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I made the mistake of not finishing reading Beautyland before I attended a conversation with and reading by its author. Marie-Helene Bertino was gracious and lovely and fascinating and low-key on fire in her candor on how she approached writing the book and writing in general. She's a wonderful writer from whom I expect many more crazy novels.

She did a great job of foiling those in the audience who had finished reading the book from spoiling it for the rest of us, but even though I didn't know how it would end and hadn't gotten anywhere near the part she read, the question-and-answer session definitely affected how I read the book, and I take full responsibility for that because I had the book (thanks, Erin!) long before the reading.

The novel is written in short vignettes, and Bertino herself mentioned during the event that everyone hates vignettes, and that includes me. Despite that, the novel moves along quite evenly. The structure and central conceit help make the vignettes work, but what really does it is that the book is completely chronological--as far as I could tell, at least--so that the reader doesn't have to worry about whether the vignettes are out of order and what that means if they are.

Without giving anything away, how you approach this book will likely determine how you read it. I was reading it one way before Bertino's reading, but I read it the opposite way after I saw her, mainly because I thought her way was correct, even though she emphasized that either way of reading (or a multiplicity of ways of reading) is fine.

Adina, the main character, changes a great deal over the course of the story, but again, those changes can mean very different things depending on how you read it. She's a keen observer, an almost ur-reporter of her surroundings. Because she was born the same year I was, there's great comfort in knowing and recognizing some of the otherwise obscure references to random events from the late '70s through to the early '90s. There are Philadelphia-specific references whose significance I don't understand; but Bertino includes just enough repetition of key places, phrases, and events so that the reader is never confused about what's important. Although I'm very different from Adina, I can really relate to her middle-school (what we called "junior high") feelings of alienation and being willing to do almost anything to belong.

The timeline grows fuzzy beginning in Adina's mid-twenties, and it doesn't really fully resolve itself until she's forty. There's not enough life content grounding the story chronologically after September 11, but also too much time spent on that same hazy time. It's like I needed more to understand it, but I didn't actually want more, because the last two sections of the book are the parts that drag the most.

There's a RadioShack scene, and it's really important. And there's no mention of requiring the customer to give their ZIP Code. Bertino wrote this scene perfectly.

I found one typo. I found at least two geographical mistakes, but one of them is ambiguous, and I haven't researched the other one long enough to know whether Bertino got it wrong. Do any of these mistakes matter? The geographical ones probably don't, but I bet the author would be annoyed by the typo.