58 pages • 1-hour read
The Anomaly
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Part 1, Chapters 8-13Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1: “As Black as the Sky”
Part 1, Chapter 8 Summary: “The Miesel Affair”
Victor Miesel’s editor, Clémence Balmer, thinks Victor is a good writer and is always impressed by how casually Victor handles it when his previous novels fail to sell or win prizes. On the day of Victor’s suicide, Clémence receives Victor’s new book, The Anomaly, via email. She reads it immediately and finds it “unputdownable” (86). Worried by the book’s existential tone, Clémence reaches out to the author and learns what happened. When she rereads The Anomaly, the suicide gives it a new context, and she notices that Victor signed his name “Victør,” with the symbol for an empty set instead of an “o” (87).
Since Victor had no relatives, Clémence handles notifications to his friends and organizes the funeral. They publish The Anomaly as quickly as they can, and it is an immediate success. Major publications publish reviews and obituaries of Victor, his old novels are rereleased, famous actors read extracts from his books in bookstores, and many of Victor’s acquaintances–including one of Victor’s exes, Ilena Leskov—trade on Victor’s posthumous fame.
Part 1, Chapter 9 Summary: “Slimboy”
Ugo Darchini, the Italian consul to Nigeria, attends a reception in Lagos toward the end of June 2021 to celebrate the opening of the Eko Atlantic Hotel. He greets Hélène Charrier, the French consul, who is surprised to find Ugo still in Nigeria after having just negotiated the return of his daughter from kidnappers. Ugo now believes that Lagos is as dangerous a place as he was warned it would be when he took the job. They begin talking with the French cultural attaché when the popstar known as Slimboy walks into the room. Slimboy became an international sensation after the release of his Afropop single “Yaba Girls” three months ago, and the press swarms him immediately. Ugo and Hélène watch as Slimboy appeases the press by kissing a famous young actress.
Slimboy, whose real name is Femi Ahmed Kaduna, is new to fame. He wrote “Yaba Girls” about his mother, who made a living selling necklaces in the Yaba district of Lagos. It is a departure from the Afro-rap that Lagos is known for; he opted for a more stripped-down sound, without auto-tune and with a saxophone accompanist. The song blew up on YouTube, and since then he has sung a duet with Beyoncé and was interviewed by Oprah. He has recently purchased a penthouse apartment in the Eko Atlantic Hotel. Ugo and Hélène talk about the hotel as a bad sign for the country, a way for the wealthy in Nigeria to escape and abandon the rest of the country.
The room goes quiet when one of the journalists asks Slimboy whether he is homosexual. Being gay is illegal in Nigeria, and celebrities are careful not to incur the prejudice of a homophobic public. Slimboy calmly replies that he sings in favor of love in general and announces that he will record a duet with Elton John. He answers the question of his sexuality by kissing the actress again. Then he makes a statement against homophobia in Nigeria. Slimboy thinks of his own teenage lover, Tom, who was burned alive, and feels guilt for denying who he is for the sake of his career. Slimboy’s manager cuts the press conference short while Hélène and Ugo notice MI6 agents watching the singer.
Part 1, Chapter 10 Summary: “Adrian and Meredith”
At a barbecue at Princeton University, probabilities expert Adrian Miller works up the courage to speak with his coworker Meredith by getting drunk. Meredith is a topologist who joined the math department two months ago. She is British and does not like Princeton, but she likes Adrian. She thinks he must have a good heart, since he hasn’t left academia for a high-paying finance job despite his expertise. She lures Adrian into the private “Turing Room” and starts flirting with him, but they are interrupted when Adrian receives a phone call on a secret government phone and must leave immediately.
After the chain of command fell apart during the morning of September 11, 2001, the US government decided to set up new protocols for future emergencies, subcontracting the Department of Applied Mathematics at MIT, where Adrian worked. At the time, Adrian was a new PhD studying the “statistics of waiting in line” (116). The department head delegated the work to Adrian and then PhD student Tina Wang, and together they developed a system that accounted for thousands of possible variables that might affect airplane travel. When the Department of Defense asked them to account for unforeseen variables, too, Adrian and Tina came up with scenarios for alien invasions as well as “Protocol 42,” mostly as a joke. They were then given bulletproof cell phones to keep with them at all times in case such a protocol was needed.
Part 1, Chapter 11 Summary: “The Joke”
This chapter is a continuation of Chapter 5, “The Spin Cycle.” After Captain David Markle gives air-traffic control the identification numbers from the plane and the names of the flight crew, an agent from NORAD asks David to disconnect the plane’s Wi-Fi and collect all electronic devices from the passengers and crew. General Patrick Silveria then instructs David to redirect the airplane to McGuire Air Force Base, noting that Navy fighter jets will escort them and have orders to shoot down Air France 006 if it deviates from the plan. David thinks that someone is playing a practical joke on him until the fighter jets arrive.
Part 1, Chapter 12 Summary: “André”
In late June 2021, the architect André Vannier takes a rickshaw across Mumbai to the Surya Tower construction site, one of the most ambitious projects of the firm Vannier & Edelman. He is there to get the project back on schedule after the local construction company lied about the quality of cement, but his thoughts keep turning to Lucie. He has difficulty accepting the irreversibility of their romantic separation. He thinks about how he desired physical intimacy more than she did and blames it on his old age. When they broke up, Lucie told him that his desire “managed to kill” hers (140).
At the construction site, André makes a show of his importance. He manipulates the construction company into agreeing with all his terms. Afterward, he flies to New York. On the flight, he rereads Miesel’s The Anomaly and writes Lucie the abstract email that she read in Chapter 3. Upon arriving in New York, André is intercepted by government agents.
Part 1, Chapter 13 Summary: “The First Few Hours”
Adrian Miller is ushered to a large hangar at McGuire Air Force Base and greeted by CIA agents while still in a daze. When he and Tina Wang came up with the “low-probability” protocols after September 11, he never expected any of them to happen (145). In fact, he and Tina intended most of them as inside jokes for math nerds like themselves. Of those protocols, covering everything from alien invasions to robot rebellion, they classified Protocol 42 as the least likely.
A council is gathered, including Adrian, Tina, and representatives from multiple government security departments. General Silveria, representing the Department of Defense, coordinates the operation. He introduces everyone present—including Jamy Pudlowski from the FBI’s Special Operations Command (the PsyOps team). Silveria explains that the 787 on the tarmac is Air France flight 006 from Paris to New York, rerouted to McGuire because an identical plane, with the same crew, passengers, and flight number already landed in New York 106 days earlier. When the council responds in disbelief, tablets are handed out with the identifying information of all the people on board. The plane is still on the tarmac with all passengers and crew on board. Silveria calls the pilot, David Markle, and asks him what day it is; on speaker, David replies March 10, 2021. Silveria then shows the council a photo of David from earlier that day, June 24, 2021. The other David Markle is in a hospital, dying of cancer. Silveria then turns to Adrian and Tina, the originators of Protocol 42, to ask what they should do next.
Part 1, Chapters 8-13 Analysis
This set of chapters covers events up until June 24, 2021—the date of the second Air France flight 006. Some of these chapters continue the project of the first seven chapters: introducing the plane’s passengers and establishing the circumstances of their lives between March and June. The rest of the chapters introduce the US government response team, with a focus on the mathematician Adrian Miller. For the rest of the novel, everyone on the Air France 006 that landed on March 10 will be given the surname “March” and everyone on the Air France 006 that landed on June 24 will be given the surname “June.” At this point in the novel, the only “June” characters introduced are pilot David Markle and his copilot, Favereaux, in the chapters “The Spin Cycle,” “The Joke,” and “The First Few Hours.”
The title of Chapter 11, “The Joke,” refers to the joke David thinks air-traffic control is playing on him by asking him to redirect the plane to McGuire Air Force Base. However, the title takes on broader resonance as events begin to defy logic, suggesting a cosmic joke being played on every character in the novel. If reality is a simulation—and this theory quickly emerges as the most plausible explanation for the inexplicable duplication of a plane and all its passengers—that means it has been designed by some intelligence. In this way, the novel breaks down the distinction between Reality and Artifice. Reality itself is a work of fiction—one that resembles a joke as much as it does any other fictional genre.
Across the other chapters, too, Le Tellier portrays the central event of the novel with a sense of humor. Adrian Miller is introduced as a character in a romantic comedy and is often described as a balding and run-down version of Hollywood leading men like Ryan Gosling (107) or Keanu Reeves (148). Adrian has to leave Meredith, his workplace crush, mid-seduction to answer a secret cell phone that he carries around due to a series of protocols he cowrote for the US government half-jokingly in 2001. He and Tina filled their report with jokes from popular culture, and now the US government is following their joke-laden Protocol 42, named after The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Galaxy. To Le Tellier, the doubling of Air France 006 is a joke between author and reader.
The introduction of the government response team, in Chapter 13, works as a pastiche of similar scenes in dozens of disaster movies from Armageddon to Moonfall. It’s sometimes hard to tell whether to classify Le Tellier’s style as pastiche or parody. The allusions to other fictional genres are often humorous, but the text never overtly mocks those genres. To the characters, the events are deeply serious. Only Adrian and Tina maintain an awareness of the underlying comedy. The reader, however, is never permitted to forget how closely this fictional world aligns with other, familiar fictions—in this way, the text calls attention the complex interrelation between Reality and Artifice. More recognizable, personal traumas—including the sophisticated ennui of Lucie’s and André’s broken romance and especially the sexual assault and anti-gay violence that define Sophia’s and Slimboy’s chapters—are presented in a straightforwardly realistic style, and the juxtaposition with so much comic pastiche makes these scenes all the more moving.
Pastiche is a technique of metafiction—calling the reader’s attention to the fact that the story they are reading is an art object, fashioned consciously by a human author, and not a natural or “real” world. The existence of a book titled The Anomaly within Le Tellier’s novel by the same is another act of metafiction: By drawing parallels between the two books—one existing in the real world and one only in the fiction—the reader can draw inferences about how the book functions in relation to the world in which it is read. The two books are doubles of each other, just as David June is a double of David March, Joanna June of Joanna March, and so on. But in the context of the novel, there is no resemblance between Victør Miesel’s book and Le Tellier’s. Miesel’s is a stream-of-consciousness glimpse into the mind of a man who has lost his connection to the experience of living; it is full of confessions and observations. Miesel’s The Anomaly seems to be imbued with a metaphysical power. For instance, when André writes an email to Lucie after reading it, he is infected by the book’s abstract, metaphorical thinking. Despite the book’s lack of plot, it attracts a cult following because of this power, either because it somehow encapsulates the experience of Air France 006 or because it speaks to something universal that was previously unexpressed in literature.
This second, fictional text called The Anomaly accomplishes at least two things at once: both satirizing a publishing industry where something that is actually meaningless—Victør spells his name with an “empty set” symbol—becomes a bestseller and raising questions about how to find meaning in a world whose fundamental rules appear meaningless. An “empty set” is a hypothetical mathematical category for results that cannot exist. Notably, the passenger manifest for the second flight 006 might itself be described as such an “empty set.” Adrian also gestures to empty sets when he devises protocols for “low-probability” events that he likens to a coin landing on its edge. Adrian describes Protocol 42 as a response to a circumstance so impossible that it is like a flipped coin that never lands. Air France 006 is such an impossible outcome, something that doesn’t actually exist when conceptualized in probabilistic terms; it belongs to an empty set in theory. When Victor March signs his name as an empty set, he questions his existence in mathematical terms.
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