On March 10, 2021, Air France flight 006, en route to New York from Paris, encounters a pocket of violent turbulence. Passengers are jostled about, yet the airbus makes it through the danger and safely lands at its destination. Among the 200-plus aboard are author Victor Miesel, architect André Vannier, film editor Lucie Bogaert, musician Femi Ahmed Kaduna, and pilot David Markle — and in the months that follow, personal highs and lows abound as each continues with their lives. Miesel pens a new novel, falls into a depression, and commits suicide. Vannier and Bogaerts, in love with each other when they land, drift apart. Kaduna, under his stage name “Slimboy,” records a hit song that propels him up the charts. And Markle is diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and withers away. Then, in late June, the surviving passengers and crew from flight 006 are tracked down by the FBI, who whisk them away in black vans and bring the crowd to an airplane hangar in New Jersey under the guise of Protocol 42, a national security threat associated with their travel over 100 days prior.
Thus begins Hervé Le Tellier’s fascinating The Anomaly, published in French last year by Éditions Gallimard, awarded the Goncourt Prize, and now available to Anglophones thanks to a beautiful translation by Adriana Hunter. The novel is full of zigs and zags, and while fans of television programs like France’s Les Revenants or the U.S.’s Manifest may anticipate certain narrative twists, Le Tellier’s playful writing, as well as his takes on existence, second chances, and personal identity, push his ambitious narrative into realms rarely encountered in popular culture.
Le Tellier is a member of the Oulipo collective. Established in 1960 by François Le Lionnais and Raymond Queneau, the group advocates for the creation of art using various restraints. In many ways, The Anomaly feels like a natural offshoot of Queneau’s notorious Exercises in Style, which took a single, banal moment and narratively retold it 99 times, employing a different “style” — itself a loose term that allowed everything from “exclamations” to “spoonerisms” — with each pass. In his novel, Le Tellier replaces Queneau’s forgettable moment with the airbus’s near disaster, and each character’s plot-line includes a personal interpretation of the event. For example, from his seat, Meisel decides:
“… that they’re going to plunge into the sea, shattering on impact with the wall of water. For many long minutes he puts up resistance, clinging to his seat, straining his muscles to counter every jolt. He avoids the window that looks out into hail-filled darkness.”
In his panic, he spots Bogaerts, who reminds him of a woman he met and failed to engage at a recent book event. Later in the novel, Bogaerts’s experience is recounted more directly, with the narration offering, “The flight was turbulent, terrifying even. While the plane was threatening to break in two and she was so frightened she was going to lose all self-control, André never stopped talking to her and smiling.” Kaduna’s recollection has the character “thinking he wouldn’t come out of it alive and making extensive use of the sick bags,” while Markle, when receiving word of his cancer diagnosis, recalls the flight in one word: “hellish.”
The recurrence of the flight in each storyline embraces Queneau’s initial restraint, yet beyond adding small details, Le Tellier expands upon Queneau’s device by following these characters after they exit the collective experience and return to regular life, showing the audience how distinct perceptions of the same moment sow fresh threads for each person to explore: Seeing Bogaerts sends Meisel toward a creative burst; André’s kindness to Bogaerts ironically acts as catalyst in destroying of their relationship; Kaduna’s fear leads to him penning lyrics about his mother; and so on. And as the authorities collect these passengers months later and transport them to New Jersey, additional riffs on repetition come to light, with talk of multiverses, simulations, and carbon copies bubbling to the surface.
Pursuing this line of analysis any further threatens to disrupt the joy of uncovering Le Tellier’s carefully scaffolded plot as the author intended. It exposes a bit of the magic trick, and it shows that The Anomaly is a difficult novel to discuss without accidentally revealing swerves designed to simultaneously hook the reader and make her question everything she previously read. Le Tellier achieves plenty of these swerves with his fractured timeline and commitment to blending genres. While overall literary in voice, the author toys with sci-fi tropes, whodunits, and motifs typically found in paperback thrillers. There is also a kitchen sink quality to the novel’s form, as straightforward narration and dialogue are occasionally usurped by chapters shaped as epistolary documents — letters, interview transcripts, emails, song lyrics. When combined with the blurred genres, the result is something akin to literary slipstream fiction, a work of reality that, as time passes, exposes itself as equally fantastic.
As the passengers of flight 006 arrive in New Jersey, they are presented with a shocking discovery that, for some, grants access to life-changing notoriety. For others, the discovery gives them a chance to revise past decisions. With both options, characters are tasked with confronting who they were, who they are, and who they want to be, and this contemplation drives the second half of The Anomaly. Le Tellier carefully considers the possibilities for these characters, sending each through a series of encounters that brings him or her to logical conclusions. The writing here is smart, questioning personal choice and the true nature of what we consider tangible existence. Yet while most of the novel’s journeys end in a satisfying manner, one can’t help but wonder if the author ultimately took on too large a cast. Without keeping a list, I would be lying to say I never once confused characters, or that I remembered every small revelation found in early passages. In fact, Le Tellier seems also to question his own ambition, for late in the novel, as Meisel thinks about his own writing, the narrator cheekily comments, regarding Meisel’s project:
“He has narrowed it down to just eleven characters and senses that, unfortunately, even this is too many. His editor begged him, Please, Victor, it’s too complicated, you’ll lose readers, simplify it, do some pruning, cut to the chase. But Victor did as he pleased.”
From here, the narrator divulges that Meisel’s novel starts “with a Mickey Spillane-type pastiche about a character who remains a mystery to virtually everyone,” which is a phrase one could also use to critique Le Tellier’s opening chapter, about a hitman who meanders in and out of the novel’s arc, a thin character who is easy to forget.
Nevertheless, despite these few stubborn outliers, Le Tellier largely fashions a planeload of memorable characters and situations. As an object, The Anomaly is meticulously arranged and presented, and on the page, the novel rises above the flash of its mysterious premise to deliver a series of intertwining tales of triumph and failure, joy and sorrow. It is a book built for initial awe and lingering meditation, and The Anomaly succeeds on both levels. Le Tellier’s writing lures the audience with questions about the unknown, yet it holds our attention thanks to the author’s dedication to crafting authentic individuals who inhabit a world tilting toward unreality.
[Published by Other Press on November 23, 2021, 400 pages, $16.99 paperback]