Girl in Landscape (original 1998; edition 1999)

After her mother dies of a brain tumor, 13-year-old Pella and her family emigrate from a nearly uninhabitable future Earth to a colony on the planet of the Arch-Builders in this coming-of-age story.

As is typical of many of his literary science fiction novels, Jonathan Lethem is most interested in placing his characters, and his readers, in a bizarre environment and watching how they adapt. In this case, the environment is an alien planet, once the home of an advanced civilization that has now been abandoned and left in ruins by all but a few of its original inhabitants. The aliens are called the Arch-builders because they left immense, now crumbling arches of unknown purpose all over the desert-like landscape. While most of the human colonists take pills to prevent contracting the alien viruses, Pella and her brothers do not, and this leads to her becoming strangely integrated with the planet and its alien life, just as she enters adolescence. She finds that she is able to mentally inhabit the bodies of the household deer -- small, unsatisfactorily described creatures that go everywhere and, apparently, observe everything that happens within the small human community. In this way, she witnesses the animosity and violence displayed toward the aliens, particularly by larger-than-life Efram Nugent, the informal leader of the colony.

This novel quietly grew on me. As Pella becomes more integrated with the life of the Arch-builders' planet, she adapts herself to living there in a way that the adults in her community cannot. She and many of the other children become something new. Lethem depicts this transformation slowly, gradually and subtly. At the same time, he unravels a sinister plot of conflict between Nugent, his fellow colonists and the Arch-builders that shares tropes with an old-fashioned Western. There is a lot going on under the surface of this novel, and I think it would benefit from rereading. Like pretty much any other Lethem novel I have read, it takes the genres we are all so familiar with, and contorts them in exciting new ways.

Read because I like the author (2013). ( )

Worldbuilding, careful word choice, not over-expository
- Ending a little rushed

This is the third novel I’ve read by Lethem, and I may have to read them all. In this genre (he writes in several), Lethem creates what I’d call literary science fiction. Here (and in [b:Amnesia Moon|32078|Amnesia Moon|Jonathan Lethem|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1168324923s/32078.jpg|2209]) the reader is immediately in medias res with little preliminary exposition and even less later clarification. This works only because Lethem is so skillful at evoking environments and social circumstances through spare, nuanced prose. Though their styles and concerns are not particularly similar, Ursula K. Le Guin’s most recent novels utilize similar techniques. The characters know where they are and why it is the way it is; the reader enters almost as an accidental observer, able to see only a small segment of a broader but obscured world.

Girl in Landscape is a bildungsroman in which the main character, the 13-year old Pella Marsh, comes of age on an alien planet, and in doing so, perhaps also signals a greater coming of age for humanity. Lethem deftly captures both adolescent angst and interpersonal complexity and shows the relationship between the qualities of the characters’ psychology and expectations and their ways of seeing and understanding the world they inhabit. The landscape of the title is interior and exterior, physical and social, real and metaphorical. Overtly a tale of misplaced hopes and xenophobia, this is also a narrative of self-discovery and acknowledgement. I only wish the concluding sections had been about 20 pages longer and slightly more archetypal. Still, a terrific read. ( )

Girl in Landscape has been compared to Nabokov's Lolita which I have never read. As a result of my ignorance I was able to read Girl in Landscape without preconceived notions of what it was about. I'm glad I did. This was great in an extremely strange way. When you first meet old-for-her-age thirteen year old Pella Marsh and her family they are getting ready to go to the beach in what you or I would consider ordinary Brooklyn Heights, New York. Only planet Earth has become a post-apoplectic wasteland where exposure to the sun has become too dangerous without complicated protective gear. It has been decided the Marsh family will leave Earth for the Planet of the Arch-builders. Before they can leave Pella's mother is stricken with a brain tumor and quickly dies. Pella, her father and two brothers must travel to the Planet of the Arch-builders without her. This is where things go from odd to downright bizarre. The Planet of the Arch-builders is sparsely populated with a few earthlings, a smattering of Arch-builder aliens and an overabundance of a creature called household deer. Pella's father, a failed politician, has hopes of creating a lawful society on the Planet of the Arch-builders but soon discovers there is an ominous rift between the humans and the aliens. The plot gets darker and darker the deeper into the story you go. ( )

One of the things that surprised me so much about Girl in Landscape was how well-written the characters were. As someone who was once a 13 year old girl, I thought Jonathan Lethem did a great job with Pella’s voice; she was a convincing, easy to relate to young girl. She was also a shrewd observer of human nature and her family dynamic. Some of my favorite parts of the book were scenes of her interaction with Efram; they were tense and sharp and menacing. I do wish the book had gone into some more detail with the Archbuilders, because they sounded so interesting, but what descriptions there were I found wonderful. This book felt different from other Letham books I’ve read, with more of a western feel (which normally I don’t much care for), but when I think about it, all pioneer stories, whether they’re early American or astral, are bound to have similarities. In all, I really enjoyed reading about Pella and her family, the growing new town, and the Archbuilders. ( )

13 yr old girl moves with family to planet of Archbuilders

9.98 ( )