Herve Le Tellier's THE ANOMALY (Tr. by Adriana Hunter, Narr. by Dominic Hoffman)

A phrase that repeats often as Herve Le Tellier's The Anomaly gets going is "Maybe this is happiness," usually describing something banal and material, or at least basic, implying that if this is what happiness is, it's been oversold, at least to the cast of characters whose mini-biographies form the first part of the novel. Among these are a novelist who wrote a book called The Anomaly and committed suicide (this is not much of a spoiler; it happens early in the book and it's one of the pivotal issues that touches off the many philosophical conundra that pepper Le Tellier's The Anomaly as the fictionalized author of The Anomaly achieves a posthumous level of fame and respect he never enjoyed in life and if you're thinking of Italo Calvino's If On a Winter's Night a Traveler, you're supposed to; the book gets an explicit name check in the account of the dead author's success.)

But the fictionalized writer of that other The Anomaly is far from being the most important character in this The Anomaly. After all, as far as we get to know, his The Anomaly is not, in fact, the text we are reading here. That would be almost too Borgesian, no?

Anyway, there are lots of other characters more interesting and more important to the story than this author. Like a professor of statistics and probability who, in his undergraduate days at M.I.T. cooked up something called "Protocol 42" as a set of guidelines to follow when something truly unexplainable, unpredictable or unprecedented happens -- when there is an anomaly that can't be handled by any normal means. He chose 42 for its name because Douglas Adams, of course -- a signal that he and his friends who cooked it up together never in a million years expected it ever to be taken seriously, let alone actually employed by the U.S. Government, even after U.S. Gov made them all sign contracts requiring that they be permanently available to be called on at any time, no questions asked, if it was ever deemed necessary to activate Protocol 42. Which, of course, is what The Anomaly, as in the Le Tellier novel, is actually about.

In March of 2021, an Air France plane traveled through some very adverse weather but fought through to JFK International Airport, sporting considerable hail damage but otherwise all right, and its several hundred passengers disembarked and went on with their lives.

Then, in June of that same year, the exact same plane, with the exact same crew and passenger manifest and serial numbers, the exact same everything, emerged from a similar storm and sent a Mayday message to JFK because the damage was a bit more severe this time around, only to be diverted to a New Jersey military base under fighter escort because all this had already happened three months before and this was too weird to allow the plane to come to JFK and disembark, etc. Yes, this all feels very familiar. We've seen the TV show, etc. But this is a French novel, you guys, and it's the Frenchest thing I've read since I finally got tired of Michel Houellebecq's shit (and yes, this includes the terrific Vernon Subutex trilogy I enjoyed last year), so, buckle up, there's going to be a whole lot of philosophical speculation going on. Starting with a lot of attention being paid to how this manifestation of a duplicate, a perfect copy in every way, of the plane and all of its contents, including a few hundred passengers, is an almost incontrovertible argument in favor of the Simulation Theory, which, in brief, states that our entire phenomenological cosmos is actually a computer simulation, none of us are real, we're all just programs running in a vast godlike computer system called Deep Thought, wait no, not that, but all the other stuff? Yes.

But again, the novelist isn't the interesting passenger. Not when there's an honest-to-Ludlum international assassin who had been traveling from Paris to NYC on his latest assignment (but left behind a wife and children and charming double life in Paris -- double lives are a theme here, my friends)! Except, we don't get to see him much, just enough to see how he handles coming home to Paris and finding another version of himself living the aforementioned charming life with wife and children and reacting the way a guy like him might react, since he alone of all the passengers is the only one who didn't get the memo about what was going on because he escaped from US Gov too soon to get in on the briefing and counseling sessions. D'oh!

There's also a Nigerian rap star who, between March and June, wrote a song that went batshit viral on the internet and catapulted him to fame on the level of being invited to collaborate with Sir Elton John on a song, because our Nigerian, stage named Slimboy, is actually gay in a country that still considers homosexuality a serious crime, see, double life again! How he -- the he's, the Slimboys -- handles the sudden dopplegangery is one of my favorite bits of The Anomaly along with...

And also there is the issue that suddenly hundreds of people who have been going about their ordinary lives in this world suddenly have perfect doppelgangers, exactly like them in every detail except they are three months younger and have no knowledge or memory of the three months that have elapsed since the original plane landed. Among the passengers on this plane were the novelist who wrote the in-book novel The Anomaly and then committed suicide; suddenly the novelist is alive again and ready to resume his life just as if it were still March 2021, except, of course, he doesn't even have the germ of the idea for The Anomaly yet so whatever experiences led to the writing of the novel and the author's suicide are quite beyond his ken.

Slight digression time. This book was written and translated and published at a very specific moment in 21st century history, and the President of the United States is very much a character in The Anomaly, only it's pretty obvious from tons of context clues and the POTUS' general behavior and way of speaking that Le Tellier assumed the United States would be dumb enough to re-elect our most embarrassing POTUS and sketches us a pretty merciless portrait of that man without ever naming him. It's sort of darkly fun to imagine that guy handling a philosophical crisis like this story poses, almost as much fun as it is to watch Le Tellier's merciless skewering of American pop culture in the person of Stephen Colbert and The Late Show, an episode of which is depicted in minute detail when Colbert et al land an interview with a pair of doppelgangers who are very attractive young women willing to go along with the producers to create some Fucking Great Television with, uh, unfortunate results.

OK, back to the others. Like the aging French architect who finds himself with a second chance at saving his relationship with his much younger girlfriend, or rather, in learning from his March self how the March self ruined said relationship with the girlfriend's March self and making a plan not to make the same mistake. And the girlfriend herself, who is a single mom with a young son who suddenly has, not just two mommies, but two absolutely identical mommies except one of them doesn't remember anything since she took a trip with her boyfriend in March.

What I'm saying is, Le Tellier took a rather tired trope -- airline experiences mysterious event and passengers lives are weird forever -- and turned it into a specific way to examine a lot of different solutions to the problem of What If Suddenly There Were Two Of Me on both a personal and a worldwide scale. Being a French novelist not unlike Houellebecq, Le Tellier does not think the rest of society, especially not American society, will handle the advent of a few hundred duplicated human beings well, let alone the news that potentially one of the less hopeful ontological interpretations of our existence is proven pretty much true, and I wish I could say I thought he took this too far but unfortunately, as events just this last week or so have proven all over again, I think Le Tellier was right on the money about how badly a lot of us would behave.

All of this is conveyed beautifully by the smooth voice and precise diction (as in consonants so crisp they sound almost British) I last enjoyed in the gigantic audio edition of Chuck Wendig's Wanderers (co-narrated with fellow audio narrating superstar Xe Sands), who performs the difficult feat of giving each character their own voice and flavor without pushing through into voice acting, meaning he also gives female characters the right hint of femininity without falling into caricature that I so appreciate.

As for translator Adriana Hunter, I have nothing to say about her work, which in my book is a compliment in that it's pretty great when a translator does so well that they seem to disappear into the translated work, where often I notice a translator for a weird word choice that sends me down rabbit holes to find out if the weird phrasing originated with the author or the translator. No, here there were only philosophical rabbit holes, and that was enough.

Maybe this is happiness.