Beautyland

Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses suicide and anti-asexual bias.

In Beautyland, Adina’s identity as an alien, either as a metaphor or a literal fact, explains why she never quite feels that she belongs to or understands the human communities around her. In always feeling that her home and her people are somewhere else that she cannot reach, Adina’s life is defined by a sense of alienation. Loneliness, too, becomes a defining characteristic of her life, one that she is increasingly aware of and embraces. Accentuating both her loneliness and sense of alienation is grief, first over what she does not have, and then over losing several of the few relationships that do have meaning for her. The novel suggests that a search for belonging can occupy someone’s life and lead to despair if unfulfilled.

Adina’s loneliness begins as a child when she longs for affection and attention from her single mother but doesn’t get it. Visiting Beautyland, Adina’s joy at spraying the perfume is mostly due to sharing this moment of happiness with her mother. For the most part, she spends evenings doing homework alone while her mother talks on the phone to Mark. With no siblings and no friends, solitude becomes familiar to Adina; as she tells Dominic at one point, she’s never known anything other than loneliness. Her relationships with Miguel, her mother, Toni, Dominic, her dog, or people at work don’t fundamentally change this sense that she doesn’t quite belong, and this creates its own grief for her.

As comfortable as she is with solitude, there are times when Adina does want to belong, as with the dance troupe with the J girls; after they reject her, her loneliness becomes acute. She feels a sense of belonging and community with the cast of the school play, and later with her fellow servers at the Red Lion, but these are brief periods of her life that come to a natural end. When Adina arranges to travel to visit Pando, the aspen grove, it seems an effort to belong—to relate to creatures who are like her, in a sense—but her panic and ultimate choice not to proceed suggest that she may not be open to such an experience. Instead, she chooses to move to New York City, where she takes refuge in her anonymity.

During her time in New York City, Adina reflects that “the most significant relationships in her life are with the little dog and the SETI institute and Yolanda K. because she values her no matter how few lunges she completes” (211). Adina has friendships, particularly with Toni and Dominic, and she continues to be on good terms with her mother, but she doesn’t recognize these relationships as sufficiently nurturing. She recognizes that the norm is for humans to form pairs or social groups, but because Adina doesn’t feel that same urge and because many people around her are prejudiced against asexuality, she perceives this as a lack in herself. Adina’s mother reinforces this when she believes that Adina’s lack of interest in romantic attachment indicates a failure in Adina’s personality and her own parenting. The cultural narratives about aliens that Adina looks to for advice on her own life always have the alien returning home to its own people. In contrast, Adina’s continued posting on Earth, later marked by a lack of response to her faxes, leaves her in a perpetual state of isolation.

Adina’s perception of herself as an extraterrestrial helps explain to her why she doesn’t truly feel that she understands, or connects to, the people around her. Adina’s reflection on her time with Miguel as an experiment reflects her difficulty, as an adult, in forming relationships with any depth and substance. Instead of participating in conventional activities like dating, cohabiting, or raising children, Adina continues to think of the human organism as something distinct and separate, while she is something else.

The novel portrays this state as painful and ultimately devastating. When the adult Adina reflects that “[p]erhaps she’s never been anything other than lonely,” she connects it to other states of pain and disappointment, thinking, “[l]oneliness […] can contain anger, hunger, fear, jealousy” (287-88). Adina becomes so lonely after Toni’s death that she derives a small sense of companionship from the frozen body of her little dog. The astronomical discoveries throughout the book—the fascination and brief excitement they generate and then the gradual dullness of familiarity or obstacle of distance—provide a metaphor for how Adina’s relationships with others never become truly sustaining; other people are in her orbit but not connected to her. Instead, the novel portrays Adina being gradually swallowed by her grief after Toni dies, to the point that she chooses to obey the directive to deactivate and hopes that she will eventually find herself among beings to whom she truly feels that she belongs.