GIRLFRIEND ON MARS, by Deborah Willis
Sometimes, a girlfriend needs space. Sometimes, she goes to space. That’s the — OK, obvious — premise of “Girlfriend on Mars,” a novel by the Canadian writer Deborah Willis, who knows what we’ve wished for from books all along, which is that they were TV instead.
Just kidding! But Willis does know how to tell a story with the grip of a good drama series. The chapters alternate between the first-person story of mopey-sweet Kevin, at home in Vancouver with his marijuana plant “children” and creeping agoraphobia, and the perspective of Amber, his (hot) longtime girlfriend who has secretly made it to the final rounds of “MarsNow,” a reality show in which (other hot) contestants compete and train to go to Mars, funded by a tech billionaire named Geoff Task. Amber’s chapters are told in close third person, so we get to both watch the show and hear the actual inner thoughts of an ambitious, intelligent contestant with a producer’s favorite flaw: daddy issues.
While the setup could have made for a breezy read, Willis cuts deep with insight that orbits the age-old, just-took-a-bong-hit question: What does it mean to be real?
And what better setting from which to examine that idea than reality TV? Like Blair Braverman’s wilderness-survival-show novel “Small Game” (which I tore through in a day), “Girlfriend on Mars” depicts the production and fanfare of a reality show as pure baloney but many cast members’ motivations as almost painfully pure. Some of those “Bachelor” contestants do really seem to long for love. Here, Amber genuinely wants to “show God — that irritable, judgy, unhelpful bastard — who’s boss” and “create Eden” on dusty ol’ Mars. I couldn’t change the channel.
Even the word “real” is used 87 times in the book. “This is what I’m meant to do with my life,” Amber tells the camera. “This is real. I can feel it.” Kevin worships a farmer who delivers him a box of produce every week, because he has “a real wife, a real family, a real job” — and, it turns out, some very real problems, too. When Kevin is thinking of getting back into screenwriting, he finds inspiration in the theme “Reality. Its unbearableness.” Task, the “Billionaire Douchebag,” promises this will be “the most real reality TV we’ve ever seen.”
But it’s our reality that Willis is playing with, and she has fun with it, especially our life on the internet, another unreal place we’ve come to accept as all too real. Like Kevin, I also “wish I could go back in time, to the innocent era of last week, when I didn’t have to think about the existence of incels.” In a viral video posted on Task’s EyeSite, “that lame social media platform no one uses,” Amber asks the idealist billionaire, “Why don’t you pay taxes? Then the world wouldn’t collapse in the first place. Then you wouldn’t need a security force. Or a moat.”
Every detail is sharply placed by Willis, who has a scorching sense of humor and a soft spot for humanity down here on Earth. In a moment of clarity, Amber realizes how much there is to discover at home: “A human being is a mystery, as dark and expanding as the universe.” Some of us seek meaning in big, ambitious missions. Others are trying to find it in our own backyard.
In order to calm himself from the stress of his girlfriend’s decision to leave him for the freezing prospects of Mars and another man, Kevin picks up “‘The Great Gatsby,’ my desert-island book. … A story ostensibly about love but really about soul-crushing decadence. Ostensibly about decadence, but really about love.” As quickly as he opens the book, he closes it, and turns on “MarsNow.”
“Sometimes novels are too real,” he thinks. “So thank god for reality television.”
Alex Beggs is a writer and copywriter in Ann Arbor, Mich.
GIRLFRIEND ON MARS | By Deborah Willis | 359 pp. | W.W. Norton & Company | $28
