Beautyland

“Adina is a student and her mother is her major concentration.”

Adina’s inquisitiveness is both a character trait and, within the speculative premise, part of the mission given to her by her superiors. The image of Adina as a student studying her mother captures her learning abilities but also reflects a child’s dependence on the mother in the early stages of development. The human lifecycle, interrogated through the ironic premise of Adina being an alien, is a major focus of the book.

“She does not want to inhabit a body with other souls, crowded and intimate, like an internal city. She likes her body’s solitude and privacy. Her belly button. Her glasses placed over her one set of eyes.”

The premise that the people from Adina’s planet are one interconnected being provides a sharp contrast to the isolation and lack of connection Adina often finds on Earth. Her longing to connect with others or a group will provide constant conflict and dissonance with her preference for isolation and individuality.

“This nuance of grade-school linguistics is challenging to articulate, though Adina tries in several faxes until her superiors reply: stop.”

Adina uses her faxes to what she calls her superiors to reflect on the human culture around her, from which she often feels apart. The replies she gets are sometimes curious, amused, or repressive, creating a mystery of who might be on the other end of the fax. Several times these replies add a note of irony or humor to the novel when it’s clear that the recipients of the faxes don’t appreciate Adina’s observations, such as in this case.

“Sometimes her mother acts like a single-sailed vessel on a giant sea. Adina anchors her fingertips on her mother’s arm. In this moment, listening to the singing, she is not her mother but Térèse Giorno who could have been another in a line of Italian chanteuses if she’d had a different life.”

Adina’s connection to her mother is one enduring relationship of her life, captured in this image of an anchor, and her mother’s independence and lack of sentiment are qualities Adina develops as an adult. This ability to see her mother as something more than a mother marks Adina’s emerging maturity as an adolescent, contributing to the structure of the novel, which documents Adina’s life on Earth from start to finish.

“A neon display in the front of Beautyland proclaims the historic news: John Frieda has mixed together isopropyl myristate, linalool, and Panax ginseng root extract to create a serum for curly-headed girls.”

Whereas the novel typically notes astronomical events as its milestones, it occasionally marks cultural developments or, as shown here, beauty advances. With a note of irony, these are portrayed with the same level of impact. Cosmetics provide a metaphor for how Adina wishes to conform with and be accepted by those around her. Beautyland, also the book’s title, draws attention to the mundane and vapid values that Adina observes, highlighting how The Need for a Sense of Purpose can be thwarted in a society that places such value on beauty.

“The final attitude. Adina thinks of the artist’s rendering of the Big Bang in her biology textbook. She is made of stardust.”

Adina’s inclusion in the dance troupe with the popular J-named girls is an exciting moment of connection for her, and she attaches huge emotional weight to the moves of the song as well as the shared performance. The analogy to the Big Bang, the explosion that begins the universe, conveys the significance of her inclusion as it (falsely) promises to satisfy The Desire for Belonging.

“Three hundred forty miles above their sorry melons, the new Hubble telescope clicks and cruises in orbit, five miles a minute, the weight of two elephants, noticing, noticing, the birth and death of stars. Its bus-size eye can even observe the death of Adina’s social life, an event that looks like a human girl walking ‘home.’”

The novel frequently uses cosmic imagery to reflect Adina’s life, beginning with the twined moments of Adina’s birth and Voyager launch. The Hubble telescope mirrors Adina’s presumed task of observing and reporting on human life, but the telescope also indicates how Adina is trying to get perspective on this painful emotional moment when she is kicked out of the dance troupe.

“In the book, a royal boy from a planet the size of a house travels the universe seeking assistance for his vulnerable rose.”

The Little Prince, published in French in 1943 by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, functions as both an allusion and a motif throughout Beautyland. Its narrative of a young boy encountering strange characters as he travels the universe on a mission to protect his cherished possession, a rose, parallels Adina’s sense of being on a mission to observe Earth.

“Adina resents this cursory, offhanded remark that dismisses the depth of pain she’s in. For the first time, Adina feels that no one on Earth or even beyond understands her.”

The replies from her superiors to Adina’s faxes fluctuate over the course of her life from encouraging to sympathetic to reproving. This passage captures a moment when Adina is 16 that highlights her sense of distance and alienation; it also reflects her development as a teenager, feeling as if no one understands her.

“Distance from humans equals safety, no matter how lonely, no matter how much Adina longs to connect. She must keep herself a secret.”

When Toni discovers her faxes to her superiors, Adina is confronted with an important character choice. Taking a lesson from depictions of human-alien interactions in popular films and novels, she decides not to confide in her friend. The feeling that she must hide herself contributes to the novel’s exploration of loneliness and alienation.

“There is a reason it’s called alien-ated. Because I am an alien, I am alone. […] When you’re alone, you are in the right place to watch sadness approach like storm clouds over an open field.”

Adina’s reflections on “alienated” pun on the word’s root sense of feeling alien, of not belonging, which is a major element of Adina’s life experiences. The simile of the storm cloud characterizes Adina’s sense that she does not have control over what happens to her but is at the mercy of external forces.

“She sits against her bed, cheeks covered with water. One of her fathers is gone. Carl Sagan never stopped searching for her. He will continue forever, into the past.”

How Adina refers to crying is one of her several expressions that indicates her feeling of distance from, or inability to comprehend, customary human emotions like sadness or grief: She describes it literally as water instead of tears. For Adina, Carl Sagan represents not only a mentor but a force on Earth who believes in her and validates her existence as an alien. She conflates Sagan’s influence with his work on the Voyager capsule, which the novel continues to track, in parallel to tracking Adina’s life.

“Adina knows what it’s like to be one consciousness in an intergalactic stew. She longs to hear him/them. […] She misses Solomon and her people, deeply rooted in each other, many sounds beating as one.”

The representation of Adina’s alien people as a combined, many-souled entity provides a poignant contrast to the alienation she feels in her Earth life. The aspen grove called Pando provides a metaphor for what Adina longs to be: a singular entity connected to many others. Her longing to hear him/them refers both to the sound of the leaves of the aspen grove in the wind and the voices of those whom she considers her own people, who no longer visit her in the night classroom once she graduates high school.

“She uses the word extraterrestrial hoping it will sound less scary to her mother and because she has never understood what she is allegedly alien to. […] At least extraterrestrial provides a frame of reference and a location for prejudice. Extra—in addition to. Terre—Earth.”

Adina’s confession to her mother, on the eve of moving to New York, is a turning point in her character arc. She is coming to terms with her sense of feeling different. Her choice of wording reinforces this conversation as a type of coming out, since she considers the prejudices and experiences of the older generation.

“Answering the question ‘Are we alone?’ is a top science priority. We’ve made a crucial step towards finding if life is out there.”

Adina’s life events are tied to reports of astronomical discoveries, and the star TRAPPIST-1, along with its planets, provides a metaphor for Adina’s hopes for new life when she moves to New York City. Human interest in extraterrestrial life is a metaphor for Adina’s hopes of understanding and feeling that she belongs among humans. It also raises an irony of the text: that both humans and aliens are attempting to find out about each other without communicating.

“It scares Adina that he is awake like she is.”

Miguel is the first person Adina meets whom she feels is like her in some respects, to the point where she wonders if he might be another from her planet. The description of this quality as being “awake” reinforces the text’s sense that those who are different are careful observers and narrators, alert to what is around them. He is her first and only attempt to have a relationship in conventional romantic terms—he is hence her attempt to enter into human experience and connection.

“Humans want to find aliens so they feel less alone. They don’t know there is nothing lonelier than an alien.”

Adina’s observation, a fax to her superiors, contemplates the philosophical paradox that humans long for knowledge of extraterrestrial life so they feel less alone in the universe, while at the same time, one can feel alone among one’s own population. The philosophical question of what enriches and gives meaning to life drives the novel.

“The girl who took Adina’s scholarship did not even use it. It’s not an of-course-she-is situation but adds up in human math, where people like Dakota take because they can.”

The girl who won the scholarship to the acting program turns into a larger metaphor in adulthood for the kind of exploitative human that Adina doesn’t understand. This adds to Adina’s sense that she is being kept purposefully apart from or outside of conventional human interactions and connections.

“The project of romance in Adina’s life has concluded. She feels sorrowful and relieved.”

When Miguel breaks up with her, Adina’s reaction reflects the aspect of her character that feels like an observer, an alien trying to have human experiences but not really understanding them. Their different levels of interest in sex represent, in a way, their larger incompatibility, which Miguel captures in the analogy of being from different planets. Adina’s reaction highlights a connection between anti-asexual bias and The Need for a Sense of Purpose, since other members of her society make it seem as though romantic connection is one of life’s main purposes, and Adina does not relate to this desire.

“At least he is still in the house. They are still together.”

When her dog, Butternut, dies while Toni’s cancer treatments are failing and she has had no replies to her faxes, Adina keeps him in the freezer as an attempt to preserve him and their bond—a mark of her loneliness and fear of loss. Clinging to this as a sort of companionship shows how little Adina has in her life.

“New York City could have ground to a halt, at least for a moment, but alternate side of the street and parking meter regulations are in effect.”

Adina feels that Toni’s death is a disaster on the scale of 9/11, and she feels that the rest of the world should also grind to a halt. Parking regulations are for Adina a metaphor for the city as a whole, in all its complexities, while this specific reference extends the ironic comparisons in the text between the mundane and the profound as Adina struggles to make sense of what humans value.

“Adina lines the paper into the tray and is about to press the wide send button when a word leaps from the page. When had she started using we instead of they?”

Recognizing that she has begun to identify with the human collective is a moment of revelation in Adina’s journey as a character. She questions whether she is starting to identify more with humans than with her alien people, a puzzle of identity that the novel never answers. This attention to “we” foreshadows the last sentence of the novel, where the “we” identifies the alien collective to which Adina believes that she is returning.

“She wonders what other rational human qualities she wrote off as extraterrestrial because of a human’s tendency to other what they don’t understand.”

When Adina learns there’s a word for her aversion to certain noises—misophonia—it’s another revelation that helps explain much. She’s discovered a quality about herself that is in fact human, not alien. Ironically, this discovery takes place within a section of the book where Adina is increasingly pleading for her superiors to come and get her, desperate to escape her human grief.