ike a waterbug venturing into deep waters, Jonathan Lethem's fourth novel dances the surface but knows the depths.
It knows the depths, where monsters lurk, but maintains a most extraordinary reticence and sangfroid about the tragedy it unfolds.
Girl in Landscape is full of talk, but it is perhaps, at the same time, the most silent book I can easily remember ever reading.
The story is not hard to follow.
We begin in a greyed-out New York, where it can be fatal to walk outdoors under the naked poisonous sun. Emigration is a common choice. Young Pella and her family--her father Clement, a failed politician; her mother Caitlin, who is the prime initiator of events; and her two younger siblings--are about to move to a world known only as the Planet of the Archbuilders.
Her mother dies of a sudden tumour.
The emigration goes ahead.
The Planet of the Archbuilders is--Lethem is absolutely clear about this--like the American West. More specifically, it is like the American West of John Ford's great Western, The Searchers (1956), which provides a model for the mise-en-scène; for the sexually charged kaleidoscope of action and motif circumambiating Pella's explosive progress toward menarche; for contrasts between slicker and oldtime resident, human (i.e. white man) and alien (i.e. Indian), male and female; for the relationship (horror vying with seduction) between settlement and wilderness; and for specific characters. Pella stands for Debby (Natalie Wood), the pre-pubescent white girl abducted by Indians; and Efram (the ambivalent, granite-faced, knowing outsider, long resident on the Planet) stands, of course, for Ethan (John Wayne), who spends seasons tracking down Natalie Wood, clearly lured by pheromones as well as hatred of Indians, rapture, insufficient self-knowledge, guilt, angst, rage, and love/hate for the Wilderness, to begin with.
Sounds noisy enough: but Lethem slips all this material--which is deliberately easy to unpack (Efram/Ethan is hardly subtle)--without comment. The narrative says nothing. None of the characters are conscious of the figures, or the fate, that underlie them.
Girl in Landscape is silent about itself.
Village on an alien plain
The story is quickly told. Pella and her family arrive, and her father immediately decides that his children will not take the medication universally imposed on humans there, for reasons not well known: Pella and her siblings are going to be true natives, he insists. The settlement is frozen into a slow entropy. There is no visible government. The place is like a Clifford D. Simak village on an alien plain, but forlorner.
The neotenous slapdash natives of the Planet of the Archbuilders seem (nobody knows, and nobody ever finds out) to be a perpetually adolescent form of the long-departed original builders, whose ruins have transformed the Planet into a vast Monument Valley; they are treated with ignorance and contempt. There are echoes in the dust here of Paul Park's Celestis (1993), which also deals with a doomed relationship between natives and humans on a Wilderness planet that sucks the life out of pioneer and imperialist alike.
Pella soon finds herself inhabiting, in her sleep, the minds of any neighbouring "household deer"--bounding mice-like native fauna--and being able to spy on the rest of the community through deer eyes.
She discovers her father having sex with a neighbouring woman, who soon leaves him. She keeps tabs on the other children who fill the community with a sort of life. And she begins to become obsessive about Efram (whose resemblance to John Wayne is uncanny, perhaps the only visibly virtuoso part of the novel).
A tragedy--involving Indians, settlers, pioneers and children--occurs. Pella survives this. At novel's end, she remains on the Planet. She knows who she will mate with. She knows she will be a native.
We part from her. It is like leaving a dream you can't quite remember.
An act of joining
And still nothing is said. Like the tesserae in a marble floor in Byzantium, each individual sequence of Girl in Landscape awaits an act of perception on the reader's part; an act of joining.
It is a book which must be watered.
Here is an example of the landscape Pella finds herself gazing in:
From the ridge she watched the farm change colors with the sunset, the greenhouse become a pink-and-orange prism, the windows of the house first reflect the rust-smeared sky then darken until they were lit from within, the shadows of the chicken coop and planters and kiln stretch longer and longer across the toast-colored flagstones until they crossed the line of the fence and beyond, the whole homestead like a sundial on the face of the valley.
This landscape is like a mosaic, in which one sees the story told; and in the joints of which one catches echoes of other tales. The Searchers, first and foremost. Tim O'Brien's In the Lake of the Woods (1994) too: a story set in a Wilderness, where a failed politician makes frozen attempts to unveil and redeem himself, and tragedy ensues.
Even more poignantly, Ang Lee's film The Ice Storm (1997), set in a frozen exurb of New York where the onset of puberty helps set off a tragic explosion, comes to mind. Lee's imagery has the same waiting quality as Lethem's: a waiting in utter silence for some explosion in vacuum to occur, which cannot be heard, but felt, like a blow. There is the same perception of adult sex as shamingly inadequate; the same equation of coming of age and catastrophe; the same flickeringly vicious take on small-town life; the same meticulous ice-cold laying down of narrative bytes, or tesserae. The same terrible haunting silence.
Both are as brilliant as razors.
Water this book.
John Clute is a writer, editor, critic and scholar of science fiction. He is the author of the Hugo Award winning Illustrated Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, co-editor of the Hugo winning Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, and one of the co-founders of the Hugo winning British SF publication Interzone. His criticism and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Omni, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and other places too numerous to list. His latest book, Encyclopedia of Fantasy--which he co-edited with John Grant--is nominated for the 1998 Hugo Award.
