Girl in Landscape [Hardcover]

Jonathan Lethem (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 16, 1998

Girl in Landscape finds Jonathan Lethem once again twisting forms and literary conventions to create a dazzling, completely unconventional tale that manages to move and amaze the reader at the same time.



In his new novel, Lethem blends elements as diverse as John Ford's classic Western "The Searchers" and Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita in an utterly unique way. The heroine is fourteen-year-old Pella Marsh, whose mother dies just before her family flees a post-apocalyptic Brooklyn for the frontier of a recently discovered planet. Hating her ineffectual father, and troubled by a powerful attraction to a virile but dangerous loner who holds sway over the little colony, Pella sets out on a course of discovery that will have tragic and irrevocable consequences for the humans in the community and the ancient inhabitants, known only as archbuilders.



Girl in Landscape is a daring exploration of the violent nature of sexual awakening, a meditation on language and perception, and an homage to the great American tradition of the Western.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Science-fiction writers attempting coming-of-age stories have seldom risked showing the stew of loneliness, anger, and angst that really characterizes adolescence. Jonathan Lethem, on the other hand, avoids the plucky sidekick syndrome and instead gives us breathtakingly realistic Pella Marsh, a girl at that awful and wonderful crux in her life just before people start calling her "woman." Her broken family has just moved to a newly settled planet, with strange and passive natives and the decaying remnants of a great civilization. Something in the alien environment soon enables Pella to telepathically travel, hidden in the bodies of inconspicuous "household deer," into the homes of her fellow settlers. She inevitably discovers the seamy side of humanity--loss of innocence eloquently portrayed. Don't read this book on a dark day, as there's not very much sunshine in here. The entire planet is covered with ruins: ruined towns, ruined hopes and dreams, ruined families. For a rare dose of SF realism, this is a fantastic read, full of raw (but not explicit) sexuality and the unhappy hierarchies of childhood. Forget about cheerful settlers moving in next door to helpful indigenous life forms. This is what the planetary frontiers will be. No matter how far away from Earth we may travel, we'll still be the same dirty, disappointing, beautiful monsters.

From Publishers Weekly

A surrealistic bildungsroman about a teenage girl unfolds among the ruins and frontier violence of a distant planet in Lethem's latest genre-bending exploration of science, landscape and the metaphysics of love and loss. As the novel opens, Pella Marsh, age 13, sets out from her subterranean home in a post-apocalyptic New York City for a final visit to Coney Island with her two younger brothers and her mother, Caitlin?all sealed in bodysuits to keep out the cancerous sun. Pella's father, Clement, has just been swept out of elective office in New York and has set his sights on the next political frontier: joining the first human settlers on the Planet of the Archbuilders. When Caitlin suddenly succumbs to a brain tumor, Clement whisks the grieving children by space ship to the faraway planet. Once the domain of a super-evolved alien species who used "viruses" to alter their ecosystem before abandoning it, the planet is now a hothouse landscape of ruined towers and refuse inhabited only by skittery, mouselike "household deer" and a few remaining Archbuilders?gentle, druidic creatures with furry, tendrilled, exoskeletal bodies and names like "Gelatinous Stand." Clement's mission, to forge a community that embraces the Archbuilders, puts him on a collision course with Ephram Nugent, a xenophobic homesteader who so closely resembles John Ford's John Wayne that one keeps expecting him to call Clement "Pilgrim." Lethem (As She Climbed Across the Table, 1997, etc.) affectingly chronicles Pella's tumultuous journey through puberty and loss and the knockabout society of children thrown together by their homesteading parents. As a result, this lyrical, often far-fetched meditation on the founding myths of the 21st century remains thoroughly rooted in an emotional world much closer to home. Author tour.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Doubleday; First Edition edition (March 16, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0385485182
• ISBN-13: 978-0385485180
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.7 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (35 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,467,517 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Jonathan Lethem was born in New York and attended Bennington College.

He is the author of seven novels including Fortress of Solitude and Motherless Brooklyn, which was named Novel of the Year by Esquire and won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Salon Book Award, as well as the Macallan Crime Writers Association Gold Dagger.

He has also written two short story collections, a novella and a collection of essays, edited The Vintage Book of Amnesia, guest-edited The Year's Best Music Writing 2002, and was the founding fiction editor of Fence magazine.

His writings have appeared in the New Yorker, Rolling Stone, McSweeney's and many other periodicals.

He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Odd, but strangely compelling, June 5, 2000

By 

Paula Gaffney - See all my reviews

This review is from: Girl in Landscape: A Novel (Paperback)

A copy of "Girl in Landscape" has been kicking around my house for a few months now. What compelled me to buy it escapes me. Especially since I tend to avoid coming-of-age stories. But there it was and there I was on a rainy Sunday afternoon. I got through the first quarter of the book and was getting ready to put it down when the story grabbed me. Jonathan Lethem has written a wonderfully engrossing novel set in a strange yet familiar setting. A strong case can be made comparing "Girl in Landscape" to many westerns, but what came to my mind was the old TV series "The Twilight Zone". Extraordinary outside influences driving an all to human story. But, like the Rod Serling classic, the world of the Archbuilders can be a dark and desolate place full of human weakness, frailty, bigotry, desire and emotion. This is a fine book worthy of a larger audience. I'm sorry I didn't read it sooner.

14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Deep and Compelling, October 2, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Girl in Landscape (Hardcover)

Jonathan Lethem has shown an amazing command of different genres, from the pulp "Gun, With Occasional Music" to the road trip "Amnesia Moon" to the twisted romance of "As She Climbed Across the Table." To call Lethem a Science Fiction Author is to do him a grave disservice by limiting the great scope of his small body of work.

"Girl with Landscape" is a of coming-of-age western set on a dreary planet with the ruins of an alien civilization. Pella Marsh, the central character, represents innocent youth, but also the strength of youth that most adults refuse to acknowledge.

The characters are all too real, especially in their bigotry and hatred, and the aliens are well-thought out, garnering are sympathy and occasionally our irritation and even disgust.

No lines are drawn clearly and no easy routes are taken in this novel. It's dreary and dark, but a brilliant work worth reading by anyone who likes good writing and a good story.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Gorgeous sci-fi western bildungsroman--what else?, August 30, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Girl in Landscape: A Novel (Paperback)

"Gorgeous" is the adjective that kept coming to mind after reading this. A great hybrid of science-fiction, western and coming-of-age novels (a sort of post-bildungsroman story). I really cannot understand why other readers found the grown-ups in the novel two-dimensional. They were absolutely real, and Efram Nugent is a bigger-than-life character that reaches mythical status. One should thank Lethem for his ability to show how surrealistic the United States can be. And his absolutely perfect, terse style, that is getting better and better as he goes on! After this, one wonders what comes next... definitely one of the best novels of the 90s.