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One the irrepressibly inventive Jonathan Lethem could weld science fiction and the Western into a mesmerizing novel of exploration and otherness, sexual awakening and loss. At the age of 13 Pella Marsh loses her mother and her home on the scorched husk that is planet Earth. Her sorrowing family emigrates to the Planet of the Archbuilders, whose mysterious inhabitants have names like Lonely Dumptruck and Hiding Kneel--and a civilization that and frightens their human visitors. On this new world, spikily independent Pella becomes as uneasy envoy between two species. And at the same time is unwilling drawn to a violent loner who embodies all the paranoid machismo of the frontier ethic. Combining the tragic grandeur of John Ford's The Searchers and the sexual tension of Lolitanbsp;and transporting them to a planet light years, Girl in Landscapenbsp;is a tour de force.nbsp;… (more)
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There are slivers of truth and insight in this book that pierced my heart.
“You shouldn’t talk to
Thirteen year old Pella has to grow up far faster than she should, and realizes hard truths about her father and the world that is left to them. “Then Pella’s anger overtook her pity. Clement and Diana had betrayed her. It was Pella who was most alone in the end, knowing all she knew. She was in charge of Clement’s aloneness, but he’d abandoned Pella to hers.”
Clement, Pella’s father, is a shell of a man, once powerful, now abandoned by a world that has moved on and by the death of his wife. He is unable to adapt to his circumstances and vacates his position as the head of the household.
After the death of Caitlin, the Marsh family leaves post-apocalyptic Earth to a new planet, inhabited by The Archbuilders. Once the family arrives, this novel drifted for me – still showing moments of beauty and truth, but these are buried in the story like the ruins left by previous Archbuilders.
The wonder in this book comes through Pella’s eyes, through the clarity she finds about her father, even when consumed by grief.
“Clement’s election was something worse, a collective shame, the family entombed like mummies in a sarcophagus of denial, imagining the polls weren’t saying what they were, pretending not to overhear the phone calls, not to feel Clement’s radiant dread. Then a truly pathetic night spent milling in a shabby ballroom, eying monitors, enduring sympathies first masked then slowly unmasked, like a party with the guest of honor gradually dying . Caitlin got drunk at the end, and Clement, unforgivably, didn’t, instead, stood clear-eyed and patronizing with a hand in Caitlin’s hair as if to steady her, gazing self-pityingly off towards some imaginary frontier.”
That new frontier held some interest for me, but the real treasure of this book is in Pella’s mind and heart.
As is typical of many of his literary science fiction novels, Jonathan Lethem is most interested in
This novel quietly grew on me. As Pella becomes more integrated with the life of the Arch-builders' planet, she adapts herself to living there in a way that the adults in her community cannot. She and many of the other children become something new. Lethem depicts this transformation slowly, gradually and subtly. At the same time, he unravels a sinister plot of conflict between Nugent, his fellow colonists and the Arch-builders that shares tropes with an old-fashioned Western. There is a lot going on under the surface of this novel, and I think it would benefit from rereading. Like pretty much any other Lethem novel I have read, it takes the genres we are all so familiar with, and contorts them in exciting new ways.
Read because I like the author (2013).
It should not be overlooked that it is a wonderful coming-of-age story (or bildungsromane to quote the German literary term). Pella Marsh is a young woman forced to grow up far too quickly and reading her story is like being in her head feeling all those raw hormone-infused teenage emotions. Lethem does a wonderful job writing from a young girl’s perspective. Pella is believable if sometimes unpredictable. There is a wonderful trope of shifting and metamorphosis, becoming something a bit alien after moving to an alien planet. This fits in well as a metaphor of a child becoming an adult in the jarring manner Pella endures.
The Marsh children’s mother dies suddenly early in the book as a result of a fast metastasizing brain tumor. This could have easily tanked into V. C. Andrews level sentimentality if it not where for Lethem’s own life experiences. His own mother died in the same manner when he was about Pella’s age so this theme arises frequently in his fiction as it did in almost exactly the same manner in The Fortress of Solitude. His personal experience of this pain lends a certain weight of gravitas to Pella’s story.
What struck me most singularly however was Lethem’s near perfect treatment of the group psychology of children and adolescents. The young characters in this book behave so realistically, you may find yourself flashing back to long hot afternoons on the playground. I would recommend reading and discussion of this book to child psychology students, despite its Science Fiction trappings.
The planet is populated by small groups of human settlers, and one human city, as well as by its original occupants the Arch-Builders and the
The humans take pills to ward off a change related to the Arch-Builders that comes on with puberty, but Pella's father doesn't want his children to take the medication, curious to see what will happen.
Thinking that perhaps his political experience will be useful, Pella's father settles the family into a small outpost community where, despite seeming friendliness, suspicion is more the norm. Pella soon begins to experience some unusual symptoms, and is disturbed by the leading questions and knowing looks from one of the less than pleasant men in the community.
Misunderstandings between species are inevitable, and Lethem's tale of human interaction with each other and with an alien culture is ultimately unsurprisingly dark.
Girl in Landscape sounds like it’s going to be a big sci-fi story, but it takes place almost entirely in a tiny human settlement with a population of about a dozen people, with half a dozen Archbuilders passing in and out – friendly creatures described as a mix of fronds, scales and tentacles, with a love of the human language that conveniently lets Lethem write some irritatingly quirky dialogue. (“I’m in a state of anticipation, anticipating statehood,” one says.) Similarly, the planet itself is a mostly featureless landscape, dotted with edible potato-like plants guaranteeing an endless supply of flavourless food. Ancient alien ruins are mentioned in passing, but add little life or colour to proceedings. The story spools out lifelessly, awkwardly detailing friction between Pella’s father and the local big man, ending in an unlikely confrontation between characters I didn’t much care about.
I’m buggered if I can figure out what this book is supposed to be about. I suspect it’s some kind of complex allegory, but the narrative was nowhere near interesting enough for me to care what that was. Some of the characters are drawn well – Pella’s father, viewed entirely through her own resentment at his former political career, is interesting – but they sit aimlessly about in the alien landscape with very little to do. The novel is also in some ways meant to be a Western, I suppose, but I’m not exactly sure what Lethem was trying to accomplish in that sense.
This is probably the weakest of Lethem’s novels so far. Fortunately, the next up is Motherless Brooklyn, which was his breakout novel, and I expect it to be quite a bit better.
I finished the novel later and it contains the germs of something interesting. Otherwise this is a tale of trans-planetary Western with native inhabitant Archbuilders being substituted for Native Americans. Archbuilders are the remainders of a great civilization who now profess an interest in English and flit about like Shakespeare's Fools, eating each scene with one-liners while the sexual antics of human children "threaten" to unravel the colony. Jesus.