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The Anomaly by Hervé Le Tellier review – high-concept thrills

In this playful French prizewinner, the mysterious duplication of a plane and its passengers kickstarts an interrogation of reality

I n the first chapter of this novel a hit man remarks to himself: “No one realises how much hit men owe to Hollywood scriptwriters.” But how does the author know? The throwaway joke, along with an unashamed obsession with verbally recreating and namechecking the mise-en-scène of streaming TV drama, is typical of the book’s effervescent playfulness. Hervé Le Tellier, after all, is the current president of Oulipo, the French “workshop of potential literature” whose past masters included Raymond Queneau and Georges Perec. And what he has done here would delight his forebears with its paradoxical nature: he has written an Oulipan bestseller, a Prix Goncourt-winning novel that has already shifted a million units on the continent.

Each chapter of the book’s first section introduces a different cast member, mainly French or American, in a different novelistic or televisual style (deftly handled in Adriana Hunter’s clever translation). After the hit man, Blake, we meet a writer, Victor Miesel, followed by film editor Lucie, architect André, musician Slimboy, six-year-old Sophie and her pet frog, lawyer Joanna, and mathematicians Adrian and Meredith. Victor’s story is a hilariously deadpan satire on the Parisian literary scene: his two unbestselling novels glory in the titles The Mountains Will Come to Find Us and Failures that Missed the Mark, while he also “translates entertaining English-language bestsellers that reduce literature to the status of a minor art for minors”. (He commences work on a book entitled The Anomaly, because of course he does.)

Other tableaux are by turns amusing and affecting: Slimboy is a Nigerian pop star wondering whether he can come out as gay; David is diagnosed with an aggressive cancer; André and Lucie were once an item but no more. Adrian and Meredith are tipsily flirting at a faculty party at MIT, where “there’s some tequila in the Turing Room, in the cupboard behind the felt pens”. Here is Meredith considering Adrian: “For a statistician, he’s a dreamer. He has green eyes that make him look like a number theorist, even though he has long hair like a game theorist, and wears the Trotskytising small steel-rimmed glasses of a logician and the holey old T-shirts of an algebraist.”

It has been a bravura 100 pages of introductions and emotional or comedic complications before the conceptual inciting event happens. Air France flight AF006 from Paris to New York emerges from the turbulence of an unexpected storm to the bafflement of air traffic control, and is redirected to a secret military base. Why? Because it’s exactly the same flight as one that already landed at JFK after emerging from a storm three months ago. Not just the same flight number but the same plane, with the same people on it. And guess what links all the characters we have met so far. There are now two copies of Blake, Victor, Lucie, Joanna, and all the rest – except Adrian and Meredith, who are instead whisked off to consult for the American government on what this might mean, while the interlopers are sequestered in a Hollywood movie hangar.

At length the assembled brains trust (you’d cast Jeff Goldblum in a shot) decides that the most likely explanation is that we all live in a simulation. Not like The Matrix , where humans are real but enslaved by machines; instead, we ourselves are nothing more than computer programs, running in some vast simulation overseen by an alien civilisation of unimaginable technological capability. The boffins explain this by reference to Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom’s “Simulation Argument” , though something very similar was a pan-galactic religion known as “The Truth” in Iain M Banks ’s sci-fi universe.

If it is the truth, though, what does this sudden duplication of an aircraft full of people mean? Maybe it’s a test, characters suppose. How will humanity know if it has failed? As the intelligence and military types argue the toss, the rest of the novel follows the characters as, in different situations, they meet their doppelgangers. Would you share your life with the person who also thinks they are you? Would you claim them as a long-lost twin? Or would they need to disappear?

After a suitably ludic ending, we are left with an after-echo, a feat of fiction informed by other fictions. Le Tellier describes a world flattened by the unbearable lightness of representation (where some still remember a time “when too many photos hadn’t yet killed photos”). Does he mean to make a sly case that the great god Netflix has become the default way for us to interpret the world? In any event, it seems fitting that the novel’s screen adaptation rights have already been sold. From TV has The Anomaly arisen; to TV shall it return.

The Anomaly by Hervé Le Tellier, translated by Adriana Hunter, is published by Michael Joseph (£14.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com . Delivery charges may apply.

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Word of Mouth

Submitting a book for review, write the editor, you are here:, the anomaly.

• About the Book

Winner of the Goncourt Prize and now an international phenomenon, this dizzying, whip-smart novel blends crime, fantasy, sci-fi and thriller as it plumbs the mysteries surrounding a Paris-New York flight.

Who would we be if we had made different choices? Told that secret, left that relationship, written that book? We all wonder --- the passengers of Air France 006 will find out.

In their own way, they were all living double lives when they boarded the plane:

Blake, a respectable family man who works as a contract killer.

Slimboy, a Nigerian pop star who uses his womanizing image to hide that he’s gay.

Joanna, a Black American lawyer pressured to play the good old boys’ game to succeed with her Big Pharma client.

Victor Miesel, a critically acclaimed yet largely obscure writer suddenly on the precipice of global fame.

About to start their descent to JFK, they hit a shockingly violent patch of turbulence, emerging on the other side to a reality both perfectly familiar and utterly strange. As it charts the fallout of this logic-defying event, THE ANOMALY takes us on a journey from Lagos and Mumbai to the White House and a top-secret hangar.

In Hervé Le Tellier’s most ambitious work yet, high literature follows the lead of a bingeable Netflix series, drawing on the best of genre fiction from “chick lit” to mystery, while also playfully critiquing their hallmarks. An ingenious, timely variation on the doppelgänger theme, it taps into the parts of ourselves that elude us most.

The Anomaly written by Hervé Le Tellier , translated by Adriana Hunter

• Publication Date: November 23, 2021
• Genres: Fiction , Science Fiction , Suspense , Thriller
• Paperback: 400 pages
• Publisher: Other Press
• ISBN-10: 1635421691
• ISBN-13: 9781635421699

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THE ANOMALY

by Hervé Le Tellier ; translated by Adriana Hunter ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 23, 2021

Humorous, captivating, thoughtful—existentialism has never been so thrilling.

A mystifying phenomenon sends shock waves through the world of an alternate 2021.

The opening chapter presents a detailed portrait of a professional assassin called Blake, a man described as “extremely meticulous, cautious, and imaginative.” The same adjectives could be applied to author Le Tellier: Trained as a mathematician and a scientific journalist, he uses these first pages to prime the reader for his methodically crafted story. The action then abruptly jumps to Victor Miesel, a disillusioned author and translator who becomes “mired in a horrible impression of unreality” after a turbulent flight. Over the following weeks, Miesel feverishly writes a new book called The anomaly , sends it to his editor, and kills himself. Then, snap , a new chapter begins, introducing a film editor named Lucie, who, along with every subsequently introduced character (eleven, altogether), is inexplicably requisitioned by the authorities.The connection between these people soon becomes clear: They were all passengers on the same turbulent flight. What exactly happened on this airplane? Le Tellier withholds the details for long enough that revealing the mystery here would spoil the entrancing quality of the book. Hunter’s brilliant translation from the French—her fifth collaboration with Le Tellier—transforms Le Tellier’s distinct French voice into a distinct English one. More importantly, Hunter captures the playful exhilaration with which Le Tellier marries his audacious plot to a deep concern for existentialist philosophy. Excerpts from Miesel’s The anomaly  appear in epigraphs for each new section, including: “There is something admirable that always surpasses knowledge, intelligence, and even genius, and that is incomprehension.”

Pub Date: Nov. 23, 2021

ISBN: 978-1-63542-169-9

Page Count: 336

Publisher: Other Press

Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2021

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2021

SCIENCE FICTION | THRILLER | TECHNICAL & MEDICAL THRILLER | GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | GENERAL SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY

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BOOK REVIEW

by Hervé Le Tellier ; translated by Adriana Hunter

by Hervé Le Tellier & translated by Adriana Hunter

More About This Book

Awards & Accolades

Our Verdict

New York Times Bestseller

by Max Brooks ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 16, 2020

A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.

Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z (2006).

A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.

Pub Date: June 16, 2020

ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine

Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020

GENERAL SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY | GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | SCIENCE FICTION

More by Max Brooks

by Max Brooks

BOOK TO SCREEN

THE DARK FOREST

From the remembrance of earth's past series , vol. 2.

by Cixin Liu ; translated by Joel Martinsen ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 11, 2015

Once again, a highly impressive must-read.

Second part of an alien-contact trilogy ( The Three-Body Problem , 2014) from China’s most celebrated science-fiction author.

In the previous book, the inhabitants of Trisolaris, a planet with three suns, discovered that their planet was doomed and that Earth offered a suitable refuge. So, determined to capture Earth and exterminate humanity, the Trisolarans embarked on a 400-year-long interstellar voyage and also sent sophons (enormously sophisticated computers constructed inside the curled-up dimensions of fundamental particles) to spy on humanity and impose an unbreakable block on scientific advance. On Earth, the Earth-Trisolaris Organization formed to help the invaders, despite knowing the inevitable outcome. Humanity’s lone advantage is that Trisolarans are incapable of lying or dissimulation and so cannot understand deceit or subterfuge. This time, with the Trisolarans a few years into their voyage, physicist Ye Wenjie (whose reminiscences drove much of the action in the last book) visits astronomer-turned-sociologist Luo Ji, urging him to develop her ideas on cosmic sociology. The Planetary Defense Council, meanwhile, in order to combat the powerful escapist movement (they want to build starships and flee so that at least some humans will survive), announces the Wallfacer Project. Four selected individuals will be accorded the power to command any resource in order to develop plans to defend Earth, while the details will remain hidden in the thoughts of each Wallfacer, where even the sophons can't reach. To combat this, the ETO creates Wallbreakers, dedicated to deducing and thwarting the plans of the Wallfacers. The chosen Wallfacers are soldier Frederick Tyler, diplomat Manuel Rey Diaz, neuroscientist Bill Hines, and—Luo Ji. Luo has no idea why he was chosen, but, nonetheless, the Trisolarans seem determined to kill him. The plot’s development centers on Liu’s dark and rather gloomy but highly persuasive philosophy, with dazzling ideas and an unsettling, nonlinear, almost nonnarrative structure that demands patience but offers huge rewards.

Pub Date: Aug. 11, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-7653-7708-1

Page Count: 480

Publisher: Tor

Review Posted Online: June 2, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2015

GENERAL SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY | SCIENCE FICTION | GENERAL SCIENCE FICTION

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by Cixin Liu ; translated by Ken Liu

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by Cixin Liu ; translated by Various

by Cixin Liu ; translated by Joel Martinsen

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BookBrowse Reviews The Anomaly by Hervé Le Tellier

Summary  |  Excerpt  |  Reviews  |  Beyond the book  |  Read-Alikes  |  Genres & Themes  |  Author Bio

The Anomaly

by Hervé Le Tellier

Critics' Opinion:

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• Speculative, Sci-Fi, Fantasy, Alt. History
• Contemporary
• Humor & Satire
• Books in Translation
• Philosophical

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An uncanny, mysterious event changes the lives of passengers aboard an Air France flight, raising questions about the nature of reality and how we should live in it.

Hervé Le Tellier's novel The Anomaly , translated from French into English by Adriana Hunter, follows the lives of a dozen or so characters, strangers to each other but connected by the transatlantic flight most of them took in March 2021, which experienced a violent bout of turbulence. Le Tellier begins by providing his characters' backstories up to June 2021, when FBI agents start knocking on their doors; the first third of the novel is this extended setup—new chapter, new character introduced, new life story told—during which it becomes clear that something strange—perhaps fantastical, definitely inauspicious—happened during the flight. A reader's experience with these first 150 pages will depend on how much they enjoy sweeping exposition and glimpses into disparate characters' inner lives; it's toward the end of the first part and into the second that the momentum really builds, as the mystery of what is called the Anomaly begins to coalesce. This middle section is where the book is most exciting and where its thriller designation is earned, and for this reason I won't even hint at what the Anomaly is, ignorance being, in this case, a precious resource. The Anomaly is a fun book, if not a hilarious one; it's playful in its self-referentiality (there's a book within the book, also called The Anomaly ) and its engagement with different fiction genres and tropes (political satire, family man who's secretly an assassin). Le Tellier pokes fun at the more risible aspects of contemporary Western society—late night talk shows, Saturday Night Live , action and alien movies, teenage vampire books, political leaders—but also takes them seriously as forces that affect and have a place in people's lives. The hitman passenger owes his killing techniques to Hollywood scriptwriters; the government agents interviewing passengers get their questions from Close Encounters of the Third Kind . Everyone knows this stuff is silly, the novel suggests; still, we can't seem to escape it. The political satire comes in the second half of the book; after the Anomaly is revealed, Le Tellier mostly ignores the passengers and turns his focus to the American government's response, featuring a useless, unnamed president. The result is sometimes funny and sometimes a little groan-inducing for how much it relies on obvious if not inaccurate Trump jokes (the blonde wig, the petulance). It was more fun for me to read these sections not as straightforward satire of Trump but as a clever way of showing that this rather bumbling character who is way out of his depth could be any number of American presidents (the book does take place in March 2021, well after the election, although it was written and originally published in France before this). This is a novel in part about doppelgangers—about what makes a person unique, and the point at which one person diverges from another—and it's interesting to draw out the metaphor here: allegedly dichotomous politicians as mere "doubles." The narration of The Anomaly is omniscient and authoritative; the point of view moves through characters, even minor ones, like a parasite, burrowing into a host until it's exhausted the resources of their thoughts and backstory before jumping into a new one. That's the kind of simile—a little forced, a little fun—that wouldn't be out of place in The Anomaly , and which might prompt a character to claim that they can't stand metaphors, one of Le Tellier's self-referential tics. The chapters that follow French characters read to me as more natural and better written than those about the Americans or a Nigerian pop star, which felt a bit over-researched and deliberately representational (we get long, detailed paragraphs about soldiers in Afghanistan, Nigerian cultural politics, racism in the American South). Perhaps they're a parody of the television series Lost 's flashback scenes; either way, these sections are too static and surveying to be really emotionally affecting. The strength of The Anomaly lies in its science-fictional bent, this striking new world that Le Tellier creates, halfway through, with its myriad philosophical and psychological ramifications. I would recommend it to a reader who tends to like mystery and thriller books—that heart-pounding, breath-holding desire to know what's going on—and is looking for something that raises philosophical and social issues. Or, on the other hand, to someone who is usually drawn to literary realism, but wants to inject a little more plotty excitement and mystery into their reading life. A reader who requires hardcore scientific worldbuilding or intense emotional stakes will be left wanting, but for the rest of us—who might not have realized, until now, how long it's been since we were genuinely surprised by a novel— The Anomaly should prove a fun and interesting read.

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The Anomaly by Hervé Le Tellier review — does the Prix Goncourt sensation live up to the hype?

W hen a genre-crossing sci-fi/thriller sells a million copies, you have to take notice. When it also wins the Prix Goncourt for its experimental, literary writing, expectations are set very high. But Hervé Le Tellier’s The Anomaly , now translated into English, is, sad to say, a disappointment. This is a novel of two genres and, put together, they curdle.

Le Tellier has been writing plays, poems, short stories and experimental fiction for 30 years, but this generic range has not helped him conquer sci-fi, and the book often reads like a low-budget Hollywood script.

The central event hinges on an aircraft that, with all its passengers, doubles and travels back in time. This is not an easy concept to grasp (I had to sketch a

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BOSTON'S PREMIER ONLINE ARTS MAGAZINE

Book Review: “The Anomaly” — We Know Less Than We Think

By Thomas Filbin

The Anomaly is an entertaining philosophical critique, suggesting that nothing is as it seems, knowledge is imperfect, and the human predicament will perhaps always be more inexplicable than we can admit to ourselves.

The Anomaly by Hervé Le Tellier. Translated from the French by Adriana Hunter. Other Press. 400 pp., $16.99.

Hervé Le Tellier’s latest novel, The Anomaly, won the Prix Goncourt in 2020, putting him in the select company of Marcel Proust (1919), André Malraux (1933), Simone de Beauvoir (1954), Romain Gary (1956), and Marguerite Duras (1984). Where Le Tellier differs from these earlier awardees is that his book self-consciously embraces genre fiction. The Anomaly takes the narrative form of a script for a pot-modern sci-fi made-for-television series. There are also elements of literary thriller and social satire. Unifying all these strands is Le Tellier’s admirable skill at keeping readers in suspense: for a long time it is not clear what this story is “about,” yet he continues to draw us into an increasingly complex plot, which is laid out in a succession of clues and strange coincidences. No spoilers here. I can say authorities round up the passengers of Air France flight 006, a Boeing 787, from Paris to New York. It had landed after going through a cataclysmic storm which seems to be both a weather event and some kind of unusual turbulence (perhaps an electromagnetic field?) which nearly destroys the plane. It is June 24, 2021. But soon airport officials realize that the same plane — with the identical crew and passengers and identical damage — landed at JFK 106 days earlier. We do not hear about this Twilight Zone discovery until halfway through the book, which gives Le Tellier enough time to go into the lives and tribulations of the various persons put under examination.

Le Tellier offers plenty of clever insights into the worlds of flawed people whose lives have now become matters of scientific curiosity. In Paris we have a contract killer named Blake, a failed novelist named Victor Miesel, and star-crossed lovers André Vannier and his girlfriend Lucie. The latter pair supply glimpses of contemporary life: it’s filled with self-doubt rather than meaning. André is older than Lucie and their relationship has been slowly disintegrating, a coolness presages the end. “Why couldn’t he see that she’s already left?” she thinks, wanting her freedom but finding it difficult make the final break. André knows he has become an old man in her eyes, a consciousness of mortality compounded by his realization that he will never be young as once he was.

In America, at Princeton University, two other actors assume their roles. Adrian, a brilliant mathematician-analyst, has become “painfully aware that he’s eyeing his coworker Meredith with something alternating between a tense smile and idiotic sentimentality.” After several drinks he gets the courage to approach her, reckoning

his chances of success at twenty-seven percent. They could have gone as high as forty percent if he didn’t stink so terribly of alcohol, but on the other hand, the inebriation will reduce by about sixty percent the suffering incurred by a rejection. He concluded that with such a high chance of failing, he might as well be drunk.

Adrian and Meredith are drawn into the mystery by the US Defense Department, which has taken over the investigation. Somebody has to figure out how to calculate the odds of what happened and come up with a plausible explanation. Weather, foreign aggression, a massive fraud scheme, and supernatural intervention are all considered.

Miesel, the unsuccessful author, somehow triggered the strange events. He has been writing for 15 years and earned next to nothing. He has a small literary prize to his credit and works as a translator. His view of the literary game is cynical, “a farcical train where crooks without tickets take first-class seats with the complicity of incompetent conductors, while modest geniuses are left on the platform.” When he returns from the  flight he pens his masterpiece, The Anomaly , in Paris. Overwhelmed by a nebulous anxiety, he falls (or throws himself) from his balcony to his death.

The investigation into the dual landings continues. There are speculations about a cosmic tear, a wormhole in three-dimensional space which allowed the plane and passengers to somehow be replicated. Meredith tries to explain the scientific concept to a high-level confab of scientists, religious figures, and philosophers, and the president of the United States. Perhaps space can fold itself like a sheet of paper, she says, and then be “hyperspace … in ten, eleven, twenty-six dimensions.” Meredith pauses and notes that “the American president sits openmouthed, showing a marked resemblance to a fat grouper with a blond wig.”

The most absorbing aspects of The Anomaly are not generated by its complicated plot, but the world Le Tellier immerses us in. Each chapter is filled with exacting detail: specifics about the investigations, intricacies of avionics, and experts’ view of how the world works. These specifics are precise and reflect enormous research — but to no avail. Perhaps the message here is that, although science is the best instrument we possess to understand the universe, it does not guarantee control. We know less than we think. Every generation falls victim to hubris, the notion that it has progressed to the apex, that it knows most of what can be usefully known. That egotism is inevitably shattered over time. Hey, it was not that long ago when many of us thought that the VHS tapes available at Blockbuster were the ultimate in-home entertainment.

In that sense, The Anomaly is an entertaining philosophical critique, suggesting that nothing is as it seems, knowledge is imperfect, and the human predicament will perhaps always be more inexplicable than we can admit to ourselves. Le Tellier introduces a counterfactual context, but he does not seriously expect readers to accept a sci-fi answer to the problems he has posed. Rather, he wants to undercut our pride in human reason with a healthy dose of epistemological skepticism.

Thomas Filbin is a freelance book critic whose work has appeared in the New York Times Book Review ,  Boston Globe , and Hudson Review .

[…] Book Review: “The Anomaly” – We Know Less Than We Think  artsfuse.org […]

[…] Thomas Filbin (The Arts Fuse) […]

very interesting to mix philosophy with physics..etc..anyway we are just an instument[like a microscope] with limitation BUT THE FACT THAT WE ARE CURIOUS..MAYBE WE ARE MORE THAN A MACHINE…

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Hervé le Tellier

The anomaly.

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Buckle your seatbelts, as Hervé le Tellier takes you on an extraordinary ride . You won't want to put this book down until the very last page!

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The Anomaly

58 pages • 1 hour read

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Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 1, Chapters 1-7

Part 1, Chapters 8-13

Part 2, Chapters 14-22

Part 3, Chapters 23-29

Part 3, Chapters 30-35

Character Analysis

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Summary and Study Guide

Hervé Le Tellier’s novel L’anomalie was first published in 2020 by Gallimard. After winning the 2020 Prix Goncourt, France’s most important literary prize, the novel became a runaway bestseller in Europe. This guide will cover the first English translation, The Anomaly , which was released in the United States in 2021, translated by Adriana Hunter and published by The Other Press. Le Tellier is a trained mathematician, science journalist, avant-garde poet, and public intellectual with over 30 books. The Anomaly is his ninth novel and the first to reach its level of international success.

The Anomaly at first appears to be a supernatural thriller in the vein of popular television shows Lost and Manifest . It features a large international cast of characters who share one thing in common: On March 10, 2021, they all fly from Paris to New York on Air France 006. After extreme turbulence, the flight lands safely. However, three months later, the flight lands again with the same people on board, having been mysteriously duplicated during the storm. Throughout the novel, Le Tellier mixes genres—from science fiction to romantic comedy and, eventually, metaphysical mystery. As the characters meet their doubles, they reconsider their life choices as well as the nature of the universe.

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Content Warning: The novel contains references to suicide, child sexual assault, gun violence, and an anti-gay hate crimes. This guide contains analysis of all these elements.

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On March 10, 2021, an Air France flight from Paris to New York experiences extreme turbulence after hitting a mysterious storm. The Boeing 787 is damaged but lands safely in New York. The crew and passengers go on with their lives. One of the passengers is a professional assassin named Blake; Blake kills someone in New York before returning to his other life as a husband and father running a catering company in Paris. Two other passengers, a young film editor named Lucie Bogaert and an older architect named André Vannier , spend a romantic couple weeks in New York before breaking up upon their return to Paris. An American family returns from a vacation in Paris, where the father began sexually abusing his daughter, Sophia, and the abuse continues at home. After the flight, a high-powered lawyer named Joanna decides to marry her boyfriend and have a child with him. An unknown Nigerian singer known as Slimboy goes on to write a hit song and stops hiding his sexuality. The pilot, Captain David Markle , discovers that he has pancreatic cancer and is dying. Victor Miesel , an author and translator with only modest success, becomes so affected by the flight that he goes on to write a book titled The Anomaly , then dies by suicide.

On June 24, 2021, 106 days after the original Air France 006 landed in New York, a second Air France 006—with the same passengers and crew on the same Boeing 787—emerges out of the storm. This time, when David Markle radios air-traffic control, he is questioned by various government agencies and then forced to redirect the flight to McGuire Air Force Base. Adrian Miller , a mathematician who cowrote a series of protocols for air-travel emergencies after September 11, 2001, is conscripted by the United States government to join a secret task force coordinated by General Patrick Silveria. Adrian and a team of scientists and philosophers study the event. Meanwhile, the passengers and crew of the second plane are held against their will, without electronic devices, while the passengers and crew of the first plane are visited by government agents all around the world; many of them are escorted to the air force base.

In the three days after June 24, before the story goes public, the team interviews the passengers, forms theories about the anomaly, and reports to the US president. In the chaos of the first day, Blake escapes the air force base and returns to Europe. During the interviews, the FBI PsyOps team discovers that Victor Miesel and Slimboy have not yet begun to compose the works that would make their counterparts famous after March 10. They also discover that Sophia is being abused by her father and are able to diagnose David’s cancer at an earlier stage. Jamy Pudlowski , head of the PsyOps team, coordinates with religious leaders to release a joint statement designed to protect the duplicated people once their existence is discovered. In the meantime, Adrian and his team decide that the most likely explanation for the anomaly is that their reality is a computer simulation. As everyone struggles to deal with the suggestion that their lives and sentience are an illusion , the US president and other world leaders coordinate an announcement to the public. A year ago, a similar event occurred in China, but China has successfully kept it a secret.

The passengers of both Air France flights begin meeting their doubles and figure out how to divvy up their shared lives. The Blake that landed in June is never found; he assassinates the Blake that landed in March and replaces him. André March gives advice to André June on not ruining his relationship with Lucie, then meets someone else. Lucie finds a way to share her son, who did not join her on the flight, with her double. Both of Sophia’s mothers reckon with the truth that their husband had been abusing their daughter; both families change their name while the father goes to prison. The Slimboys pretend to be identical twins and go on tour together, releasing a song about their late romantic partner, who was killed in an anti-gay hate crime. David Markle dies twice, forcing his family to go through the grieving process a second time. Joanna June finds no room for herself in Joanna March’s marriage and starts a new life working for the FBI. Victor Miesel, through a press conference announcing that he is alive, meets the woman he has been looking for, and they begin a relationship. He writes a new book that resembles Le Tellier’s. Meanwhile, the world reacts to the news of doubles and the proposed simulation theory. An actress who was duplicated on Air France 006 and her double are murdered by a religious fanatic after going on The Late Show . There is a general sense of meaninglessness in the wake of the news, but eventually life returns to something close to normal. Then, on October 21, 2021, another copy of Air France 006 appears in the same place, and the US government secretly shoots it down.

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THE ANOMALY: A BOOK REVIEW

I picked up a copy of “The Anomaly” by Hervé le Tellier at our local bookshop on the basis of rave reviews and touted best-seller status (“more than a million copies sold world-wide”!) I should have known better. It turned out to be what’s known in the lit biz as a “novel of ideas”—look it up if you care to—too clever by half for its own good and, in my own opinion, much too “French” (with a pause to apologize to mes amies and mes amis).

Okay, please overlook the scare quotes, the parentheses, the elliptical asides. My own version of too clever by half. But I did actually dislike this book quite a lot, and dislike is always a good reason for me to start writing. I’d describe is as a meta-novel, given that, in part, it’s a novel about someone supposedly writing a novel called “The Anomaly.” (I would not want to read that one, either). The anomaly in question is the story of an Air France flight from Paris to New York which encounters a meteorological supercell so intense as to cause a “divergence” in which the plane, along with all its passengers and crew, duplicate themselves, one reaching the other side of the Atlantic three months later than the first.

An ”interesting” premise, for sure. An intriguing idea. But from there we descend into a complication of characters who, for me, are devoid of both interest and humanity. They read like “ideas” of people, useful to the author in pursuit of his big “idea”, rather than actual, engaging human beings. Perhaps this is appropriate, because while they start out as sketchy human beings they rapidly turn out, with their others, into what our rapidly (and so secretly! National security is at stake!) assembled team of scientists begin to call “simulations.”

Oh, dear. The FBI gets involved, along with all the other super-efficient American security experts. Arrests are made, for top security reasons, of members of the flight that landed three months earlier, who are cheerfully (or miserably) going on with their lives. Passengers and crew of the second arriving flight are immediately quarantined (in deadly secret, of course) in the vast hanger of a US Air Force base. The President of the United States is informed. Teams of the most brilliant top scientists and psychologists are assembled. Leaders from every major religion—rabbis (conservative and reform), archbishops, prelates, imams—are brought together (in secret!) to discuss the deep religious implications of the event. Interviews are held. Arrangements are made for the victims of this fictional plot to meet their others. Somehow they must learn to get on with their lives. Some do. Some don’t.

Meanwhile, as news leaks out, the media become involved. We are privileged to participate in endless discussions of the meaning of the anomaly from the literary, philosophical—epistemology! The nature of reality! Does it exist? Of course not!—religious, social and psychological points of view. Not to forget politics, This is, after all, the US, as seen from the other side of the pond. Everything is touched upon, nothing is examined in anything other than rather pretentious cliché. Nothing gets resolved. A third flight appears on the horizon, another planeload of passengers and crew…

Oh, please. Spare me. Spare yourself. I’m just glad it’s all over.

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Two Women, United by Climate Change and the Man They Both Married

In her far-reaching latest novel, “The Limits,” Nell Freudenberger forges connections between the global and the familial.

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By Charles Finch

Charles Finch is the author, most recently, of “What Just Happened,” a chronicle of 2020.

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THE LIMITS, by Nell Freudenberger

“The future is already here,” goes a line usually attributed to William Gibson. “It’s just not very evenly distributed.” So it can seem with climate change. Floods in Libya, temperatures above 125 degrees in China and Iran, wildfires across Hawaii and Canada and Tenerife: Those of us lucky enough not to be directly affected by these multiplying events can only watch from the intimate but infinite distance of our phone screens, a peculiarly modern kind of powerlessness.

In her involving new novel, “The Limits,” the gifted veteran author Nell Freudenberger wants to close this gap. The book is set during the first year of the pandemic, partly in New York and partly in Tahiti; its subject, as it roves among characters in the two places, is the essential human similarity of our complicated families and communities everywhere on this imperiled planet.

“The Limits” revolves around two women, the past and current wives of a prominent Manhattan cardiologist. The ex-wife is Nathalie, a French scientist studying coral at the CRIOBE, a research station on the island of Mo’orea in French Polynesia. As the book begins, she sends her daughter, the bright but stubborn 15-year-old Pia, to live in New York with her father, Stephen, and his new wife, Kate, a high school teacher who has just become pregnant.

Some novelists might confine their story to this quartet. Freudenberger, whose work has been ambitious in its scope since her sensational 2003 debut collection, “Lucky Girls,” introduces an additional focal character, Athyna. She’s a student of Kate’s from a disadvantaged background, and has to balance her schoolwork and standard teen problems with caring — tenderly but distractedly — for her 4-year-old nephew.

By the time Athyna meets Pia, in the culmination of the book’s plotlines, the reader already knows how different their lives are. Take what they eat. Athyna makes her nephew mac and cheese:“They were out of milk, but Marcus didn’t care. He was happy with the cheese powder mixed with some butter and the macaroni.” Not much later, Pia’s father goes shopping and picks up “local milk and butter, swordfish, baby lettuce and butternut squash. Fresh sage and rosemary, and … at the last minute, a plum pie and some honeycomb ice cream. He thought they deserved a treat.”

These contrasts sound like the grounding for a big, global, omnidirectionally curious midcareer novel, reminiscent of the work of Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie or Jonathan Franzen. And Freudenberger, with topical contemporary novels like “The Newlyweds” and “The Dissident” behind her, gamely meets that challenge.

But more often, in fact, “The Limits” feels microscopically small. The book’s success in drawing together its threads is mixed — Pia and Athyna’s meeting doesn’t lead to much, and a fuzzy subplot hinting at a possible terrorist act is swept quickly away in the finale — but it is easily most alive and nuanced when Freudenberger is writing about contemporary New York parenting, the impossible task of raising a teenager with quicksilver moods, the sheer physical exhaustion of it all. The pregnant Kate “looked tired,” the author tells us in one of many beautifully alert moments, “as if the baby was the one doing all the sleeping.”

Partly, this is doubtless because the novel is set in the homebound months of 2020. And Freudenberger is scrupulous in her depictions of Tahiti, as well as the lives of public high school kids in New York; the book’s acknowledgments reveal she visited French Polynesia for research and has long taught as a visiting writer in Brooklyn schools.

On the other hand, there’s still something slightly paternalistic about the book’s tone. “The Limits” is effortlessly attuned to wealth, full of references to second homes in Amagansett (but barely a shack!) and the legendarily illiberal Maidstone Club; Stephen’s mother, a retired doctor, is casually revealed to be on the board of the New York City Ballet. All of this feels less consciously fabricated than the scenes about Tahitians or Athyna, and Freudenberger certainly seems from the outside to belong to the affluent milieu she describes — a graduate of Harvard living with her husband and children in Brooklyn, recipient in her distinguished career of a Whiting Award, a Guggenheim fellowship, a Pulitzer grant.

In other words: Does she agree that her characters deserve that treat?

It’s a sad fact of the novel as a genre that so worryingly many of the great ones can be boiled down to the hypothetical question “What if a rich person had to experience a crisis?” “The Limits” is that kind of book, it must be conceded. But to her vast credit, Freudenberger has a brain and a conscience, and it’s clear that she is trying to simultaneously scrutinize her experiences as a particular kind of parent in New York and tie them to a larger world. If she sometimes feels pinioned between the two — well, so are we all.

The very best parts of “The Limits” are its descriptions of the natural scenery around Mo’orea. Perhaps the key theme of Freudenberger’s career is dislocation — the idea that seeing the foreign in the world can elicit, too, the foreign within us — and Nathalie, the book’s watchful conscience, personifies this idea. She observes her beloved corals in despondent farewell, sentient beings “that had been around when the pharaohs ruled Egypt … a whole miraculous world that had been undisturbed because nothing had changed there — not the darkness or the pressure or the clarity of the water — for all those thousands of years.”

Soon enough, climate change will cease to be a problem divided this neatly between rich and poor. We are so laughably ignorant of what we have wrought, “The Limits” suggests, that we can scarcely conceive of what we may yet lose. Freudenberger’s writing, which has so often touched on the personal ramifications of the impersonal vectors of globalism and science, has in a way been leading to exactly this subject. But it is the usual story, familiar to fathers and mothers and caretakers like Athyna the world over. We can pretend that catastrophes will always happen elsewhere, until they’re happening to us.

THE LIMITS | Nell Freudenberger | Knopf | 368 pp. | $29

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Leigh Bardugo’s latest is a magical tale based in real Spanish history

In her new novel, ‘the familiar,’ the author of the grishaverse series has crafted an essential read about oppression and liberation.

Leigh Bardugo has made a career out of writing about oppressed people who wield uncanny powers. Those concerns loom large in her young-adult Grishaverse series, about a downtrodden minority who command a world-shaping magic, and the hero of her adult debut, “ Ninth House ,” is also lifted up from poverty thanks to unique abilities. But her latest adult novel, “ The Familiar ,” explores this theme with an even greater depth and sensitivity.

“The Familiar,” which is set in late-16th-century Spain, is centered on a young servant named Luzia who has the power to create milagritos, or small miracles. When Luzia’s power is accidentally discovered, influential people want to use her for their own advancement, and soon she’s entangled in political intrigue, as well as competition with other miracle-workers. Through it all, Luzia must hide the true nature of her power, which comes from reciting refranes, or old sayings, in Ladino — a Sephardic dialect of Spanish mixed with Hebrew and other languages. Nobody can know that Luzia is a conversa, a Jew whose family was forced to convert to Catholicism.

Stories about subaltern people who can work wonders often serve as a way to think about the multifaceted nature of power — how total agency in one realm can give way to helplessness in others. But they are also a window into the dual nature of stigma, which often assigns improbable power and usefulness to the most-stigmatized people. This common fantasy trope — see these five recent novels about powerful underdogs — allows us to have it both ways, rooting for a hero who is an underdog but also unbeatable.

And yet “The Familiar” feels distinct from similar tales — including Bardugo’s own — because it explores a brutal and shameful real-life history. Bardugo unsparingly depicts the violence inflicted on Jews and other non-Christians by the Spanish Inquisition, and the toll that hiding imposes on people. “The Familiar” hits hardest when it shows Luzia’s father succumbing to madness, and her constant fear that she will be found out as a conversa. Bardugo brilliantly explores the wavy line between the supernatural and the divine: Magic is forbidden, but miracles come from God.

Luzia’s status as a scullion, or kitchen servant, also shapes how she moves through the world. She pretends to be illiterate, when in fact she can read Latin as well as Spanish, and puts on an exaggerated humble persona. She quickly befriends Santángel, the mysterious supernatural bodyguard to a powerful nobleman who is the familiar of the book’s title.

At one point, Santángel warns Luzia that her lowly-servant act has gotten so good that she risks believing in it: “I know what it is to lower yourself, to keep your eyes downcast, to seek invisibility. It is a danger to become nothing. You hope no one will look, and so one day when you go to find yourself, only dust remains, ground down to nothing from sheer neglect.” These words fuel Luzia’s hunger to show the world who she really is, despite the cost.

At times, the two halves of “The Familiar” are in an uneasy tension: Its escapist narrative about a lowly person whose power raises them up chafes against the much darker real-life story of the hateful Spanish Inquisition. Bardugo has clearly done a lot of research, but she uses it sparingly, and her breakneck pace sometimes means sacrificing immersion. Some of the political wranglings fail to fully come into focus, and one major development falls a bit flat as a result. (I couldn’t help contrasting it with Anne Rice’s historical fiction, which takes its time and shows every nook and cranny.) And yet, when Bardugo chooses to venture further into the darkness, it’s that much more devastating because of how much fun the reader has been having. In fact, she is a master of anticlimax: She builds apprehension for huge events that do not come to pass, then blindsides the reader with something totally unexpected instead.

“The Familiar” is strongest when it pulls back from Luzia’s perspective and becomes more of an ensemble novel. Luzia’s aunt Hualit, who has successfully hidden her Jewish origins and become a glamorous mistress to Santángel’s patron, has a fascinating arc. And Luzia’s former employer, Valentina, finds herself reevaluating her whole life. These smaller stories add considerable weight to the heroic journey of Luzia and Santángel.

Fans of Bardugo’s work will find “The Familiar” a thrilling addition to her canon about oppression and liberation, and anyone interested in this historical period and the themes she’s exploring will find it engrossing. This is a story about the suffering that results when the majority imposes its religion on everyone else, using coercive authority to control the identities of all. That, alone, makes “The Familiar” an essential read.

Charlie Jane Anders is the author of “Promises Stronger Than Darkness,” the final book in a young-adult trilogy that began with “Victories Greater Than Death.” Her other books include “The City in the Middle of the Night” and “All the Birds in the Sky.” She has won the Hugo, Nebula, Sturgeon, Lambda Literary, Crawford and Locus awards.

The Familiar

By Leigh Bardugo

Flatiron. 385 pp. $29.99

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