Outlook for Earthlings

THE OUTLOOK FOR EARTHLINGS traces an unusual, difficult friendship across a lifetime, between women of stunningly opposite natures. Melanie Taper is rule-bound, timid, compelled to obey and venerate authority. Yet in unguarded moments she demonstrates such deadly insight into human foibles as to suggest a strength that has, for dark reasons, deliberately hidden itself lifelong. 'No woman,' she notes, 'can declare a man is wonderful, like one who doesn't know him.' Scarlet Rand, by contrast, is rash, willful, abrasive, impatient of reverence of any stripe. She is vexed by 'demure' traits and 'small fussing motions.' Scarlet is shocked by Mel's passive reserve; by her strained, almost archaic meekness. Despite her obvious gifts, Mel is - bafflingly - self-erasing. Mel's Billy Budd-like saintliness maddens Scarlet-because finally and most troublingly, Scarlet disbelieves it. Their friendship, begun in high school and resumed in midlife, suggests to each a final frontier, a saving sanctuary. Yet at its core, a pained impasse soon becomes evident: Each woman takes a secret, moral offense at the other's inmost nature-and choices. Living out these differences-against awareness of the illness which is slowly destroying one of them-proves an ultimate challenge. In each, a reckoning must occur. THE OUTLOOK FOR EARTHLINGS examines what women want, amid conflicting layers of need-between privacy and exposure, solitude and society, authenticity and connection, expectation and actuality. It ponders beginnings, endings, and Virginia Woolf's declaration that good angels must be killed. It considers the limits of friendship-and of the act of witnessing. At its heart, it asks how we may finally measure a life-and who should do the measuring. EARTHLINGS tracks the trajectory of a problematic friendship over a lifetime, between two women of opposite natures who are nevertheless perhaps too close.