Girl in Landscape

A Familiar Alien Landscape

I've been a fan of Jonathan Lethem since his first book, Gun, with Occasional Music, which I read my first year in college. Its bizarre, noir sci-fi sensibility fit right into the context of Vonnegut, Chandler, and Pynchon books I was also devouring at the time. I've read most of what Lethem's written over the years, and I find myself a little surprised to declare that now, over a decade later, my favorite is Girl in Landscape. I'm not necessarily calling it his masterpiece, but it is the one I return to with the most pleasure, year after year.

That could be in part because it's a quick read; it's a slim book, compared to his more recent work, at only 280 pages. Set during adolescence, Girl in Landscape wouldn't be out of place in the young adult section of a bookstore (it shares that similarity with A. M. Homes's Jack, another excellent novel with a teenage protagonist). But it's primarily because of its heroine, Pella Marsh, one of the most likable and realistic girls I've ever read about. If I ever have a daughter, I'd seriously consider naming her Pella.

Girl in Landscape might best be described as a surreal coming-of-age western set on another planet. After the sudden and tragic death of her mother, Pella Marsh, along with her two younger brothers and her father, a losing politician, have moved out of Brooklyn, which is quickly becoming almost uninhabitable, to another planet -- the planet of the Archbuilders, where a few Earth settlers are going about the business of creating a kind of society in the desolate stretches of a wilderness long abandoned by most of its own kind.

Lethem's storytelling style here is minimal and sparse, like the landscape. The plot advances as much through dialogue as description. But every word is positioned perfectly, thematically, often foreshadowing events to come. His imagination is bountiful, charming, and symbolic: the Archbuilders themselves, with their impossible joints, fronds, and fur, wander the planet as the aimless remnants of a once-great society. Household deer, tiny creatures like mercurial, pesky dustballs, race the prairies and mate on windowsills. And the Archbuilder food, which the settlers try in good faith to adapt to, consists of different flavored "potatoes," from cake to ice to "fish," which contain "fish" that can be grown much like sea monkeys.

Pella is thirteen, and suffering the growing pangs of adolescence in radically bizarre circumstances, but her stumbles into adulthood and responsibility and budding and often disturbing sexuality are underlying themes of the book beautifully elaborated and mirrored by the external environment the Marshes find themselves trying to cultivate. The fledgling pioneer society, too, is at a crucial stage of growth and maturity, if it is to survive, and the power struggles, ostracism, and persecution of adults, as well as children, as outsiders or deviants, are not unlike themes Lethem explores in later books. There is humor here as well as sorrow, and a playfulness with language that is a joy all its own: the Archbuilders love English, and speak their poetic almost-nonsense to any and all who will listen ("Pella Marsh....Your name evokes," muses one; for themselves, they have chosen names like Hiding Kneel and Truth Renowned), and Lethem's spare phrases and metaphors take on a resonance of their own, echoing against the past glories of the Archbuilders and past failures of the human race.

Girl in Landscape is, really, a perfect little book -- innovative, intelligent, surprisingly moving (your heart will lurch a bit at passages you never saw coming), and utterly inventive, it also sheds new light on the loss of innocence and other sacrifices that come with becoming an adult. Whether or not you're a fan of Lethem's other work, this book should not be missed.

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