Customer Reviews

Girl in Landscape

5 star:		(15)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

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.

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.

"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.

Lethem has attempted some very difficult goals in "Girl in Landscape," but by and large he succeeds admirably.

* Writing a believable 13-year old girl

* Creating another habitable planet

* Describing a non-human culture

* Moving between a dream state and waking reality without the seams showing

Lethem is so deft in his tightrope act that I found myself exclaiming "Wow" aloud several times while reading. His skill is palpable, but the book never comes off as flashy or bragging.

In fact, aside from a uncharacteristically weak dénouement, the book is nearly perfect.

This is what novel writing is all about, a truly imaginative exploration. Lethem may have been pegged as a science ficiton writer, but he is one of the most intriguing young American Fiction writers working today regardless of genre. "Girl in Landscape" should be one of those crossover type books the people who like to label writers are always so eager to discover.

At first I was struck by some similarities in a novel I read 2 years ago ("Straitjacket & Tie" by Eugene Stein), but as Lethem's story progresses the clash between Archbuilders and humans becomes less of an alien/Earthling struggle and more of a metaphor of all explorers in new worlds, both on land and in the heart. It is hard to ignore the essential American frontiersman and Native American analogies that Lethem's story evokes as well.

What makes this book so compelling is that we discover the Planet of the Archbuilders and its secrets as Pella does. Discovery is part of the novel's rich landscape. Pella - a growing teenager confilcted with herself and family - tries so desperately to find a new place in a new world that she can call her own and, as a result of the alien virus, floats out of her body becoming a literal outsider - sometimes looking in on herself. There is also the alien's discovery of the English language and the way the Archbuilders (particularly Hiding Kneel) make use of its poetry and even learn to make jokes.

This is a novel that speaks to our very humanity forcing us to look at how we treat each other, how we exclude others because of difference, how we all keep looking for a new home - a better place where we can finally belong.

Letham still writes quite well, and his imagination still astounds, but I just didn't like this one that much. I just couldn't identify with any of the aspects of the story. I was never a girl coming of age having a power struggle with the adults around me, and I never lost a parent at a young age. I also was never froced to move very far away from home to someplace strange. I was never much of a spy as a child either. So in the end all I had was a odd landscape against which a fairly depressing story was staged. If you can identify with any of the above experiences you might like this book more than I did. I won't say it was bad, but I wish I hadn't shelled out hardcover price. (something I'd gladly do again for Amnesia moon)

Since Robert Heinlein's death, I have been looking for anyone who could sustain Heinlein's ability to project the reader into an imagined future and then to build sympathy with the characters. Lethem has the critical ability to establish empathy essentially with his every character, and few do this as easily as he. I have just completed Amnesia Moon, where Lethem tries on empathy with a clock and a potted plant as (metamorphosed) primary characters - and he makes even that work. Therefore, I found Pella, her family and friends, and the alien race in particular (not to mention the planetary ecosystem), to be so sympathetic that it was somewhat wrenching to put the novel down (the same was true of Amnesia Moon, though in that case, the characters were not intended to be quite so sympathetic). The last time I felt this way about a book was reading Heinlein (and in this case, Heinlein's earlier rather than later novels). This is perhaps the only book I have ever read about which I still experience literal pain due to the fact that there was so much more of the story to tell, and it is virtually certain that the sequel (or sequels as I imagined them) will go unwritten. (By the way, I found the analogy to Lolita to stretch credibility. I have read both books, and they are entirely different projects. At the most fundamental level, Lolita was about Humbert Humbert - not really about Lolita at all. This novel is about Pella - more akin to a project such as Heinlein's Podkayne of Mars, but with Lethem's mastery of empathetic character development.) In short, the single best science fiction book I have read since Heinlein.

Based on some of the comparisons on the back of the book, you would think that Lethem's science fiction novel was some sort of masterpiece. One critic went so far as to compare the book to Nabokov's Lolita. I'm not sure I see the comparison other than a very subtle, as in so subtle you not only barely register it, but aimply do not care, current of sexual tension that reveals itself at the very end of the book. I still for the life of my cannot figure out how this was published to so much acclaim, other than the theory that the book picked up steam after he published Motherless Brooklyn (which actually was a magnificent book, one that deserves all of the acclaim it has received).

The novel is about Pella Marsh and her dysfunctional family living in some post-apocalyptic future. At some point, the Marsh's, following the death of Pella's mother, relocate to another world that was once inhabited with a super-evolved race that, other than a few stragglers, went off to colonize the rest of the universe. I think part of the disappointment is the lack of concrete description. So much is left unsaid, and although the writing school mantra "show don't tell" works with books dealing with things that are familiar to us, here, in a world where there is nothing to anchor us but the writer's descriptions, anything short of a full-blown explanation (peppered with descriptions and what not) of what it is we are supposed to be experiencing. Although some of the concepts are highly interesting, there is simply too much missing from this book for it to be nothing more than an early outing from a now celebrated and much improved writer. John Gardner said that your first novel is something that should be locked away in your desk, never to see the light of day, and I wonder if Lethem should have done that with this book.

I was very amazed and moved by this book, "Girl in Landscape," where Jonathan Lethem writes about a fourteen-year-old girl named Pella Marsh from Brooklyn, who has to move to a recently discovered planet. Since her mother has died, and she hates her father, she is virtually left alone with no one to talk to besides her two brothers who are way to young to understand her. At the new planet, the struggle and fighting between the humans and the Archbuilders (the original inhabitants of the new planet) shows that human nature itself is corrupt and that humans have a bad habit of leaving out people or "things" that are different. In a way this book reminded me a little of the book "The Lord of the Flies" because of the way Lethem shows human nature as not being so pretty, and because of the violence that goes on in the book. Pella is the kind of person that hates the fighting that goes around her and wants to change it. Her actions are so powerful that it is unbelievable she is only fourteen. She is forced to be strong and mature because of what goes on around her. But it is not just her that is powerful, but also the setting, plot, and characters are all powerful.
This book is really good because Lethem makes the planet and the inhabitants so real. The way he makes up all the setting makes me really surprised that someone can make such a realistic setting out of his or her imagination alone. I also enjoyed the story, because while the book was about science fiction, Pella's life makes it a drama as well. The one thing that I did not enjoy was the fact that the ending was a little bit rough. I did not think that the book should have ended that way, even though others may differ. I thought that the book would have a little more of a nicer conclusion to it. But other than that, I really loved and enjoyed this book. When I read this, it made me feel like reading all Lethem's other books as well. When I finished the book, I knew that I made the right decision to read this book. I recommend this book to anyone who wants to read a good and powerful book, because it really changed me and sticks with me. I think that this book will amaze anyone who reads it.

Once again, Jonathan Lethem has written an engrossing novel that defies simple classification. Only now, after reading four of his books with radically different settings and stories, am I beginning to see the threads that connect his oeuvre; for Lethem is a master at writing beneath the surface, at putting thoughts into your head without being so blunt as to put them directly on the page. This book might be called a Western/sci-fi/psychodrama but even stringing together fifty-seven categories wouldn't do it justice.