Marie-Helene Bertino’s Beautyland isn’t sci-fi, but it aches for a time when most of our science today was actionable fiction. When Voyager beamed out the Golden Record in 1977 and the size of the universe hadn’t yet set in like a cosmological concrete. When Carl Sagan on the airwaves made it sound exciting how small we could be, if it meant we wouldn’t have to be alone. In Beautyland, we aren’t. But the alien, singular, very much is.

Bertino’s third novel, by far her temporally widest-ranging, charts forty years in the life of one Adina Giorno. Adina is a human-passing ET sent to earth in ‘77, the same year the Golden Record was ejected out of it. Adina (named after Bertino’s late friend Adina Talve-Goodman) grows up in northeast Philadelphia with a single Italian-American mother following an incident of domestic violence; she finds herself a queer Italian clique of friends; she works odd jobs and gains a platform to tell her story following a career move to NYC. All the while she faxes to her alien hive mind superiors about what she observes about human behavior: the sociality, what organs turn them on, the unfamiliar tendency of things on this planet to end.

With a well-trodden genre of plot, the book entrusts Adina the keys to its narrative engine. Imagine Sōseki’s I am a Cat except it’s space operatic and you root for everyone instead of no one.

Both Adina’s faxes and the third-person narration flanking them are wry and emotionally potent, each sentence inventing an efficient new way to startle you. A verb that works where a verb shouldn’t work; a choice of noun that takes time to digest but, like Adina, beckons for your understanding. She parses her friend and confidant Toni’s way of eating an eggroll as saving her favorite part, the “crispy exoskeleton,” for last, as if it’s a creature tumbled out of a Ridley Scott feature film.

Every word in this book is quintuply wound, laser precise, without being overwritten. The Jazz-cup-tinted nostalgia for roller skate parks and The Price is Right wardrobe malfunctions and crappy box sets of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos recedes as Adina ages and sobers up to her place (or lack thereof) on this planet. The wonder of space begins to evaporate, for Adina, the closer to our present day knowledge of it we hurtle towards. She tries enchanting the bright, distant quasar SETI picked up on in 2015 as the gluttonous owl from the old Tootsie Pop ads, but it’s clear her old magic won’t do the trick. Beautyland knows this, has gone through this. That’s the point.

Beautyland can sometimes seem too circumscribed within Bertino's own life experiences to put its kinda-sorta-sci-fi bent, or Adina’s fax machine pearls of wisdom, into action on the page. The plot feels preordained; even as Adina is the central character in front of whom reality unfurls, she often comes off as commenting over a reality that’s already happened. Readers new to Bertino also may struggle at times to see where Adina’s voice breaches the horizon between the author’s poetic license and a genuinely altered mode of perception. After all, both of them are astonishingly attuned to observation.

Beautyland is a rather passive story, in which learning to see the world for what it is fails to stop it from doing what it does to people, randomly, mercilessly. Just because Adina can’t stand the concept of series having to end (it makes her weepy to the point of nausea when the end credits roll) doesn’t grant her any sort of time-warping abilities to keep the inimitable Ted Danson on her screen past the Cheers finale, or The Good Place finale 27 years and one grayed head of hair later.

The book itself loathes that it has to obey the concept of an ending, but that’s what you get when you’ve been spending the whole time playing squarely on earth’s turf, by earth’s rules. The last section of Beautyland lifts its pretenses of speculative fiction for passages that are wholly realistic, gutting, and unfairly lived in. Things swell and fizzle out if only because that’s what they tend to do.

With mysticism for all things retro and a gifted language for imploring the everyday, Beautyland starts with a telescope and carries on with a microscope. Bertino’s created a novel full of slow burns that ignite at the nastiest possible times, of characters learning to be friends before learning to be human. If ever we launch another Golden Record into the cold depths of space, this book might function as one of our zeitgeist’s most intuitive time capsules. And we can also teach them a thing or two about the best method for eating an egg roll.