How would you explain a human life to someone who had never been here? You could begin with our cities, our machines, or the distance we have traveled into space. Or you could begin with a mother saying she is fine in a voice that means she is not.
Adina Giorno has work of this kind to do. Growing up in Philadelphia, she understands herself to have come from another planet. She is here to observe humans and send her findings to her distant superiors. Her equipment is a fax machine rescued by her mother from a neighbor’s trash.
It is a wonderfully unglamorous arrangement for interstellar communication. There is a paper tray to feed, a button to press, a machine occupying most of a child’s bureau. The prospect of an answer can make a bedroom feel connected to the universe. Yet it cannot make the household around that bedroom easier to understand.
Marie-Helene Bertino’s Beautyland offers an appealing way into that problem. Adina is an observer with a personal stake in almost everything she observes. She can describe people with startling freshness while needing them to notice her, like her, and come home when they are supposed to. A report is not a way of leaving the day behind. Sometimes it is another way of asking to belong to it.
Her first world is her mother
The public opening from Farrar, Straus and Giroux places Adina’s birth beside the launch of Voyager 1 in September 1977. One vessel is leaving Earth with information about humanity; another kind of visitor is arriving to collect it. The scale is enormous, the reversal gently comic.
But the maternity ward is not waiting to celebrate a cosmic coincidence. Térèse, Adina’s mother, is in danger. Her blood pressure is falling. After the birth she is exhausted, unsupported by her own parents, and painfully aware of the life that has just become unavailable to her. The universe may have acquired an observer. A young woman has acquired the responsibility of keeping a baby alive.
The opening holds these events together without asking the smaller scene to illustrate the bigger one. A mother’s fatigue does not become insignificant because a spacecraft is leaving Florida. Nor does the imaginative reach of the scene cancel its physical awkwardness: bodies, hospital gowns, light, and a baby reaching toward warmth.
This movement between scales is one reason to try the prose. An account of humanity can suddenly turn into an account of something in a cupboard. Beautyland itself is a local store selling necessities and beauty supplies. Its name promises an elsewhere, but the destination is close enough to reach in a car with an unreliable heater.
In the store, and in the preparations for going there, Térèse becomes more than the hardworking mother a synopsis might give us. She wants a particular bottle of Jean Naté. She prolongs the old bottle by adding water, insisting that the scent is the same, only lighter. She will not buy a larger bottle even when it offers better value per ounce. The family’s shortage of money prevents the purchase that would supposedly save money.
The perfume is also a form of proximity. Térèse does not like to hug; Adina can get close enough to smell her. What might look like a minor preference in an adult’s shopping becomes part of the child’s understanding of affection. The bottle belongs to both their lives, but differently.
That difference gives the scene its force. For Térèse, a purchase involves money, habit, and a small claim to the person she is. For Adina, it is bound up with access to her mother. A distant researcher might classify the transaction as consumer behavior. The girl in the aisle cannot afford that degree of detachment.
Instructions everyone else seems to know
An alien observer is a useful comic invention because familiar behavior stops looking inevitable. People have elaborate rules for being ordinary. They rarely hand over a complete set, and they may resent being asked to explain them.
For a child, learning these rules is already difficult. Learning them while discovering that other families possess resources yours does not is a more particular education. Adina’s outsider position has an address and an economic setting. It is not simply a superior vantage point from which to laugh at the species.
In her interview with Charlotte Owen for Bustle, Bertino discusses the class distinctions people read in one another without openly naming them. She also describes the difficulty of recognizing her own working-class experience as material for literature. Small, supposedly unimportant things had first to become things she permitted herself to write about.
The opening supplies a sharp example. Six-year-old Adina has been invited to join an accelerated learning program. Térèse is proud, but only after being assured that there is no charge. The recognition is the same; the sequence of feeling is different. Before she can enjoy what the invitation says about her daughter, she needs to know what it will ask of her household.
It is worth noticing how much that tiny delay contains. No one has to deliver a speech about inequality. A practical question interrupts the expected response. The reader sees a mother making room for happiness after checking whether happiness comes with a bill.
Adina’s intelligence does not put her outside these difficulties. Being good at describing an encounter need not make the next encounter easier. There is a familiar exhaustion in having to work out deliberately what everyone else appears to understand without effort.
That is where the fax machine becomes more than a charming prop. It provides an address for things that might otherwise remain unsaid. Adina can turn an observation into something sent. An incoming sheet makes the possibility of attention material: someone has received this, someone wants more.
The first exchange in the excerpt concerns rabbits. Its simplicity matters. She does not have to produce an important theory before being invited to continue. A child has noticed something; an audience asks her to describe it. Anyone who remembers urgently wanting to tell someone a small discovery can recognize the appeal.
Believing her is not the same as solving her
A reader may still wonder what to make of Adina’s extraterrestrial identity. Is it literal? Is another explanation available? These are understandable questions, but treating them as the only reason to read would make the book smaller than its opening suggests.
Bertino’s answer in the Bustle conversation is useful here. She does not consider it her job to assign Adina a diagnosis. She speaks instead about believing people when their accounts of themselves are difficult to understand, and about supporting the parts of a friend one loves.
This does not require us to abandon curiosity. It changes its direction. We can be interested in where Adina comes from while also attending to what she needs this afternoon. The latter question should not have to wait for the former to be settled.
The story’s ordinary relationships help sustain that attention. A mother is not a fixed collection of characteristics. Neither is a friend. Someone who has been understood on Monday can surprise or hurt us on Thursday. Reporting on people might organize experience, but living with them keeps making the report incomplete.
There is also a difference between understanding why a group behaves as it does and knowing how to join it. The observer may have the best account of the room and still be the person standing awkwardly at its edge. That is a strong invitation to care about Adina: the wit belongs to someone who has not outgrown the wish to be wanted.
The opening makes this tension available without turning her into a judge whose verdicts we must applaud. She depends on the world she finds strange. Its inhabitants can disappoint her, but they are also the people whose company she seeks.
A funny opening is not a promise of comfort
Bertino’s public excerpt offers pleasures that a plot outline cannot convey. Its images keep moving between the cosmic and the domestic. An object may be funny, economically necessary, and emotionally charged within the same passage. The prose is doing more than transporting a character to the next event.
The brief reports add another rhythm: life as Adina encounters it, then life as she tries to describe it for someone elsewhere. The gap can make an ordinary habit look absurd. It can also reveal how hard an ordinary feeling is to communicate. The reader is invited to enjoy the attempt, not merely extract its conclusion.
There is a limit to what this beginning promises. In an account of the novel’s broader course—rather than the opening alone—Shayne Terry in the Chicago Review of Books describes a childhood brightness that gives way to longer stretches of depression and despair as Adina grows older. The review’s warning is useful without listing what happens. This is not a premise that guarantees a consistently comforting book.
Readers looking primarily for the engineering of an alien civilization may find a different set of interests here. Readers drawn to an unusual voice, a mother and daughter’s difficult closeness, and the strangeness concealed inside familiar life have good reasons to try the opening. The later life belongs to the novel to unfold.
For now, there is a girl beside a machine someone else threw away. She has seen something she wants to tell someone. The paper goes in. Across a distance she cannot measure, she hopes her account will make sense. Before the universe supplies any explanation, the wish is already recognizable.