Hervé Le Tellier has set himself an interesting challenge: To explain—or at least to write convincingly about characters who try to explain—the inexplicable. The Anomaly requires a willing suspension of disbelief, but Le Tellier writes so well and with such conviction (or his translator Adriana Hunter translates so well) that I, a thoroughgoing skeptic, was more than willing to go along for the ride.
The next chapter introduces Victor Miesel, a depressed author of literary fiction who, after experiencing terrifying turbulence on an Air France flight to New York—a flight that Blake was also on—writes a new novel “as if following dictation.” It’s his seventh and will be called The anomaly. He sends it to his editor and falls or jumps from his balcony, killing himself on April 22, 2021.
The next chapter, dated June 28, 2021, introduces Lucie Bogaert, a film editor, who is the lover of André Vannier, an architect. André “looked about fifty, but who could well have been older.” He is at least twenty years older than Lucie. They too are on the harrowing Air France flight, and when they return to Paris, “slowly everything started to sour.”
In the next chapter, dated May 28, 2021, a character named David learns from his oncologist brother that he has inoperable Stage 4 pancreatic cancer that has metastasized into his liver and small intestine. In other words, a death sentence.
What do these people have in common? They are all on Air France flight 006 from Paris to New York that after flying through a violent and unforeseen thunderstorm lands at JFK on March 10, 2021.
They are also on Air France flight 006 from Paris to New York that requests emergency landing instructions from Kennedy Approach on Wednesday, June 24, 2021— a hundred and six days later. It’s the same Boeing 787, the same crew, the same passengers, and the same hail damage from an identical storm. Rather than allow a plane that cannot exist land at JFK, the government directs it to McGuire Air Force base outside Trenton, NJ, and cordons it off to figure out what happened.
A mathematician brought in to explain compares the situation to being asked the possible outcomes of flipping a coin. Heads, tails, and the remote chance of the coin resting on its side. But what “if the flipped coin stays suspended in the air?” What if 250 duplicates of random airplane passengers abruptly pop into existence?
As The New York Times reported, Le Tellier has long been fascinated by the idea of the double. “Returning home one evening, he thought: ‘It would be interesting if I found my double awaiting me. How would I react?’ This was the genesis of a book he took one year to write.”
He said he inverted the usual approach in a novel, “where you invent a character and plunge that character into a situation. Instead, I took the situation as my starting point, one that would allow me to confront seven or eight characters with their doubles, after 106 days have elapsed. A lot can happen in 106 days! How would different characters react?”
Le Tellier, 64, is a writer, journalist, mathematician, food critic, and teacher. He’s published fifteen books of stories, essays, and novels, none of which made best-seller lists. The Anomaly was an enormous best-seller in France (more than a million copies), and won the 2020 Goncourt prize.
“I am surprised by the book’s success given that it’s so experimental, bizarre and a little crazy,” Le Tellier told the Tines. “Perhaps reading it was a means of escape.”
Because Le Tellier is telling a number of stories in the novel, he cannot round out his characters thoroughly or give them much depth, but it hardly matters. He provides enough that we understand their situations and conflicts. In addition, he considered plausible moves by the US Government to control and explain the situation. Also, how would Christians, Muslims, Jews, and Buddhists explain it? How would mathematicians? How would philosophers?
Because Le Tellier is willing to engage in some philosophical speculation—what is reality? how do we know what is real?—The Anomaly is more than a boy’s adventure story. And on the last page we are left thoughtful and shaken.
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