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.
Part 3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 3: “Red Supergiant (Work)”
Part 3, Pages 143-155 Summary
In the 1990s, Voyager I becomes the furthest human-made object in space. Adina works the early bird shift at the Red Lion Diner, serving customers the daily special from 4:00 pm to midnight. The regulars like Adina and the veteran servers nickname her “Little One.” She attends college and reports to her superiors, who reveal that there are others on Earth as reporters. They say that there is no need to combine with them, but “Adina longs to combine” (145). Her mother is busy with work. Adina grieves when Carl Sagan dies, feeling that one of her fathers is gone. She decides that, unlike what Dakota told her, human opportunity is like a pie, and there are only a certain number of slices.
The servers at work stand up for Adina when a customer sexually harasses her. A classmate, Keith Nguyen, who runs the student newspaper, asks Adina to write an article on the lacrosse match. Instead of sports reporting, Adina fills the article with her observations. At work, she meets Mrs. Goldman, who sold books to her at the flea market and thought that Adina would become a writer.
Dominic visits, and Adina is happy to see a friend, but she feels the absence of Toni. Adina tells Dominic that she’s never been anything but lonely. Dominic reveals that he is attracted to men. Adina wants to linger in that moment when he drops her off because she feels that those moments are “vestibules” when people become honest, “the only time adults appear in focus, aware of themselves as humans” (154). She feels that these exchanges are sincere moments of connection.
Adina continues her faxes, and her superiors reply that her observations are mediocre. However, not everyone dislikes her observations: Keith says that everyone loved Adina’s article and asks her to write more.
Part 3, Pages 156-172 Summary
Adina’s mother’s garden continues to grow. She shares her produce with other residents in the complex. Mrs. Leafhalter dies suddenly, and her niece gives Adina and her mother Mrs. Leafhalter's television. Adina watches and is fascinated by a documentary on the colony of aspen trees in Utah named Pando, “a single organism, the biggest on Earth […] Comprised of many but solo as a star” (157). Adina continues to attempt to describe human behavior to her superiors, who expect logic. Adina enjoys the feeling of completion at the end of each serving shift. Meanwhile, she attempts to send an email to Toni but doesn’t hear back. Janae visits the diner and reflects on high school as the best time of her life. During another shift, Adina learns that her favorite early bird customer, Lottie, has died. She reflects in a fax on how human beings fetishize the heart and have so many expressions around that word.
Adina arranges to travel to Utah to see Pando. At the airport, she studies a family and thinks that they seem to be performing their lives. At 22 years old, taking her first flight, Adina is terrified that she is going to die. She reads beauty magazines to distract herself. When the flight attendant asks her what she is afraid of, Adina answers, “Staying the same forever” (164). At Salt Lake City, Adina arranges for a train ticket and begins the journey home.
Adina decides to quit her job and move to New York City. She buys a car that has a cassette deck. The servers at work give her a send-off. Later, Adina sits down with her mother and tells her about her experiences as an alien. In return, Adina’s mother describes her birth and how Térèse almost died. She says that it sounds like Adina doesn’t want to be in the world. Adina packs her car, chooses her playlist, and waves goodbye to Flying Man, still posted outside Auto World. As she approaches New York City, she thinks of it as her third and final lost home.
Part 3 Analysis
This short section focuses on Adina’s years of college; these years are a stage of passing-through, connecting Adina’s high school years and her out-of-character move to New York City. This period presents an opportunity for reflection, such as when Adina encounters Janae at the diner and contemplates their very different high school experiences. Adina feels trapped in the familiar yet has difficulty navigating the unfamiliar, as demonstrated by her inability to send Toni an email. The distance from her friend, accentuated by Dominic’s visit, deepens her loneliness and her struggles with Communication and the Limits of Language. Her connection to her home planet feels more distant without the night classroom, and when she tries to express herself, she encounters dismissive replies from her superiors.
As she comes to a deeper understanding of herself, Bertino frames Adina as a queer character, as Dominic will identify her in Part 4—she is later identified as asexual. Her narrative does not follow the conventional linearity of her peers who enjoy romance in high school, go to college, and then get a job, and she hides and attempts to come to terms with a large part of herself—her extraterrestrial identity—while feeling discomfort with sexual and romantic experiences with men. She attempts to frame her feelings in her preferred language as she tries to communicate with her mother about being an extraterrestrial in a “coming out” conversation, as Bertino has described it, after which Adina feels frustrated and invalidated (Shelly, Lucie. “In ‘Beautyland,’ An Italian American Extraterrestrial in Philly is Humanity’s Sharpest Scribe.” Electric Lit, 28 Mar 2024). Part 3 therefore sharpens the metaphor of the extraterrestrial as someone who is different from what normative society dictates and desires community and acceptance.
The aspen colony of Pando, a real entity, provides a metaphor for Adina’s sense of herself: a distinct person yet supposedly connected to a larger entity in ways she doesn’t fully understand. Her choice not to visit the aspen colony after all, whether motivated by fear or aversion, suggests that she may not yet be able to confront something about herself, or rather, that there is some self-knowledge she continues to avoid. The dramatic shift of circumstances, to New York City, conveys Adina seeking to connect with her two closest friends, Toni and Dominic, who both live there. On a more macro scale, it is a quest to be part of a larger organism on Earth: the largest and most diverse city in the US. Adina, maturing into adulthood, longs for new experiences and feels The Desire for Belonging.
While the car gives her new independence, and the other servers at the diner offer a sense of community, Adina’s discussion with her mother, in which she feels her mother fails to understand her viewpoint, creates a further rift in her life. Adina feels that she lost a father when Carl Sagan dies, as she had imagined that this influential man understood her; now, in a sense, she has lost her mother. She continues to imagine that the Flying Man, one of the landmarks of her childhood, is communicating to her, representing the home to which Adina is saying goodbye.
