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Summary
Summary
Girl in Landscapefinds 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'sLolitain 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 Landscapeis 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.
Author Notes
Jonathan Lethem was born in Brooklyn, New York on February 19, 1964. His first novel, Gun, with Occasional Music was published in 1994. His other works include As She Climbed across the Table (1997), Amnesia Moon (1995), The Fortress of Solitude (2003), You Don't Love Me Yet (2007), Chronic City (2009), and Dissident Gardens (2013). He won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Motherless Brooklyn (1999). He also writes short stories, comics and essays. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's, Rolling Stone, Esquire, The New York Times, The Paris Review, McSweeney's and other periodicals and anthologies.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
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, Caitlinall 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 Archbuildersgentle, 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. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
An ingenious and unsettling dystopian romance from the surrealist w†nderkind who has in a scant five years produced five aggressively original works of fiction (As She Climbed Across the Table, 1997, etc.). The story begins on Earth--in Brooklyn, in fact--in a future transfigured by some unspecified (seemingly nuclear) catastrophe. The ozone layer is only a memory, people travel underground in private ""subway cars,"" and beachgoers can tolerate the sun only when enclosed in protective portable ""tents."" These and similar phenomena emerge in some brilliantly managed expository scenes focussed on teenaged Pella Marsh and her two younger brothers as they endure the loss of their mother to a brain tumor and their removal (by father Clement, a defeated politician) to another planet. Arriving at a ""new settlement"" on the environmentally friendly Planet of the Archbuilders, the Marshalls gradually assimilate into a society of fugitive earthlings who coexist uneasily with their mysterious hosts. The Arehbuilders, seemingly equal parts human, animal, and vegetable, pose a disturbing riddle: Are they benign protective beings evolved beyond humans (some of whom argue that they're only the ""rubble"" left behind by their more adventurous interstellar-explorer counterparts)? Or are these passive ""aliens"" a variety of lotus-eaters whose resignation to their stripped-down ""planet"" lulls their human neighbors into inert compliance with its norms? The possibilities are cleverly explored through a pleasingly melodramatic storyline that satisfies our expectations without overexplaining, and through a profusion of grimly comic details picturing life (or the imitation of it) in this bizarre new world. And Lethem's people are fully as real as his locale seems unreal. The protagonist Pella, a sturdy girl-woman altogether equal to the tests she undergoes, is especially memorable. Wonderful stuff. One waits eagerly to learn where Lethem will take us next. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
The surface of the earth has become inhospitable to man, and the alternatives are to live underground or to emigrate to a newly discovered planet in another solar system. Fourteen-year-old Pella Marsh's family decides on the new planet, partly so that her ineffectual father can restart his failing political career. Pella's mother dies shortly before the journey, and so she finds herself unsupervised on the new world. The planet has a surprise waiting for the colonists: a virus left behind from an advanced race. Those infected, including humans, enter a fugue state where their consciousness is transferred to an omnipresent and nearly invisible creature. It is a perfect tool for eavesdropping and discovering secrets. The secrets Pella discovers will rock the small settlement and result in a number of killings. A cool, quirky, and oddly compelling coming-of-age story that raises questions that linger long after the book is read. --Eric Robbins
Library Journal Review
From the only novelist listed as one of Newsweek's "100 People for the New Century": the coming-of-age story of a 14-year-old whose family flees post-apocalyptic Brooklyn for a new planet. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.