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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN num: 9780375703911
ISBN number: 0375703918
Label: Vintage
Manufacturer: Vintage
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 288
Printing Date: January 26, 1999
Publishing house: Vintage
Release Date: January 26, 1999
Sale Popularity Level: 256927
Studio: Vintage
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Editor's Notes and Comments:
Product Description:
Anyone who wonders why Jonathan Lethem is the only novelist to be included among Newsweek's '100 People for the New Century' need only read his deliriously original new book, a science fiction/Western that combines the tragic momentum of The Searchers with the sexual tension of Lolita.
At the age of 13, Pella Marsh emigrates with her family to the Planet of the Archbuilders. These enigmatic aborigines have names like Lonely Dumptruck and and Hiding Kneel--and a civilization that baffles and frightens their human visitors.
As the spikily independent Pella becomes an uneasy envoy between two species, Girl in Landscape deftly interweaves themes of exploration and otherness, loss and sexual awakening.
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 subsequent 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.
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Rated by buyers 
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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 very 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.
Rated by buyers 
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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.
Rated by buyers -
Jonathan Lethem isn't afraid to take chances, and he takes lots of chances in "Girl In Landscape," mainly in taking a familiar and predictable theme making something fresh and interesting out of it. For the most part, he succeeds in "Girl." However, this novel is not of the caliber of, for example, "Motherless Brooklyn," "Gun with Occasional Music" or "Fortress of Solitude." But it's much better than "As She Climbed Across the Table."
Some critics have described "Girl" as a melding of the sci-fi and "Western" genres. That's fair, insofar as the story involves space travel from a future, ravaged Earth to another ravaged, distant planet of a once-mighty, now-departed alien race, where the drama unfolds on the edge of a wild and alien frontier. (Think, "The Million-Year Picnic" meets "Little House on the Prairie," with some of the claustrophobic intensity of Stephen Crane's "The Blue Hotel," and the vigilante "justice" of "The Ox-bow Incident.") "Girl" is more than "just" a Sci-fi Western. It's a novel full of nuances and shadows, both in the characters and theme. It asks more questions about "what it means to be human" (a perennially favorite sci-fi theme) or to have courage in the face of the violence and cowardice of which small colonial minds are capable (shades of "High Noon"), than it offers by way of answers.
The "pioneers" who inhabit this off-world Podunk are all émigrés from Earth, seeking a new life on the planet of an ancient alien race known as "the Archbuilders" who, somehow, ruined their own mess kit and left behind a world of elegant and inscrutable ruins. Along the way, they developed "viruses" to alter their environment and themselves, to which the colonizing humans are vulnerable and must take pills to counteract. Those Archbuilders who remain are the ne'er-do-well, left-behind descendants of this once-mighty race. They are vaguely humanoid, hairy over an exoskeleton, walk upright, with two double-jointed legs and two double-jointed arms. They speak good English ("and invite you up into [their] room") and are quite friendly in an odd, almost humorous way, and hang around the humans' frontier village: one poses for paintings and gives sexual favors to a lonely "artist"; another plays backgammon with the town heavy's hired hand. In subtle ways they mock their human colonizers by taking on "human" names such as "Lonely Dumptruck," "Hiding Kneel," and "Truth Renowned." The humans generally despise and mistrust them and believe they are all potential child molesters. (Now *there's* an interesting twist on alien menace.)
Into this paradise, across the galaxy from Brooklyn, NY, comes the Marsh family: Clement, the father, a failed politician, wishy-washy to the core; his 13 year old daughter, Pella, the protagonist; and two younger brothers, Raymond and David. They are, truly, "motherless," - the result of the sudden and untimely death of their mother, Caitlin, felled by a stroke just as the family is preparing to immigrate to the new world. Pella is forced to deal with the loss of her mother, her new and ambiguous role as the mater familias to her father and younger siblings, the father's inability to be man, much less a father, in the new environment, and, among other issues, the motives of the town strongman, Efram Nugent. Nugent is a loner and the original colonizer of this part of the planet, a self-styled "expert" on the Archbuilders past and present. To Pella, he is an intimidating but irresistible hall of mirrors who has, as she learns, agendas within agendas, including an unsavory interest in Pella.
Without being a spoiler, suffice it to say there are the semi-predictable cultural clashes between the aliens, with their gentle but disturbing ways, and the humans, with their crude and judgmental worldviews and propensity to violence. Along the way there is interspecies sex, arson, murder, betrayal, redemption, etc., etc. Pella emerges with a new toughness and understanding. You can see it coming a mile away, but when it arrives, it's not a disappointment.
What makes this book a "four star" instead of a "five star" is the weak beginning when the Marsh gang is on Earth. It's too long, and not enough attention is paid to Clement to make his ineffective weakness in the new world more credible. What makes this book a "four star" instead of a "three star" though is the quality of Lethem's writing. You can't beat it. Some writers feel they have to describe everything in minute detail. Lethem's spare descriptions of characters in "Girl" (except for the aliens, virtually zero in the way of physical description except parts of the body-- e.g., Nugent's powerful hands, Pella's budding breasts, etc.) is an effective technique that deflects the reader's attention away from trying to imagine what characters "look like" and focuses the reader's attention on what characters are.
Rated by buyers -
I'll have to give Lethem credit for not repeating himself (although I've only read two of his books so I'm probably not that qualified to make that sort of judgement . . . but who's going to stop me?) since this book is radically different from the last one I read. That's a good thing, in my opinion. The style here is science-fiction but it's more about using the weird themes and landscapes as a background, something to throw his ideas up against, which pleases the literary crowd that normally develops a twitch every time the word "sci-fi" gets tossed around, as they imagine spaceships and people saying things like, "So, Zolgar, we meet again". But I'd consider this science-fiction, just a little more esoteric. If that makes any kind of difference to you, then go crazy. So, the concept. This time out, Lethem tries to get us to believe that another planet has been discovered and the inhabitants have invited people from Earth to go live there and settle. Unfortunately, the planet is mostly abandoned and crumbling and the Archbuilders (the people who live there) that are left are curious and friendly, but not really all that useful. Into this settlement comes the Marsh family. The dad, Clement, apparently lost an election and that means that the whole family has to move (why this is, Lethem never explains, and it did bother me a little bit), so they try to settle on the new world. Clement's idea is to have them all fit in as best they can, so this involves not taking special pills that make humans immune from whatever bioengineered viruses that the Archbuilders left behind. There are other people on the planet as well, including slightly xenophobic homesteader Ephram, who Clement's daughter Pella finds herself both drawn to and repelled by. If I told you that everyone finds peace and harmony and the story ends with the happiest of feelings, would you believe me? Probably not, right? Basically this seems to be Lethem's version of a Western, there's definitely echoes of The Searchers (and I don't just say that because they mention it on the back cover) and the story seems to suggest that you can take the people off the planet but you really can't make them act any different. The story glides along nicely, but I do have to agree with the people who suggest that the setting is more interesting than the characters, but in some cases it is. A lot of the characters really don't come alive, although this may be because most of the story is told through Pella's eyes, and she comes across well enough, although you may have a hard time believing that she's thirteen. But you may not. Ephram has the strongest personality but then he's totally channeling John Wayne so that may account for it. Clement remains rather ineffectual and the Archbuilders are amusing window dressing. So Lethem probably doesn't run with the concept to the extent that he could have but I do give him points for trying and the overall concept is fascinating enough that it manages to carry the book on its own (I wish he would have given us more background, but that probably would have bogged the novel down) and it's short enough that by the time you start to really get irritated by these things, it's over and done with. Another fine effort, it's not going to change your life or make you see literature in a new way, but there are certainly worse ways to pass a few hours.
Rated by buyers -
Lethem is nothing if not inventive; each of his novels is different from all the others, and they seem to have only superficial similarities with anyone else's work, too. Thirteen-year-old Pella Marsh, just edging over the cusp into womanhood, is the oldest of three children of Clement and Caitlin -- the former a failed politician in a post-enviro-catastrophic America, the latter now dead of cancer. They've transplanted themselves to the over-bioengineered World of the Archbuilders in order to escape Earth, but our world's most basic interpersonal problems have accompanied them. The Archbuilders -- those few who remain after the great bulk of them went off into deep space -- are quiet, gentle, curious polylinguists whom the humans don't really understand and probably never will. There are only a handful of other families in their little town-without-a-name: The Kincaids, with a son Pella's age, the drunken Grants with their two socially warped offspring, a lesbian couple with a baby, and a few bachelors. But one of those is Efram Nugent, the personification of violent inadaptability whom Pella sees as part of the rock of the new planet, almost an undeniable force of nature, and whom she alternates between fearing, loathing, and idolizing. Perhaps it's really the Planet of Efram. And he's far more adaptable than anyone could know, because he, like Pella, declines to take the drug that keeps him from inhabiting the "household deer" in his sleep and speeding and spying across the valleys, witnessing all the personal human things that no one else should see. There's a certain titillating Nabokovian flavor here (though without his humor) but don't let that distract you. The story is mostly a bleak but moving look at human inability to be anything other than human, regardless of the landscape.
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