52 pages • 1 hour read
Marie-Helene BertinoBeautyland
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2024A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Author Context: Marie-Helene Bertino
Marie-Helene Bertino was born and raised in northeast Philadelphia and is of Italian ancestry, two attributes she shares with Adina, the protagonist of Beautyland. Bertino earned a bachelor’s degree in English from Villanova University and her Master of Fine Arts (MFA) from Brooklyn College. She moved to New York City in 2003 and worked in various occupations, including as a biographer for people living with traumatic brain injuries and as a music reviewer.
In 2012, Bertino’s short story collection Safe as Houses won the prestigious Iowa Short Fiction award and was published by the University of Iowa Press. Stories in the collection had already won recognition, including a Pushcart Prize for “North Of.” Safe as Houses was named one of the outstanding collections of 2012 by The Story Prize and was long-listed for the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. Beautyland began as a short story from this collection titled “Sometimes You Break Their Hearts, Sometimes They Break Yours.”
Bertino’s debut novel, 2 A.M. at the Cat’s Pajamas, was published by Crown in 2014. The novel was a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers pick and one of the best books of 2012 for National Public Radio (NPR). As literary fiction with an ensemble cast, the story brings together a young aspiring singer, her fifth-grade teacher, and the owner of a jazz club called The Cat’s Pajamas on the night before Christmas Eve as they pursue their ambitions, face their fears, and try to hold on to their dreams.
Her second novel, Parakeet (2020), was highly anticipated and recognized on several best-of lists, earning an editor’s choice distinction in the New York Times. Parakeet introduces a surreal premise that anticipates Beautyland when the protagonist, about to be married, is visited by a parakeet she believes to be the ghost of her grandmother, who sends her on a journey to locate her lost brother and, eventually, discover what the young woman wants for her life.
Bertino has been awarded several writer’s residences, including at the University of Montana and as the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Fellow in 2017. She has taught creative writing at The New School, New York University, and the Institute for American Indian Arts in Sante Fe, New Mexico. At the time of this guide’s publication, she was the Ritvo-Slifka Writer-in-Residence at Yale University. Her second short story collection, Exit Zero, will be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2025.
Philosophical Context: Extraterrestrial Lifeforms
Within its framework of astronomical discoveries, Beautyland is concerned with a question humans of many societies have asked: Are we alone on our planet, or is there intelligent life elsewhere in the universe?
Extraterrestrial life forms have long been of interest in literature, and their popularity is entrenched by the commercial success of novels like H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds (1898) or the Martian series by Edgar Rice Burroughs, beginning publication in 1912. Acclaimed novels like Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) imagine what life could be like if free from human conventions (in the case of Le Guin’s novel, conventions of human sex and gender), while novels like Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris (1961) envision interactions between humans and more advanced alien life forms.
The possibility of extraterrestrial life has also occupied scientists and researchers; this question was central to the career of American astronomer Carl Sagan (1934-1996), who features prominently in Beautyland. Sagan published several popular works on the subject, including A Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space (1994) and The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (1996). He was best known for the public television series which was also published as a book: Cosmos (1980). Sagan designed the first artifacts sent into space as an attempt to communicate with other life forms. The plaques placed on the Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 spacecraft, launched in 1972 and 1973, attempt to represent humans and the location of Earth pictorially. Sagan also designed the Golden Record, dispatched on the Voyager spacecraft in 1977, which contains sounds and images meant to convey the diversity of life on Earth.
The search for extraterrestrial intelligence, collectively known as SETI, took on international scope in the 1980s. The SETI Institute was established in 1984 as a non-profit organization seeking to explore the nature of life in the universe. The Institute, privately funded and based in three different centers, collaborates with NASA, the National Science Foundation, and several other research entities in involvement on earth-based telescopes, space telescopes like the Hubble, launched in 1990, and multiple missions to explore space. To date, while there is no accepted scientific proof of intelligent life outside the planet, popular narratives in film, television shows, and novels such as Sagan’s Contact (1985) continue to imagine the possibility.
