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.
Character Analysis
Adina Giorno
Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses suicide and anti-gay and anti-asexual bias.
Adina is the protagonist of this novel, a biography of her life. She has black hair that is hard to style and skin that looks like she has a year-round tan, an inheritance from her Sicilian mother. Adina is raised in northeast Philadelphia by her mother after her father leaves the family when Adina is four.
Adina is a sensitive, observant, and quiet child who feels The Desire for Belonging but never quite feels like she belongs. Much of this sense of distance is explained by her learning, when she is four years old and activated, that she was sent by beings from a faraway planet to observe lifeforms on Earth. Adina never questions this explanation for her identity, nor does she ever rebel from this assignment. Rather, just as she is an avid student on Earth and placed in an accelerated learners program, she is an attentive student during her sessions in the night classroom. She enjoys observing and reflecting on what she sees around her, beginning with her first report on bunnies. This leads to a lifelong hobby as a writer. Adina is a philosopher, often emotionally detached or distant from what she observes and therefore presented as an ideal narrator—this is her diegetic role as well as a narrative role when she acts in Our Town. However, she also has a talent for expression that makes her articles popular in her college newspaper and later accounts for the success of her book. She is also a satirist, something that she has in common with Toni and Dominic, who become her lifelong friends.
While Adina encounters childhood and adolescent struggles to fit in with a peer group, her identity as an alien becomes a metaphor for her sense of never quite feeling that she comprehends or can participate in typical human behaviors. Moments when she feels she does belong are utterly thrilling to Adina, as when she rehearses a dance with the J girls or performs in the play Our Town in high school. She briefly feels a sense of belonging among the other servers at the Red Lion when she works there, as she witnesses them looking out for and including her. However, when Adina moves to New York City, she cements her status as a lifelong observer and an outsider looking in.
Her gym class with Yolanda K. is one of the only places where Adina feels a sense of community or connection with others. For the most part, she feels one of many, individuated from the group, and deeply lonely. Loneliness characterizes Adina’s entire life, though she has a few important relationships: with her mother, with Toni and Dominic, with her dog, and with Miguel, whom she dates for a time. Coinciding with her sense of emotional detachment, Adina doesn’t experience feelings of romance or sexual desire; Toni and Dominic describe her as asexual. Adina’s sexual orientation is central to her characterization, since Bertino uses her struggle to fit in and follow normative life patterns as a wider metaphor for the “queer” experience, as Dominic calls it. Sex becomes another human activity Adina attempts to participate in but doesn’t ultimately feel that she understands. Her aversion to mouth noises—diagnosed later as misophonia—is another example of how Adina feels vaguely repelled by the condition of being human.
Adina’s character arc partly follows the conventions of literary tragedy, as she struggles with grief and significant loss in the last third of the novel. She sees her concluding decision to die by suicide as a step in her deactivation that will allow her, finally, to rejoin the unique creatures of her home planet, which includes individual souls joined into a single entity, like the aspen colony Pando. This wish for belonging drives Adina her entire life as she feels, as an alien, that inclusion in the human world is fundamentally beyond her.
Térèse Giorno
Térèse is Sicilian American and beautiful, with olive skin, deep-set eyes, a Roman nose, and dark, curly hair. In her youth, she was wild and enjoyed herself, which attracted Adina’s father. Térèse is practical and unsentimental, not a woman who gives hugs. In contrast to Adina’s sense of literal and figurative alienation, Térèse is deeply human, motivated by love, ambition, and affection. Adina’s birth was a turning point for her as Térèse nearly died, and thereafter, she identifies herself as a mother, devoting her energies to providing for her child. She takes extra jobs to earn money and makes sacrifices to make ends meet and provide for Adina’s needs, like eyeglasses, speech therapy, and a private high school. This character arc represents the experiences of working-class, single mothers. Bertino characterizes her as disciplined and less wild than in her youth, but she is also a woman with a lively sense of humor. She appreciates luxury or adventure where she can find them, as when she sprays the air full of perfume in Beautyland or takes Adina to the beach with a bottle of wine for her 16th birthday.
Though not affectionate by nature, Térèse exhibits nurturing tendencies in her garden, which flourishes and grows over the years and helps connect her to the community within her apartment complex. Térèse also shows care and support for the residents of the care facility where she works, showing the compassionate side of her nature. She is a woman who wants to succeed on her own terms, as demonstrated in her response to the custom of giving birthday balloons at Adina’s school. She seeks romance, as demonstrated by her pursuit of relationships with Mark and then Charles. Her loyalty to Adina, even when she doesn’t understand Adina’s experience of being an alien, shows in how she supports her at readings. Térèse’s tenderness to Toni’s mom after Toni’s death likewise shows her compassionate heart.
She is a woman with a strong sense of self, lacking self-pity. Her commitment to improving herself and her circumstances emerges in how she pursues her education and advances in her career after Adina leaves home. Liberated from the need to support Adina, Térèse can focus her energies on herself and, like her garden, she flourishes.
Toni
Toni, as Adina’s closest friend, is a foil to Adina and sometimes serves a faintly antagonistic role when her relationship with Audrey sparks Adina’s jealousy and, later, when Toni’s ability to befriend and blend makes Adina hesitate to contact her in New York City. Toni’s solid sense of self, her sense of humor, and her hard-to-impress persona earn Adina’s admiration. Toni has several brothers, and this childhood of being surrounded by family, as well as a mother who requires care, teaches Toni a sense of interdependence that makes Adina aware of her own lack of this quality. Unlike Adina, Toni doesn’t appear concerned about being accepted by anyone other than the people she cares about. Toni’s understanding of herself, for instance her sexual attraction to women, juxtaposes with Adina’s own lack of sexual or romantic feelings.
Toni in some ways reflects Térèse’s complete lack of sentiment, particularly when she is facing her cancer diagnosis. At the same time, Toni spurs Adina to try new things, challenges her, and yet supports her, behaving as both mentor and friend. Toni’s complete and unquestioning acceptance of Adina’s description of herself as an alien—from the very beginning in elementary school, when Toni says she’s from Neptune—becomes the basis of their trust and connection, helping Adina to accept herself. This powerful friendship offers one reason for Adina’s devastating grief when Toni dies.
Mrs. Leafhalter
Mrs. Leafhalter plays a supporting role that expands in meaning throughout the text when Adina begins to see parallels between the two of them. At first, she is merely a representative of the community in their apartment complex, offering to babysit Adina when Térèse is occupied. She functions as an adult with authority and also as an object of curiosity to Adina, given that Mrs. Leafhalter has a very no-nonsense, straightforward, unsentimental approach to life. She likes to give advice and declare her opinions. Mrs. Leafhalter becomes the means by which Adina gets a glimpse of the world outside of Philadelphia, the larger world that she, for a moment, thinks that she will be a part of when the J girls invite her into their dance troupe. Later, Mrs. Leafhalter again offers Adina glimpses into the larger world when Adina inherits her TV. After some years of living in New York City, Adina recalls Mrs. Leafhalter with affection and thinks of her as a single woman supporting herself, just like Adina. Mrs. Leafhalter offers, if not a role model, an image of how a single human woman survives in the modern world.
Miguel
Miguel is briefly Adina’s love interest and companion, participating in what she later thinks of as her experiment with human romance. He, too, views himself as an alien, figuratively speaking, which is what first draws Adina to him. Miguel is a musician and artist, and what interests Adina is the sense that he, too, is alert to and observant of the world around him. He stirs her longing to connect, to feel less alone, and to find others like her. However, although he has a special relationship with sound—he sees shapes and images inspired by sounds—Miguel is not a good fit for her after all, as foreshadowed by the insulting treatment from his performing partner, Sarah Glide. Sarah makes it clear that Miguel’s circle will not be a place where Adina belongs. Their different degrees of sexual interest also create tension in the relationship, which leads Miguel to invoke again the alien metaphor, suggesting that they are from different planets. For Adina, this language confirms her loneliness and sense of alienation. While Miguel moves on to date someone else, Adina accepts that sex and romance aren’t experiences she desires to have. She misses the companionship, but mostly, Miguel confirms Adina’s sense that she is different and may never truly understand the human experience.
