BEINGS, by Ilana Masad
There are memories I’ve recounted so many times that, after a while, they no longer feel real. The story supplants the memory, and it’s as if I’m telling someone else’s tale. The reverse is also true: There are stories family members have told me about my childhood that I swear I recall, even though they relate events I was too young to possibly remember.
This — the way we craft narratives from memories, and the way memories become narratives — is the concept Ilana Masad plumbs in her engaging, elegant sophomore novel, “Beings.”
The novel weaves together three story lines. The first is the saga of an interracial couple who, in 1961, are driving home after a belated honeymoon in Canada when they see a “speck of light” in the sky that seems “to be going much too slow to be a good-luck charm and too fast to be a star at all.” The evening goes from peaceful to frantic, though the exact details of what occurred remain a haze for the pair.
Or, at least, this is how the narrator, whom we know only as “the Archivist,” tells it. For Masad frames the couple’s story as something that the Archivist, working in the present day, envisions. This mysterious figure unspools the couple’s tale — which they come to understand as an encounter with what they call “Beings” — from several boxes’ worth of discovered documents, including tapes of the couple’s sessions with a psychiatrist, newspaper clippings and a decades-old nonfiction book about their ordeal. “This is how I like to imagine them,” the Archivist explains.
The bulk of this story line, a book-within-a-book told in an omniscient third person, chronicles what the couple experience (or think they experience) the night they see that “peculiar light.” Interspersed throughout are asides from the Archivist, providing historical context, personal interpretations and other musings. The Archivist makes clear that they’re creating a novelistic retelling of the couple’s life after the strange incident, and occasionally confesses that sometimes they divert from the “truth” for storytelling purposes. They take liberties; they embellish.
The second story line comes in the form of letters from a young woman, Phyllis, to her lover, Rosa, whom she left behind in her hometown after Phyllis’s mother found out about their relationship. Phyllis writes from 1960s-era Boston, where she’s a copy editor at a newspaper. Phyllis tells Rosa about her foray into science fiction writing, her sessions with a psychiatrist who uses hypnosis in an attempt to turn Phyllis straight, and her eventual embrace of her sexual identity and queer activism.
The third and final story line returns to the Archivist and offers a peek into their life. The Archivist has their own mystery to solve when a documentary producer emails them a video of themself as a child, in which they’re telling a newscaster about the aliens they and their classmates encountered. The Archivist has no recollection of this, and can’t rely on their mother to help them remember: The Archivist describes her as having some sort of psychosis, and they don’t consider her a reliable narrator. Where did the video come from? Why doesn’t the Archivist remember it?
Most of the novel’s energy comes from Phyllis, who is bright and eager. Her voice — filled with despair, longing, hope — provides heart and humor in a novel that otherwise has a serious tone. The interracial couple’s story is a quiet page-turner. Their section follows them as they attempt to not only understand what happened to them that fateful night but also figure out how to tell their story to a public that is skeptical one moment, believers the next. The Archivist’s section is less riveting, serving primarily as a thematic ribbon, although it does have its own lovely arc.
The novel’s primary flaw lies in the Archivist’s asides in the couple’s tale — those interjections often seem defensive and patronizing as the Archivist attempts to overexplain their (and, ultimately, the book’s) mission. In one aside, the Archivist explains why they use language that appears dated or offensive; in another, they define the term “parasocial.” These digressions betray a lack of confidence in the audience’s intelligence.
They are, however, the minority. Masad’s wise novel is a restrained, gentle reflection on the nature of “truth” versus memory with an elegiac and satisfying ending. If some facts remain ambiguous — well, maybe, just maybe, it doesn’t really matter.
BEINGS | By Ilana Masad | Bloomsbury | 291 pp. | $28.99
The post Were They Abducted by Aliens, or Is Their Memory Just Spotty? appeared first on New York Times.
