2023/143: The Stargazer's Embassy — Eleanor Lerman

Maybe I had a limited imagination; that quality had been necessary for me to cultivate in order to survive. That's what the music and headphones and books and TV were for: to limit what I did not wish to see, what I did not want to know. [p. 248]

The novel begins in 1990, in New York: Julia Glazer works as a cleaner, keeping her head down, going from work to home to work again. One evening, though, she decides to head to the river to watch a meteor shower. There, she meets John, who's a psychiatrist and former lecturer, a Pulitzer Prize winner. They fall in love well before Julia discovers that his area of interest is 'experiencers' -- people who have, or believe they have, experienced alien abductions. Julia is extremely unhappy with this development: she grew up with a mother who was obsessed with aliens. And Julia happens to know that they are real, and that they seem to be stalking Julia herself.

This is a slow, cerebral novel, focussed more on Julia's interior life and her anger towards her mother than on the aliens themselves. She moves passively through her life, refusing the aliens at every turn: refusing to interact with them, refusing to discuss them with others, refusing to think about what happened to her mother and to herself. Refusing to consider that the tattoo on her wrist, of five stars -- which is also the logo of the Stargazer's Embassy, her stepfather's bar in upstate New York -- might mark her as different.

Then everything changes: and the novel picks up ten years later, when reports of alien abductions are few and far between. Did Julia -- who's returned to her work as a cleaner, who has no friends and no close relationships, who's doing her best not to think about what she calls the things --have something to do with that? And have the aliens really, finally, given up on her, or do they have unresolved issues?

The Stargazer's Embassy is a world away from conventional 'alien abduction' novels. These aliens are unsettling, but not especially monstrous; their agenda remains, for the most part, mysterious; they are badly-dressed, having no understanding of fashion or costume, and some of them have a taste for Jack Daniels. They remember Julia's mother, and they are scared of Julia: but she is not scared of them.

Lerman's prose is full of vivid imagery -- 'The sky was streaky, blue on blue on blue, displaying a small moon ... rising as slowly as if it wasn’t sure it was really supposed to appear tonight' [p. 13] -- and she structures this story, with its deliberately isolated and introspective protagonist, with confidence and care. That said, I didn't find it as enjoyable as Still Alive or Satellite Street. At least on first reading: on a reread, I could appreciate the pacing and the few interactions that Julia allows herself.