The Anomaly

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.

The novel opens from the point of view of a hitman known as Blake. Blake has always been an amoral person, and his lack of empathy for others makes him good at his job. Blake became a hitman when he was 20 years old, after a stranger at a bar drunkenly offered him a lot of money to kill someone. Blake later contacts the stranger, having invented a new identity. He then meticulously plans and carries out the killing of a middle-aged man named Samuel Tadler, making it look like an accident. Since then, he has come up with many more identities and completed many more contract killings.

Before becoming a hitman, Blake attended hospitality school and trained to be chef. He runs a successful, Paris-based vegetarian catering company and lives in Paris under an assumed name, Joe, with his wife, Flora, and two children, Quentin and Mathilde. He keeps his two lives and personae strictly separate (18); he even owns two apartments in Paris under different names.

On March 10, 2021, Blake flies to New York for a contract. The turbulence on the flight is so violent that he thinks he is going to die, but the plane lands safely. For the next week, Blake tracks his target, arranging for multiple precautions that turn out to be unnecessary, as he easily kills his mark and returns to Paris. In June 2021, Blake is living in Paris as Joe. He drinks coffee at his favorite Paris bar while reading a book by Victor Miesel. When he leaves to meet a new client, a mysterious man watches him.

Victor Miesel is a French author who has enjoyed very little success with his own writing. He has a jaded view of the publishing industry, but he maintains a sense of humor despite his failures. Instead, he makes a living as a translator. He translates a wide range of languages and books, including some English-language bestsellers into French.

Miesel always carries a red Lego brick in his pocket. Originally it belonged to a castle he was building with his father before his father died. He’s since lost the brick twice and replaced it, considering it “just a memory of a memory” (21).

He has no children and has never had a lasting relationship. He remembers only one woman with whom he believes he might have been happy. He met her at a translation conference, where they shared one brief exchange about translating the dessert crème chantilly into English. She suggested “Ascot cream” (22). Miesel was never able to find her again. He returned to the conference in subsequent years and even left hints in his translations, hoping she was reading them, but he never found her.

On March 10, 2021, Miesel flies to New York to accept a translation prize. He notices a young woman on the plane who reminds him of the woman he met at the conference, but she is younger and with an older man. The turbulence is so violent that Miesel becomes almost catatonic. He becomes “mired in a horrible impression of unreality,” and he has to be escorted off the plane and to a hotel (25). He attends the party and accepts the translation prize still in a daze.

Back in Paris, he writes a new book, The Anomaly, full of metaphysical aphorisms and colorful metaphors. He writes it compulsively, driven by anxiety, and after he finishes, in April 2021, he immediately jumps from his balcony and dies by suicide.

Years before the March 2021 flight, Lucie Bogaert, a successful film editor, meets the architect André Vannier at a party. He is a much older man, but he pursues Lucie, and Lucie lets him. She attends one of André’s dinner parties and is impressed by his important friends—including Armand Mélois, who runs French counterespionage. One day, after saving Lucie from a speeding truck, André accidentally blurts out that he loves her, but Lucie continues to resist her growing attraction to him until March 2021, when André confronts Lucie about his feelings. Lucie kisses him and agrees to join him on his trip to New York.

While her son, Louis, stays with his grandmother, Lucie and André take the same flight to New York from Paris as Blake and Miesel, experiencing the same intense turbulence. Lucie finds André reassuring, and they have an enjoyable trip. Lucie cuts her hair short and declares that she is starting a new life. But when they return to Paris, their relationship falls apart. He is too controlling and too sexually needy for her. In June 2021, they go on one final date, and Lucie breaks it off. As a parting gift, André gives her a copy of The Anomaly by Victør Miesel.

Three weeks later, Lucie edits a scene while she waits for Louis to wake up. She feels depressed. She reads an email from André and considers it “trite nonsense” (38). Suddenly, she is visited by the French national police.

David Markle waits for the oncologist, who is also his brother, Paul. To avoid thinking about why he is there, he fixates on a ficus in the waiting room. He imagines that if the ficus is watered any later than 5:35 on Thursday afternoon, it won’t survive. Paul invites David into the office and asks after his wife, Jody, who is teaching. After an awkward delay, Paul tells David his diagnosis: stage four pancreatic cancer. He explains that there is very little chance David will survive the year, and David wonders whether things would be different if he’d seen a doctor after “that hellish flight from Paris” (44). He was the pilot of the Air France to New York on March 10, 2021.

Paul explains that every cancer is different, and he does not know when David’s cancer started. He tries to assure his brother by talking about experimental treatments, but he is lying. He explains the protocols of cancer treatment to David while David thinks about Jody and their kids, Grace and Benjamin. There is a beam of sunlight that shines between two skyscrapers for only a few minutes each day.

By June 2021, the doctors give up trying to stop the cancer. David is dying at a hospital in New York City while Jody sleeps at his side. In late June, two men in suits visit David while he is unconscious. They take a photo of him and swab his mouth for DNA.

It is March 10, 2021. Captain David Markle, the pilot of Air France 006, notices the storm ahead and is concerned because it is the worst he has ever seen. David radios air-traffic control, and a woman advises him to continue to New York as planned. David then speaks to the passengers over the intercom, explaining that there will be “very significant turbulence” (52). When they hit the storm, the plane freefalls and the passengers scream. Hailstones pelt the windows. David and his copilot, Favereaux, work to keep the plane under control. Then, suddenly, the plane escapes the storm, entering clear skies.

The plane seems fine, but the instruments are no longer working, so David calls air-traffic control. This time, a man answers. He is very surprised and asks David to confirm the flight number and names of the flight crew.

Sophia’s frog, Betty, escaped her terrarium in the beginning of June 2021. Three weeks later, her brother Liam finds Betty dehydrated behind a space heater. The family is about to flush Betty down the toilet when they discover that she is actually still alive, rehydrated by the water.

Sophia is smart and knows a lot about amphibians. On their family trip to Paris in March, she forced her mother, April, to take her to the zoo. During that trip, her father, Clark, received a new assignment from the army. As a result, he did not fly back with them on Air France 006, on which Sophia and her mother experienced terrible turbulence.

Clark used to be a kind person, but after joining the army at age 22, he became hardened and cruel. He yells at April for not keeping the kids quiet. When April asks Clark to be more sensitive around the kids, Clark goes on an angry rant about not being respected. He thinks about all the terrible things he’s had to endure as a soldier. April, Sophia, and Liam are afraid of Clark when he is angry, so they obey him when he orders April and Liam to go shopping for groceries.

When April and Liam are gone, Clark starts a bath for Sophia and orders her to get in quickly, because they don’t have “as much time as in Pari—” (69). But before she gets in, the FBI arrive. The rest of the chapter is told from Sophia’s point of view. She hears her father shouting downstairs. Agent Heather Chapman then explains to Sophia that she will be going somewhere with them. Sophia asks Agent Chapman to take care of Betty.

Joanna Wasserman is a no-nonsense lawyer for the firm Denton & Lovell. In late June, she meets with Sean Prior, the CEO of Valdeo, a pharmaceutical company. Prior prides himself on talking with Joanna as an equal, but Joanna is aware of the hypocrisy. He is white and born wealthy, and she is the Black daughter of a seamstress.

Joanna was recently hired and made a partner by Denton & Lovell for this case specifically. Valdeo’s insecticide, Hexachlorion, was released without proper testing and is now showing signs of harmfulness. Joanna is defending Valdeo in a class-action lawsuit; she was chosen—she believes—because most of the affected workers are women of color. She took the job both to advance her professional ambitions and to help save the life of her sister, Ellen, who needs an expensive liver transplant.

Joanna is pregnant. She met her husband, Aby Wasserman, last year, when she defended his right as a newspaper cartoonist to publish opinions about a white supremacist. When Joanna was flying back to New York from Paris on March 10, 2021, the turbulence made her fear for her life, and the realization that she might die at any time convinced her to marry Aby and have a baby as soon as possible.

Joanna coaches Prior on Denton & Lovell’s defense strategy. Afterward, Prior invites Joanna to join him at the Dolder club, a meeting of the most powerful people in Big Pharma. Joanna is thinking about whether to accept when FBI agents arrive for her.