NEW YORK, NY.- “He was too good for this earth,” Abraham Lincoln said of a son who died young.

So it seems was Adina Talve-Goodman, an aspiring writer who survived a heart transplant only to perish of cancer at 31 in 2018 (her essays were published posthumously), and is acknowledged by Marie-Helene Bertino at the conclusion of her astonishing third novel, “Beautyland.”

Bertino’s protagonist is also named Adina, which means “noble”or “delicate” depending on the source. Before we went down internet rabbit holes to scrabble up such information, “Beautyland” reminds us, we were fascinated by black holes. Never mind the fault in our stars (though one character gets cancer as well), this is a book that exults in them.

The fictional Adina may be too good for this earth, but more significant: She is not exactly of it, having been somehow sent pre-utero by alien life-forms on an endangered planet — “her superiors” — to find out if they can live here, endangered though it also is. In one of Bertino’s cleverest conceits, Adina communicates with them from a very young age by fax machine. (What better use for this outdated but unkillable technology, the faxiest thing about which is that paper spit out at the end with the one line saying the fax didn’t go through?)

“Beautyland” begins in the late 1970s, when the American space program had passed through the wide-eyed phases of Project Mercury and the moon landing and become a little more, well, mundane. “Star Wars” was in movie theaters and Johnny Carson was making fun of his frequent guest Carl Sagan, who, Adina faxes, is “a polarizing astronomer who wears natty turtleneck-blazer combos and has been denied Harvard tenure for being too Hollywood.” (“YES WE KNOW ABOUT HIM AND HIS TURTLENECKS,” the superiors write back wearily.)

Though Adina’s consciousness is expansive, her orbit is constricted — she is vulnerable, a mollusk without a shell, like E.T., another of the era’s cultural touchstones, though passing as a human. She grows up skinny, bucktoothed, myopic and sensitive to sounds in a sinking home in Logan Triangle, Philadelphia. Her single, Sicilian mother serves boiled chicken and drives a Volkswagen that has to be prayed up hills.

“When it was time to decide the official food of movie-watching,” Adina huffs to the home office, “human beings did not go for Fig Newtons or caramel, foods that are silent, but popcorn, the loudest sound on Earth.” This is the kind of humor that made Seinfeld millions, and Bertino does pathos, too.

The popular girls adopt Adina, then shun her. She gravitates to New York City, where one of her longer missives concerns the vagaries of alternate side street parking. As messages from her superiors mysteriously begin to recede, locals step up. “Trust the group,” a halal vendor tells her. “Living in New York,” Adina writes in a notebook, “is like sitting at a nine-million-person blackjack table. We work together against the dealer.”

The story closely and lovingly follows her Sisyphean life of promise — she is “gifted,” at both acting and writing, but quickly learns Earth is not a meritocracy — through to the 2017 discovery of the interstellar asteroid Oumuamua and her first foray onto Twitter, where she attracts 650,000 followers after writing a memoir about being an alien, whose veracity is hotly debated online. There are interesting gaps in the novel’s cosmic coverage — Adina doesn’t take notice of the Challenger or Columbia disasters, for example; maybe because they were more pragmatic than discovery missions? — and stops blessedly short of Elon Musk and SpaceX.

Like its heroine’s name, “Beautyland” is titled “Beautyland” for a reason, and it’s not just because, as writer Amy Sohn has noted, “‘Land’ is the new ‘Nation’” in book titles. It’s the name of the cosmetics supply store where Adina’s mother stocks up on eight-ounce bottles of Jean Naté, a dash of glamour to sweeten her job working at a facility for the disabled; and where the arrival of John Frieda’s Frizz-Ease, circa 1989, is announced as a major event. It takes an alien, perhaps, to remind us how much of femininity is a disguise, armor — shell.

For Adina the world is divided by gender, yes — as when that clique of more confidently coifed high school girls decides to exclude you for the sin of laughing after your high school crush reveals his penis, which looks like an “angry mushroom,” rather than doing his bidding.

But otherness is a more central theme. Where humans zag, Adina zigs: hating the Beatles, believing Yoko the true artist. Bound lobsters in tanks and season finales on TV make her cry (“the Worst Feeling”) or even vomit. She submits to a boyfriend, a pianist with synesthesia, only because she suspects he too is from another planet.

An ineffable sadness and sense of resignation hang over “Beautyland,” which refuses to give in to sentimentality or serendipity or the idea of everything working out for a reason. It’s the second novel I’ve reviewed in six months that invokes Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town,” the first being, more obsessively, Ann Patchett’s bestselling “Tom Lake.”

Adina is cast not as Emily, like Patchett’s heroine, but as the narrator, which feels deeply significant. Being an alien here might just be a metaphor for the difficult blessing of feeling enough apart from the thrum of life on Earth to report on its goings-on: to tell a story.

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Publication Notes:

‘Beautyland’

By Marie-Helene Bertino

Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 336 pages. $28.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.