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'One of our most inventive, stylish and sensuous writers... Girl in Landscape may well be the freshest American novel published so far this year.' Entertainment Weekly
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Product Description
Girl in Landscape offers a genre-bending, mind-expanding tale of a new frontier. Jonathan Lethem's novel is a science-fiction Western that evokes both the brooding tragedy of John Ford's The Searchers and the sexual precocity of Nabokov's Lolita.
Lethem's heroine is 14-year-old Pella Marsh, whose mother dies just as her family flees a post-apocalyptic Brooklyn for the frontier of a recently discovered planet. Hating her ineffectual father, and troubled by a powerful attraction to the virile but dangerous loner who holds sway over the little colony, Pella embarks on a course of discovery that will have tragic and irrevocable consequences - both for the humans in her community, and also for the mysterious and passive indigenous inhabitants, The Archbuilders.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
The second Lethem book that I have read and in some ways it has made me rethink how much I liked the first (GwOM). Again this is a "genre-bending" (This phrase seems to be used in every review I have seen) book, this time western-SF rather that detective-SF. Western-SF has a much larger heritage that detective-SF as huge amouts of early SF were really just westerns in space. You know the sort of thing, a group of collonists (pilgrims) set out in their spaceships (waggons) to found a new life on a new world (in the new world).
This is a bit different in that for all of it being set against a somewhat confusing SF-Western backdrop it is really a book about sexual awakening, coming of age and the perversions of man. Strangely the thrust of the book is lurking under the surface and does not really ever shine. You get the fealing that the author has tried too hard to fit too many things into one short book.
The final chapters seem particularly rushed, as if Lethem suddenly realised that the book was getting a bit long for a slim paperback. It is almost like a child who gets so absorbed in their english homework that they start writing something good, only to realise that they have already done their 500 words and cut the end of a good tale off in a fit of laziness.
The fact that Lethem (in these books) seems to want to show off his skill, at mixing and changing styles, at painting diverse characters, at rendering believable and solid worlds (all of which he does very well) makes me wonder if these books are not simply "journeyman" pieces, simply designed to show off his skill rather than to effect the reader.
They are wonderfully crafted pieces (aside from the ending of GiL) and I am left wanting to read his other books, but I wonder if I will ever find substance beneth the fine glaze that his words form
This is a bit different in that for all of it being set against a somewhat confusing SF-Western backdrop it is really a book about sexual awakening, coming of age and the perversions of man. Strangely the thrust of the book is lurking under the surface and does not really ever shine. You get the fealing that the author has tried too hard to fit too many things into one short book.
The final chapters seem particularly rushed, as if Lethem suddenly realised that the book was getting a bit long for a slim paperback. It is almost like a child who gets so absorbed in their english homework that they start writing something good, only to realise that they have already done their 500 words and cut the end of a good tale off in a fit of laziness.
The fact that Lethem (in these books) seems to want to show off his skill, at mixing and changing styles, at painting diverse characters, at rendering believable and solid worlds (all of which he does very well) makes me wonder if these books are not simply "journeyman" pieces, simply designed to show off his skill rather than to effect the reader.
They are wonderfully crafted pieces (aside from the ending of GiL) and I am left wanting to read his other books, but I wonder if I will ever find substance beneth the fine glaze that his words form
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
Pella and her family, leave behind an underground earth, their fathers political defeat, and their mother's unexpected death for the planet of the archbuilders. The great civilization built by the archbuilders is left in ruins, and the currenct archbuilders are deemed poor copies of their once great ancestors by the immigrants. In a dusty frontier "town" with a few other families, archbuilders, and the unspoken leader, Effram, Pella finds herself a political pawn. First to her father as he decides she and her brothers will not take the medication to protect them from the archbuilders virus. Then to Effram who is trying to undermine Pella's fathers' place in the town as a leader, and kill the remaining archbuilders. The adults fear and prejudice toward the archbuilders prevent them from understanding the archbuilders, and leads to violence in the town. These actions rip the town apart and damage the fragile community. Finally Pella, her family broken by the move, and tired of watching the destruction of the town by Efframs' anger at the remaining archbuilders, begins to fight for justice. For herself and the others. Pella's transformation by the events in the town and the archbuilders virus, and Efframs anger at the current archbuilders and obsession with their ancestors make for two compelling characters. Tension, anger, voyeriusm, and grief color this story making it wonderful and at times suspenseful read.
Format:Paperback
I guess the other reviewer was not very sensitive, or was blinded by the usual prejudice against SF. I do not want to waste your time defending SF and its dignity as a literary territory. Read Dick, read Disch, read Delany, read the early Ballard, and then judge, if you please. But saying that SF is not Lethem's favorite playground obviously means you don't know much/anything about Lethem. He's a brilliant, gifted, and highly original SF writer who turned mainstream when he wrote Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude. But he never forgot his roots. There's a hommage to Philip K. Dick even in the Fortress (which, being based on superheroes among many other things, is partly SF too). As for Girl, it's a great, moving, disquieting vision of America, projected on a faraway planet whose landscape has been cut and pasted from a disquieting masterpiece of US western mindscape, The Searchers. A book about families, children, multicultural relationships, thwarted ambition and crippled love, about loss and mothers, and motherless children. A great book.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
Reflective science fiction
This feels like an early work, but it's an enjoyable if slightly disturbing read. Science fiction (not, I think, his preferred genre) that deals with questions of identity,... Read more
Published on 12 Feb 2006 by Jezza
Gorgeous sci-fi western bildungsroman--what else?
"Gorgeous" is the adjective that kept coming to mind after reading this. A great hybrid of science-fiction, western and coming-of-age novels (a sort of... Read more
Published on 30 Aug 1999
Deep and Compelling
Jonathan Lethem has shown an amazing command of different genres, from the pulp "Gun, With Occasional Music" to the road trip "Amnesia Moon" to the twisted... Read more
Published on 2 Oct 1998
not the story for me.
Letham still writes quite well, and his imagination still astounds, but I just didn't like this one that much. I just couldn't identify with any of the aspects of the story. Read more
Published on 4 Sep 1998
Girl is the landscape
I have read all the Lethem books and I must say this one was up there with Amnesia Moon as the most complex. Read more
Published on 12 Jun 1998
Crazy and Unusual, but fun
This was quite a ride for me. I enjoyed this book and the creatures seemed very confusing, but I began to understand. I love the plot and the setting. Read more
Published on 2 Jun 1998
Weird & wonderful - Sci-fi with soul
This is what novel writing is all about, a truly imaginative exploration. Lethem may have been pegged as a science ficiton writer, but he is one of the most intriguing young... Read more
Published on 24 April 1998
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