...astonishing ... Never mind the fault in our stars...this is a book that exults in them ... 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 I’ve reviewed in six months that invokes Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, the first being, more obsessively, Ann Patchett’s best-selling 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.
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 ... 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 ... 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.
One of the most memorable characters in recent American literature, and Bertino’s novel is a stunning look at her life ... The premise of Beautyland might seem high-concept and possibly twee at first, but the novel is anything but ... A monumental accomplishment, a shimmering masterpiece from an author with talent to spare. It’s also a novel that offers, but doesn’t insist upon, hope and freedom from isolation.
Is Adina really an alien? Or is she just lonely, confused, profoundly hurt? The joy of Beautyland lies partly in the way it rejects the simplicity of this false binary. Like Bertino’s fantastic previous novel, Parakeet (2020), this book is interested in the charged terrain of uncertainty and the tender ideas that emerge when we poke at the unknown ... From this gorgeous data of existence, Bertino taps into a particular nostalgic awe familiar to a generation of kids raised on Carl Sagan and inflatable lunchroom planetariums ... Beautyland portrays that 1980s astronomical wonder with loving skepticism, one eye on the splendor of whatever lies beyond, another on the mess of the planet we inhabit, or, more accurately, the mess we’ve made of it. Adina longs for release from her sojourn into humanity, but while she waits, she accidentally lives a meaningful life on Earth. She continues to hope for something beyond humanity, something better, and what could be more human than that?
There is a certain kind of fiction that, in its pitch-perfect encapsulation of reality, functions to help us mourn the distance between the world we want and the world as it is. These are the stories and novels of Marie-Helene Bertino ... Longtime Bertino fans may find that Beautyland is darker in tone than the earlier works. Bertino has never shied away from depicting the harsh realities of life in America — systemic inequities based on race, gender, and class, random acts of violence, the way the constant churn of capitalism leaves no time for grief — but she usually counters these with enough humor and whimsy to tip the scales toward joy. Beautyland begins in that vein, but it’s frontloaded; as Adina grows up, her outlook dims, and she lingers longer in depression and despair. These, Bertino seems to say, no one on Earth can escape, not even an extraterrestrial ... But Adina keeps trying to communicate. Her project — to write about what it means to be human — is also Bertino’s project, and in Beautyland she has done so masterfully.
...a wonderfully quirky, funny, bittersweet novel ... Bertino nails the sensation of oppressive loneliness that a city of nine million people can exude ... True, Beautyland is sometimes a sad novel, threaded with Adina’s longing to find a home, to not be viewed as an outsider looking in. But it’s also a very funny and empathetic book that unravels the contradictions, complexities, and weirdness of this thing we call life.
One of the (many) delights here is how the author captures the world through a child’s eyes. We forget how confusing the unexplained and contradictory world of adults is to kids; they truly are little aliens thrust into this realm, needing to puzzle so much out on their own ... Admirers of Bertino’s work often remark on the wondrousness of her writing from the sentence level up. Her descriptions render the world in new and unexpected ways and yet remain wholly organic to the story. A reader trying to pick a favorite passage ends up highlighting everything. And while, in Parakeet, her observational wit was mordant and desert-dry, it is tender and open here without being naïve or falling into treacle. I read the author’s three novels in quick succession and plan to circle back to her award-winning debut story collection, Safe as Houses. After that, like her other fans, I’ll eagerly await whatever Bertino writes next.
As she did in the expertly imagination-bending Parakeet (2020), and with so much humor and heart, Bertino balances fantasy and hyperrealism, metaphor and fact. For whom is the act of belonging not, to some degree, an exhausting, lifelong quest? It’s like fiction was invented for Adina and her tale, which unspools so assuredly readers might mistake it for their own.
The more she’s enveloped by ordinary life, the more distant and uncommunicative her alien superiors become. Almost against her will, almost while she’s not paying attention, Adina becomes human whether she understands it or not, and Bertino’s strange, memorable narrative becomes increasingly moving. By the time the human experience of grief reaches her, readers have been so caught up in her watery strangeness that these scenes hit like a freight train, combining sharp insight with Bertino’s unblinkingly observant prose ... Beautyland offers no easy conclusions, either to Adina’s story or humanity’s, but it works with increasing strength as a portrait of the weirdly widespread alienation of the 21st century. Perhaps it’s fitting that Adina herself never quite coalesces as a character, despite how badly she wants to.
A compelling, touching story that weds Bertino’s masterful eye for the poignant detail of the everyday with her equally virtuosic flair as a teller of the tallest kinds of tales—so tall, in this case, they are interplanetary. A heartbreaking book that staggers with both truth and beauty.
The triumphant latest from Bertino offers a wryly comic critique of social conventions from the perspective of a woman who also happens to be an alien from another planet ... Bertino nimbly portrays her protagonist’s alienhood as both metaphor and reality. The results are divine.
