Beautyland v. Great Expectations
The 2025 Tournament of Books, presented by Field Notes, is an annual battle royale among 16 of the best novels of the previous year.
MARCH 12 • OPENING ROUND
Beautyland
v. Great Expectations
Judged by Meher Manda
Meher Manda is a writer of poetry, fiction, and culture criticism, editor, and educator, fully formed in Bombay, India, though currently stationed in the U S of A. She's the author of the poetry chapbook Busted Models (No, Dear / Small Anchor, 2019) and her work has been published in The Margins, the Los Angeles Review, Catapult, Epiphany, Kweli, and elsewhere. A Best New Poets and Best of the Net Anthology nominee, she is collaborating on a political graphic novel forthcoming from Hachette India in 2025. Her writing wrestles with the tensions that splinter the self from state / woman from body / singular from spectacle / guttural from ordinary. Known connections to this year’s contenders: “I'm friendly and familiar with Alison Espach, who is also based in Providence.” / mehermanda.com
Chalk it up to our lives in the throes of one disaster after the other, or the obsessive proliferation of screens to doom-scroll, but lately the world registers to me more like a simulation gone rogue. There are days when everything feels new. There is a strangeness to my side of the bed, an oddity to the items and accouterments of daily living I’ve surrounded myself with. Somedays this feeling persists in every sensation. My body, the strange pulse of its fluids, the instinctive nods and hums of life: Every beat registers like a new imprint. In silence, I’m compelled to consider how bizarre and out of control our make-believe of social performance is. In loneliness, I’m compelled to consider if there are rules here known to all but me.
Am I naming an alien sensation when I say that in this age of hyper screen-dependency, more clarified is the feeling of isolation from an in-group. Why only a few hours ago I caught my phone throwing my reflection back at me: empty and devoid of rigor, not how I imagine it sees the world. What had I been looking at? Or rather who? Is it even important? Perhaps the tell is embedded in the word after all: in alienation, the feeling of an alien body at odds with everything else. In singularity, this feeling is universal. The two books I was entrusted to read pulled me to a time before digital ubiquity, but understand very much the feeling of strangeness.
“If when I explain human behavior you insist on logic, we won’t get far,” writes Adina Giorno, short-term earthling but permanent fixture in Marie-Helene Bertino’s Beautyland. Adina’s distanced observation isn’t the case of a strange moment removed from the beats of the everyday, but a strange life “activated” through Adina’s deployment on Earth to better understand human life and its rules of operation. When Adina marks her debut in the world, her Sicilian American mother nearly dies from impact but lives so mother-daughter can function as a parallel but wholly disjointed twosome. This is America in the 1970s, caught in the throes of the Cold War, on an obsessive hunt for extraterrestrial cred. It’s the decade of the Apollo program and Star Wars, when space exploration would find eager champions and proselytizers in pop culture.
In 1977, the year America launches Voyager 1 into space, containing among other things an audio-visual disk compiled with sounds of Earth, Adina too is sent to Earth by her “superiors” to collect observations and findings and dispatch them back to her “home planet.” She learns this is possible through a fax machine—a delightfully anachronistic choice considering the conceit—and begins faxing bite-sized commentary and impressions about human life, ranging from the mundane to the surprisingly profound:
“Motorcyclists are not expected to be women. Women who ride motorcycles do not want you to know they’re women”
“Human beings did not think their lives were challenging enough so they invented roller coasters.”
“Human beings don’t like when other humans seem happy.”
“Dogs are the best we can do.”
Like the music of Chuck Berry and Wolfgang Mozart, the tongues of English, Urdu, Korean, and Telugu, and images of animal and human life that populated the Golden Record on the Voyager 1 spacecraft—as if a singular audio-visual disk can purport to capture the complex, the heartbreaking, and the extraordinary that is sentient life on Earth—Adina fashions herself into the eyes, ears, fingers, and beating heart for her people living far away. In doing so, she assumes the English language as her only tool which, naturally, proves to be increasingly inept as Adina comes of age and circuits through the motions of loss and grief. As Adina admits to her superiors, “Language is pitiable when weighed against experience.”
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How then would you use language to even remotely capture a political zeitgeist as monumental as the one behind Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential run? Obama would run a historic campaign, defeating Hillary Clinton first in the Democratic primaries, and later John McCain to become the first African American president of the United States, an office he would go on to hold for two terms. It remains an unprecedented event in American history—even if the sheen has worn off with time and due reflection on Obama’s time in office. That a country built on the backs of enslaved people with a fraught, centuries-long racial history would show up in hoards to vote for a Black president was one part of the puzzle that promised a pathway for a more progressive America. On the other hand, a look at the powerbrokers, donors, and capitalists that made Obama’s presidential campaign a fiscally sustainable endeavor, who would go on to flatten Obama’s rhetorical radicalism in office, was the other part of the picture.
In the middle is David Hammond, the passive, un-heroic—because there can only be one in this world—protagonist of Vinson Cunningham’s Great Expectations, who finds himself unexpectedly working in the fundraising committee of Obama’s 2008 campaign.
“I’d somehow groped my way to the middle of the world. The middle of a world, at least. Or an unseen perch quite near the center, with an excellent view,” Hammond admits in narratorial voice. It is 2007. When the skinny senator from Illinois with the “complexion of a cardboard box left out to bleach in the Sun” is announcing his bid for the greatest of all American seats, Hammond is a 21-year-old college flunk-out, employed as a private tutor and spending weekends with a baby daughter he shares with a former girlfriend, living in Harlem with his widowed mother. A series of right-place-at-the-right-time situations later, Hammond finds himself rubbing shoulders with—or at least confirming their names on donors lists—some of the wealthiest, most influential people at the crossroads of financial capital and political power.
The more salons, drawing rooms, and mansions Hammond enters, the more he learns just how closed-in and exclusive American polity really is.
Obama, who is identified in the novel as “the Senator,” appears sparingly and briefly, flitting from one donor event to another, shaking hands and delivering confident platitudes about America’s future. To Hammond’s keen, erudite gaze, the Senator is meant to represent the apotheosis of divine manifestation—hence, the precise nature of the candidate’s speech-making that evokes for Hammond the “black-pulpit touch” designed to touch, buoy, and yes, proselytize to his sympathetic voting block. “The Senator had begun, even then, at the outset of his campaign to understand his supporters, however small their number at that point, as congregants, as members of a mystical body, their bonds invisible but real,” Hammond says. To America, the Senator is suggested to be in the league of its greatest leaders; he even announces his run on the steps of the Illinois statehouse much like Abraham Lincoln did 150 years earlier. He is the vessel through which a fractured, broken American state—particularly in the ongoing 2008 financial crash—will mushroom and come out whole. Thus, the title of the novel; much like its intertextual ode to a literary tome, the Senator too exemplifies America and its early makers’ destined greatness.
But if the Senator is in the league of the extraordinary gentlemen who predated him, then Hammond too lives in the shadow of their empire’s fault lines. From his vantage point, close to seductive capital but without any real influence, Hammond studies the campaign and its stockbrokers with a camera’s eye, intent on tying up what he sees with what he knows: his own life, delivered through the lens of his faith, his relationship with sex, and the women who form his planetary companions in the incessant churn. Much like Adina, Hammond too acts as our interlocutor, making us privy to a world that remains squarely inaccessible to large swathes of Americans, that was inaccessible to him too until he finds himself more and more entrenched, if only in the way of learning who the modern kingmakers of the country are. The more salons, drawing rooms, and mansions Hammond enters, the more he learns just how closed-in and exclusive American polity really is.
The outside-in gaze is pilfered through the observations of Great Expectations, and the alienation here too is systematic to the arrangement of Americanness. Hammond finds himself on the outskirts of a mammothian project, with legs long enough to outlive any singular presidential campaign, and grows, increasingly under its prominence, inward, to interrogate, intellectualize, and confirm his own readings of the self and the world. Adina too leaves Philadelphia for New York City, and despite this opening of her world, expands inward, this time with a dog to boot, as hurt, confusion, and agony register more prominently on her selfhood. Peculiarly, both novels also find themselves connected through another thread: of characters sketching wanton father-figures in inspiring moments. For Adina, this comes in the way of astronomer Carl Sagan, a regular television fixture in ’80s America, whose insistence upon extraterrestrial life confirms Adina’s personhood. For Hammond, a slate of could-be-father-figures populate the novel, starting with his 17-year-old cousin Johnny and his friend Angel, back when Hammond is 10. “I remember thinking that these boys were my two fathers,” Hammond says.
America is a country of oddities, and in both Beautyland and Great Expectations, its preternatural fixation with singularity, its spectacle of immenseness, and its self-ordained destiny find reflections, in spite of the 30 years that separate the two. Ultimately, I came to appreciate Beautyland more for its heroine, a figure abandoned by her people and suspended in grief, whose observations get sharper and more biting even as she continues to withdraw from Earth life. On the other hand, the lens of theological reading that is applied in Great Expectations shifts so often out of focus that I found it difficult to truly stick to a consistent narrative tissue.
I’m picking Beautyland to advance to the next round for unsettling me with the foibles of its protagonist. In every way Adina registered the world anew, I found a new language to swallow the tics-and-tocks of this strange life. However, I will recommend you read both books to find the one that challenges or comforts you—whatever you need at this moment—more. As for me, I’m going to keep turning to books that attempt to name and define the singular, even as the world quickly accelerates to a scary, unnamable point in the horizon.
Advancing:
Beautyland
Match Commentary
with Meave Gallagher and Alana Mohamed
Meave Gallagher: It seems strange that I couldn’t tell which book Judge Manda preferred until the penultimate paragraph. Before then, I would’ve guessed Great Expectations because she spends more time with it, but unlike Beautyland, it was so—unsurprising. I kept waiting for his single fatherhood to become an important point, but the judge, like the novel, just breezed on past it. I am no one’s parent, but my husband and his first wife had a son when they were barely 20, divorced when their son was four, and you could not tell the story of either of their lives without including chapters on parenthood. My husband worked so hard to be a good father, and 27 years later, he and his son have a closer relationship than many adult children and parents I know. Even without being the primary parent, Hammond seems to have trouble remembering he has a child, which is weird. Does this say anything about him? I have no idea! Why is the baby there at all?
Alana Mohamed: This one certainly kept me on my toes. It seems like Judge Manda was mostly interested in dissecting the alienation each novel explores and, sometimes, we end up dwelling more on the thing that troubles us than delights. I can sympathize with the alienation a certain kind of person, and especially a person of color, might feel after the elation of electing America’s first Black president wears off. Hindsight is 20/20, etc. I spent most of my college years protesting drone strikes, but I remember the excitement and the sense that we were starting a new chapter of American history. I think there’s probably merit in chronicling how that felt, what it took, and how willing we all were to look away.
Meave: Great Expectations kind of slid through my brain. The Sincere Black Senator is as calculating and clever as any other politician, and lets one of his bundlers take the fall for very obvious campaign funding fraud. His halo, it is tarnished. I know that song: canvassing for a ballot proposition, in a line to hear Obama speak at a Black church in Oakland, and everyone buzzing with excitement; reading about how his policy positions weren’t very progressive and that we were pinning our hopes on a handsome young charmer; thinking, Maybe he’ll be better in office! I was 25, and after so many trash leaders, I wanted someone who seemed new and excited about the job. Ha ha. Call me jaded as the government is rapidly dismantled by a bunch of halfwit Hitler Youth and its components sold off to private entities so they can make all government services into a claw machine, but not only didn’t it shock me, I had trouble reading Hammond’s shock as well. He seemed more surprised to be invited to be part of the transition team than at the blatant corruption. Was that author Cunningham’s point? For this being a fairly straightforward story about a campaign aide who discovers the rot at the center, it was awfully reserved.
Alana: I see what you mean about the story sliding through the brain—I think it’s very studied in some ways and I’m not sure how much that is Hammond feeling out of step with the world he’s in versus the consequences of Cunningham being a critic himself. And regarding Hammond’s daughter—I think there’s much to be said about how Hammond treats his family and the women he encounters. Judge Manda would probably agree with you that Hammond was hard to get a read on—he’s “passive” and he “intellectualizes” his experiences with his “erudite” gaze.
Meave: What is an “erudite gaze?” His eyes look smart?
Alana: Ha! I guess I read that as a nod to his filtering everything through books he’s read and classes he’s taken. Judge Manda credits Beautyland’s win to how Adina’s “observations get sharper and more biting” as she withdraws—it seems like that feeling was missing with Hammond’s narration, but that absence also allowed Judge Manda to write some of her own into this judgment. Do you think Beautyland got the short end of the stick this round, even though it took the win?
Meave: Lots more words about boring Hammond and his apathy that appears as impermeability that Adina got shunted to the side. I nominated Beautyland and I had to refresh myself on its plot—it’s been so long since I read it, and the judgment didn’t jog my memory. So I turned to some random pages and was immediately reminded why I liked it so much. When Beautyland hurt, it hurt. When it was weird, it was funny. Adina could be an alien, or she could be on the autism spectrum; her observations about how miserable all the Friends were, or the one Anthropologie model whose smile looks desperate, or her lists about good things. And Butternut! I am crying right now thinking about Butternut. Going by Judge Manda’s word alone, how do you even begin to imagine Adina? A girl who faxes lists, and…?
Alana: Yeah, I do think Adina herself is not as clearly rendered as Hammond in this judgment. When Judge Manda writes that the English language “proves to be increasingly inept as Adina comes of age and circuits through the motions of loss and grief,” I couldn’t tell if that was a good thing or a bad thing because we moved on to our deep dive on Great Expectations.
Meave: “Circuits” is an interesting word choice. Also, again, strange to mention that the English language becomes less useful when Adina ends up a successful author. In English.
Alana: Judge Manda says she walked away with “new language to swallow the tics-and-tocks of this strange life.” Great Expectations, in contrast, is an “intertextual ode,” harkening back to Charles Dickens and the Bible and as referential as the Senator himself. Judge Manda compares Adina’s transmissions to “the music of Chuck Berry and Wolfgang Mozart, the tongues of English, Urdu, Korean, and Telugu, and images of animal and human life that populated the Golden Record on the Voyager 1 spacecraft.” I wish she would have spent more time on what Adina’s pastiche of the human world did well as compared to Hammond’s “narratorial” voice.
Meave: I mean, the Golden Record and Carl Sagan feature rather prominently in the novel. Adina considers Sagan “one of her fathers…who never stopped searching for her. He will continue forever, into the past.” What does Adina mean by that? I paused to consider her observations so many times while reading Beautyland. What do you suppose her final faxed word was? Do you think invoking The Little Prince was hackneyed or even sadder for its aptness? I can’t believe the last thing she does is ride the Staten Island Ferry. Oh, I’m crying more. OK.
Alana: The Little Prince invocation felt appropriate to me! Adina’s observations, the fact that they kind of… wrestle with language is such an important part of why they are so compelling. It stands in contrast to Hammond’s supposed mastery—of words, of charm. I kind of see why Judge Manda tries to focus her analysis around the “theological reading” as the main “narrative tissue,” even if that wasn’t the lens I found most compelling. I liked Great Expectations well enough for making me revisit a time that now feels extremely foreign to me, but I’m ultimately glad to see Beautyland advance.
Meave: I would have loved it if Great Expectations had multiple viewpoints, or if it hewed more closely to the Dickens novel, or if it surpassed its perfectly competent writing with more feeling. I remember Hammond going back to visit the church and school he’d attended in Chicago and thinking—something—about the church, or faith, but there just wasn’t enough feeling behind the language to, as you say, grab onto something. Beautyland is unique. It doesn’t insist you believe in the aliens, but that you believe Adina’s thoughts about and reactions to her experiences. I’m so glad the judge put it through, however dissimilar our reasoning. Excuse me, I need a hankie.
While I snuffle into a wad of damp cotton, Kevin and John are preparing to take the booth for The History of Sound versus The Sound of Sil—Orbital, with Judge Bobuq Sayed launching one to the quarterfinals and the other into the silent sea.
Today’s mascot
Today’s mascot is nominated by Bobbie, who tells us:
All I would say overall is that I’m not sure he’s much of a reader, but my little fella sure has helped with my writing. He’s quite entertaining!
This little guy came to us via a felled tree during a home reno project.
It wasn’t long before he considered this table (where I make notes, we play family card games, and sometimes I even get to type on my book projects) his own personal territory.
He’s a Fox Squirrel, but we’ve never given him a proper name. Supposedly this makes it easier when the day arrives he realizes his true lineage. . . We have our doubts.
If you’re interested in nominating a pet as a mascot for this year’s Tournament of Books, contact us for more details. (Please note, this is a paid program.)