This seems to be an obsession of mine,” Ilana Masad said, “this notion of forging connections with people who are no longer here, and how that can also assuage loneliness.” This was on a Zoom call at the end of August to discuss the author’s sophomore novel, Beings.
Cultural and literary critic Masad writes with shrewd sensitivity to her characters’ humanity. Beings is a tender examination of reciprocal trust and of how conviction allows us to form both connection and identity. The book follows three separate but intertwined narratives. The first two stories run concurrently through the 1960s: that of Barney and Betty Hill, a real-life interracial married couple (in the novel, unnamed) who believed themselves to be the first alien abductees, and that of emerging copy editor and budding science fiction writer Phyllis Egerton, a closeted lesbian navigating the prejudices of the era. When the Hills are outed before they’re ready to share their story publicly, the couple’s lives become about defense of the unlikely. Phyllis’s safety relies on whether others believe that she’s straight. Masad recounts the couple’s experiences in third-person point of view and Phyllis’s through first-person letters and journal entries addressed to Rosa, an early love. In a third narrative, these two accounts are compiled and interpreted by an isolated nonbinary Archivist looking for connections across history. Their own repressed memory of a childhood alien encounter is one they are not sure that they even believe themself.
The Archivist’s commentary on the Hills’ story reveals how deft Masad is at considering the implications of viewing past action through contemporary lenses. The Archivist enters the story through dialectical commentary; their first note is on the mutability of language and why they’ve made specific choices about words related to race that may become anachronistic. They write into lacunae of the historical record: Where the couple’s records are sparse or formal, rather than personal, the Archivist allows the Hills generous agency. “I am telling it out of order, aren’t I?” they offer in an early note.
I can’t help it. I am trying to tell you a story about things that actually happened, whether you or I believe them or not, but I am sidetracked, time and again, by imagining my way into their mundanity.
Let’s call it what it is: I am making things up.
With a purpose, though. Which is to convey the truth.
Well.
A truth.
The Archivist’s entries interrogate their own easy assumptions as much as they interpret the couple’s stories of an extraterrestrial encounter for the reader. What results from their work represents a kind of illuminated manuscript, a new creation unto itself and a refreshing commentary on the act of storytelling.
Beings is in this way a love letter to those who do the quiet, laborious, and sometimes subversive work of historical preservation and interpretation: academics, archivists, and librarians. These confessional insertions also call to mind a biographer’s stylistic and narrative dance: Just how much of their influence on the narrative do they acknowledge on the page? “My Autobiography of Carson McCullers [by Jenn Shapland] was a huge influence on me,” said Masad. “In that book, it’s all about that acknowledgment. It’s all about how she’s, like, taking ownership of her version of Carson McCullers. It was [a] revelation that I can insert a voice that is asking these questions.”
Phyllis’s story is presented through her unreliable first-person narrative. Masad said, “It felt, to me, really important to have her attempt to put on a good face,” even though Phyllis runs away and has to make a life for herself in a world that is intolerant of her queerness. Yet through Phyllis’s story, the author reveals how the pre-Stonewall era defies easy classification. Phyllis’s psychologist, upon learning of her desires, treats her harshly because she lives in a time when queer identity was classified as a mental illness. Her chapters represent the internalized American pressure to draw facile conclusions from her own struggle, even though she lives in an America that denies her ability to live and love truthfully. Masad makes good use of the epistolary structure to underscore this tension. And as a fiction writer with literary ambition, Phyllis is an example of many women during that time who faced gender discrimination yet found a more viable path to publication in the more tolerant science fiction genre.
The Archivist finds meaning in their work but also communion with the Hills and Phyllis, whose stories they preserve. Their frank admissions in the archives run alongside their own story of a quiet life and a desire for greater human connection that isn’t always possible. The Archivist wants “strangers to care about them. They want to care about strangers.” They find that connection in the archives, writing, “I only know that, decades after his death, decades after hers, I grieve for them. I keep them alive just a little bit longer, so that I, too, am not so very alone.” Masad honors the Archivist’s introversion and assigns value to human connection that can happen across decades or centuries. The quiet, important document she has the Archivist create as a result of their research—the manuscript and careful archive they create with their own commentary—is itself a beautiful way to honor the Hills and Phyllis.
This is a story about faith in other people’s versions of their truth. Not faith in UFOs, but in the sense of believing what people say about themselves, their identity, their needs, or their experiences. “What does it mean to believe someone, and when is it hard?” Masad said when I asked her about the question at the core of the novel. “Where does belief stop? Where do we honor belief, and where do we not? How do we decide that? How much of that is about power and control? Or, why do we believe? Why do we not?”
Beings reminds us that narrative requires suspension of our disbelief. So, too, does human connection.•
Heather Scott Partington is a writer, teacher, and book critic. She is a regular contributor to Alta Journal and a board member of the National Book Critics Circle, where she serves as fiction chair. Her writing has appeared in publications such as the New York Times Book Review, the Washington Post, USA Today, the Los Angeles Times, and the San Francisco Chronicle. She lives in Elk Grove, California.
