The book features this teenage girl Pella who settles in the frontiers of space with her father after her mother dies. It's cool because the scene feels a lot like a small-town western what-with the interactions between the people already living there, and yet the presence of Archbuilders, these mousy creatures native to the planet, gives the book a quirky Sci-Fi feel.
I think what really appealed to me was how well Lethem was able to get into the mind of a girl on the brink of coming of age. I could fully relate to the feeling of being unable to speak up that Pella so often describes at the beginning of the book. Throughout the novel, she undergoes key changes that ultimately lead to her developing a voice with which she uses to defend what she believes in, and shape the future of the planet. The way in which she went from someone quiet and unable to speak for herself to a true leader made it a clear-cut coming-of-age novel, and I was really disappointed we didn't get to read it this semester because it was unlike anything else we've read.
On top of being intensely engaging and relatable, it offered a really accurate depiction of a girl coming of age that I feel Housekeeping and The Bell Jar did not accomplish. Esther was just whacked, and that pretty much made her an outlier in her experiences, and Ruth barely opened up to her reader. Even though Pella was telling her story from all the way out in space, she was a very normal girl and her coming-of-age was well-defined, whereas I'm not even sure if Esther or Ruth ever came of age.I hope students who take this class in the future get to read Girl in Landscape because it was by far the best book on the reading list, although I thoroughly enjoyed all of them.
You're making me really regret that we couldn't fit this one on the syllabus this year. (Stupid seven-week fourth quarter!) It is nice to end the course with the Sag Harbor Labor Day party, as it evokes the feeling of commemorating something as it ends, which resonates with the graduators. But I always did enjoy talking about _Girl_ in the context of this course, and you describe its strange charms nicely here. I second Izzy's comments: please do read this novel, not long after taking this class!
ReplyDeleteI know exactly what you mean about not being able to put it down. I actually read the entire thing in one sitting some evening when I was able to disengage myself from homework. Actually, I read through it so quickly I am having trouble even remembering things to say about it. I guess I would say that the characters in the book are the most interesting of any of the books on the syllabus. They are also probably the most unrealistic. Actually, now that I think about it, all of the books we read had very very real characters (with the exception of Sylvie, who I vocally denounced in class and on my blog as being unrealistic). Girl in Landscape is not so concerned with making them entirely real, and this makes them much more fascinating. Not to say they aren't relatable, but I can't imagine a character like Ephram existing in real life. This departure from strictly real characters was intriguing and refreshing.
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