father who forces his son to eat dirt-covered watermelon at the Wildwood boardwalk — violence, domesticity, mothers, perception

Human beings spend their lives pretending their parents are people with no needs. They do not want their moms to talk about sex or die.

Adina's faxed observation after learning about her mother's new boyfriend Charles — family, denial, mortality, parenthood

A hobby is a pleasant way to pass time and distract oneself. Stamp collecting, baking. A way for the mind to say: Look over here. But it can't stop the inevitable. Hobbies are a way of staying present so humans do not have to think about death.

Adina's transmission about the Snoopy enthusiast Santino, reaching for the deeper meaning beneath human pastimes — mortality, distraction, death, human behavior

Spend your first week on Earth under a lamp you go searching for heat the rest of your life.

Adina's mother explains her daughter's perpetual coldness as a consequence of the phototherapy lamp she was placed under as a jaundiced newborn — origins, longing, motherhood, warmth

You always think the best of people, Adina. Even terrible people.

Toni's remark at the Willows while eating egg rolls, after Adina charitably describes the dismissive department store clerk as 'lonely' — empathy, friendship, naivety, generosity

When someone dies, where does the way they eat egg rolls go?

Adina's transmission after Toni's death, mourning the irreplaceable specificity of her friend's rituals — grief, memory, individuality, loss

In the end, they break up for a common human reason: They don't believe in each other.

Adina reflects on her relationship with Miguel ending, recognizing the mutual failure of faith — love, belief, relationships, failure

Living in New York is like sitting at a nine-million-person blackjack table. We work together against the dealer.

Adina's written observation about the collective trust required to navigate New York City life — community, trust, city life, cooperation

Loneliness is a composite feeling: ironically unable to exist alone. It can contain anger, hunger, fear, jealousy.

Adina rethinks her lifetime of self-identified loneliness, realizing it was never a simple or singular emotion — loneliness, emotion, self-knowledge, complexity

Misogyny, like Roman Catholicism, is an institution built on faith. It has hierarchy, jokes, language, periodicals.

Opening line of Adina's extended analysis of the Beatles, Yoko Ono, and the institutions of cultural power — gender, patriarchy, institutions, culture

A body is a hard thing to have.

The closing line of Adina's final public reading, capping a lyrical catalogue of human pleasures — embodiment, vulnerability, mortality, beauty

It's amazing to know that you're never going to be totally okay ever again.

Dominic says this to Adina at Toni's funeral reception, handing her the box Toni left for her — grief, permanence, honesty, loss

Most families would hug now.

Adina says this to her mother after a rare moment of emotional honesty about the men in Adina's life, prompting them to attempt an awkward embrace — family, intimacy, vulnerability, growth