Aliens as Metaphor, and as Aliens
Beings (Bloomsbury, $28.99 ), the gripping, sensitive, and beautifully written second novel from Ilana Masad (All My Mother’s Lovers) is ostensibly about close encounters with extra-terrestrials visiting earth with all the standard alien fare: big-eyed grays, lights in the sky, orbs landing in rural fields and forests, even visits to spaceships.
But what the novel is truly grappling with is the ways in which humans are alien to one another.
Three related narratives are braided throughout: A biracial couple of the early sixties grapple with a brief alien abduction and the fallout of making public their experience. Masad writes, “That was what it felt like: the prejudices he saw all around him doing just what they should not do, what he wished he could prevent them from doing, and jumping the blood brain barrier.” The white wife craves connection with others in the alien abduction community: “Around the next bend, the trees thinned out….and when she looked through the binoculars again, she felt the early stirrings of what much later she would recognize as awe: the thing above was huge, round.” Her stoic Black veteran husband, however, shuns the spotlight.
In the same period, a young lesbian writes longing letters to her ex-lover and composes sci-fi stories while navigating life during a time period in which same sex relationships, like interracial relationships, were illegal.
The last thread of the novel involves a present-day character, a non-binary “Archivist” in a research library, who has procured the papers of the interracial couple, and the sci-fi writer above, and become privately obsessed with both histories. The Archivist has their own past with being “other”—they were one of a group of elementary students who witnessed an alien sighting. While they have no memory of this sighting, and while their mentally ill mother believes all manner of conspiracies except for the real possibility their child has seen aliens—they work to find the truth both, in their own past and within the archives they spend their free time and work hours sifting through, which we have read as well.
Tightly structured in a basketweave of ringing sentences, Masad’s accomplished novel had me hanging onto every word. Though it starts out as an almost speculative novel or alternative history, the reader quickly realizes it’s very much about the present day. As the characters watch Nixon get elected, struggling to understand how it could be, struggling to understand racism and homophobia, and other modern ills, the subtext is clear: all beings can be othered, treated as aliens—what’s most important are the connections between us.
Bethany Ball is the author of What to Do About the Solomons and The Pessimists (both Grove Atlantic) and lives in New York.
