Identity and Ambiguity: Letham's Portrait of the West

GIRL IN LANDSCAPE

By Jonathan Letham

Doubleday Books

208 pp, $22.95

Fiction fans who relish in richness of prose would find Girl in Landscape only bordering on satisfaction. A review in Timeout NY put it best: "Most often, [Girl in Landscape] reads like a children's book for adults," a description hardly convincing for admirers of the silky lushness of, say, the novels of Rushdie or Morrison. Much more than style, however, the ideas expounded in the novel and the way author Jonathan Lethem structures them raise this book to its own, medium-high pedestal. At the most basic level, the novel is a literary reenactment of John Ford's 1956 Western The Searchers, which serves both as a tribute to the Great American cinematic genre of the Western and as a questioning of American notions of frontier and otherness. At another level, the book is a coming-of-age story of a girl's passage into womanhood. Finally, and at a much more interesting level, it is a laudable inquiry of language.

The story takes place in the near future, when New York residents live underground and travel via personal subway cars because of a fatally potent sun. The protagonist, fourteen-year-old Pella Marsh, leaves for a recently discovered planet with her two younger brothers and her father after her mother dies. The family moves into a small colony, a town in the making, where Americans live among the planet's indigenous inhabitants, the Archbuilders. Pella eventually becomes infected by a virus that enables her to spy unnoticed on other colonists. As the plot progresses, she develops a controlling attraction for Efram Nugent, the man who has lived in the colony for the longest period of time and who has assumed a degree of power over the other inhabitants.

Lethem's portrayal of the colony evokes the dusty, wood-ridden, disorganized towns of the Wild West glorified in the Western film genre. However, the colony also reminds us that these towns constituted an actual frontier for the colonists, a territory uncharted for them in which to institute their conception of civilization from a clean slate. The inter-actions between the Americans of the Archbuilder colony seem so elemental, summon such basic dilemmas and yield such unproductive results that the reader can only wonder why the Wild West was not indeed wilder.

The alienness of the Archbuilders in the eyes of the Americans, for its part, conjures up traditional images that Westerners derive from their abhorrence for-or fascination with--Native Americans. For most of the colonists, the Archbuilders peaceful, contemplative lifestyle and enchantment and play with the English language make them no more than stupid vagabonds. For the rest, like Clement, these same attributes deserve admiration and scrutiny and elicit awe. Although the latter is far more noble than the former, both are ultimately essentializing and patronizing pictures of an "other culture." It is only Pella that can sort through such simplifications and make fair value judgements about individual Archbuilders, as her inquisition at the end regarding a crime an Archbuilder was accused of committing demonstrates.

It is the book's reflection on language, however, that deserves most attention. Throughout the novel, the power of words, as well as the notion of meaning, constantly comes into question. In the beginning, Pella confesses that she relies on her mother for words that serve as an "antidote" to her father's political speak. In a conversation between Efram and Pella's father Clement, this very speak implies the threat that Clement represents for Efram's power. Toward the end, Efram dies specifically because of the accusatory, lying words a child utters about him. This causation becomes clear a moment before his death. When Pella and Morris, who voices the accusation, stand before Efram: "He [Efram] understood. She [Pella] would stand by the words. He knew the power in them. He should."

All these examples hint at the power of language among the characters in the book. What is most striking and intelligent about this pondering on language, however, pertains to the notion of meaning. Pella is entirely and explicitly aware of the ambiguity of words, the indeterminate meanings of utterances. Archbuilder speech baffles her, often to the point of exasperance. During a sexually-tense moment between her and Efram, she borders on swooning and discerns the reality of her situation from dreams based on what words she hears. If they are too loaded with meaning, they probably belong to Efram and are thus not dreamt. Her awareness of the arbitrary nature of meaning seems more the state of mind of a language philosopher or an applied linguist (i.e. of a post-deconstruction academic) rather than a young adolescent. The issues that haunt Pella are the stuff of very recent debate and need to seep through a whole super-structure for a teenager to unknowingly apply them in her everyday life-even if she is "mature for her age," as other characters describe her. Pella might thereby embody a prophetic vision on Lethem's part: a future generation entirely immersed in the indeterminacy of meaning.

Girl in Landscape thus revisits the Western film genre, offers a noteworthy character development and provides a profound, albeit tacit, discussion of language and meaning--all compensating for an overly transparent style. Maybe Lethem's next works will stray, stylistically, from the clarity that one of his epigraphs calls for, quoting none other than John Wayne: "I don't trust ambiguity." Ambiguity plagues words for Pella; perhaps it should begin to spill into Lethem's prose as well.