Girl in Landscape

#5
Title: Girl in Landscape 
Author: Jonathan Lethem

Publisher: Vintage
Year: 1998
Genre: Science Fiction
280 pages

+  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 Amnesia Moon) 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.