Sometimes, a girlfriend needs space. Sometimes, she goes to space. That’s the — OK, obvious — premise of Girlfriend on Mars, a novel by the Canadian writer Deborah Willis, who knows what we’ve wished for from books all along, which is that they were TV instead. Just kidding! But Willis does know how to tell a story with the grip of a good drama series ... While the setup could have made for a breezy read, Willis cuts deep with insight that orbits the age-old, just-took-a-bong-hit question: What does it mean to be real? ... it’s our reality that Willis is playing with, and she has fun with it, especially our life on the internet, another unreal place we’ve come to accept as all too real ... Every detail is sharply placed by Willis, who has a scorching sense of humor and a soft spot for humanity down here on Earth.
...veers giddily on the brink between satire and tragedy, transporting us to places we never dreamed we’d go ... However fantastic, nutty and corrupt this all sounds, we are reminded that Musk and his fellow billionaires are already deep into space travel. And that reality, together with Willis’ witty writing, entangles us in the quagmire of comedy, love and fear portrayed in these pages. Sometimes it seems as if this Vancouver couple might represent one whole — albeit flawed — being, with Kevin representing feeling, and Amber, blind ambition, and the universal urge to flee town, or in this case, the planet, while earthly love takes a back seat.
Both satirical and sobering, Willis’ gimlet-eyed debut spares no one, skewering both apathy and misplaced ambition while keeping the pages turning at a furious pace.
Part disaffected-slacker rom-com, part social satire, part wistful end-of-the-world eulogy for ordinary, unscripted love, this novel veers close to the kind of wearying cynicism and late-stage capitalist master-villainy that would make its conceit feel familiar. Yet again and again the novel saves itself from this fate by the very real hope at the heart of its main characters’ binary orbit around each other—that love may be enough after all; if not to save them, then at least to make sure they will not be forgotten. Winsome, sweet, and apocalyptic—a perfect blend for the end of days.
Willis keeps up a light tone and a fast pace even while getting deep into the science behind the Mars voyage, and her satire yields plenty of clever insights on celebrity culture. Readers are in for a treat.
