ANOMIA
By Jade Wallace
Palimpsest Press, 2024
Review by Margaryta Golovchenko
There is a special quality to a novel written by a poet. This is very much the case with ANOMIA, the debut novel by Jade Wallace, who forms one half of the MA|DE, a poetry collective with Mark Laliberte that experiments with form and voice in their work. There are two ways to describe ANOMIA: by emphasizing plot and by considering the affective landscape Wallace created within its pages. From a plot perspective, the novel is quite simple. A couple, Blue and Culver, go missing. This prompts their once-friend, Fir, to convince another friend, Fain, to begin searching for them despite the local police’s refusal to take the disappearance seriously and investigate it. Fir and Fain are convinced that Blue and Culver’s disappearance has a sinister reason behind it. A second, parallel investigation, is conducted by teenagers Limn and Malapert. Theirs is triggered by Malapert’s suspicion that Slip, an old person living in a trailer park, has a bag of human bones in their trailer.
ANOMIA’s engagement with gender through language has been one of the main marketing angles, drawing comparisons to works like the genre-defying avant-garde French work Sphinx by Anne Garréta. A notable difference between this comparison, however, is that Wallace’s commitment to the premise of resisting the use of any pronouns maintains its integrity, something that cannot be said of Garréta’s text with its heavily implied heterosexuality. There were only a couple cases where pronouns were used. One occurred in a scene where “Fir lay awake, synchronizing their breath” with Fain’s beside them. Another occurs in a scene where Blue is with Fir and is described as “parting their hands but locking their eyes.” In both cases, as noted in relation to Slip, singleness is not a certainty, the “they” remains perpetually open to multiplicity. This commitment is palpable in Wallace’s use of “the parent” and “barmate” to preserve the openness without sacrificing the integrity of the narrative. Wallace centres the theme of identity and selfhood, using language to identify shortcomings and imagine workarounds. Beginning with the opening chapter, in which Slip tries to assemble the bones into bodies and realizes that “Some of the bones that are still whole seem to manifest in fours. This could mean that Slip is confusing likeness for identity. […] Slip decides that it is better to presume a plurality than a singularity.”
Age is, arguably, the only (relatively) stable marker in ANOMIA, as Slip, being the oldest of the characters, is the one to regularly offer words of multifaceted wisdom. In a later chapter, Slip tells The Corposes, the name Slip gives to the bones, that because a name is of little use to bones they will “only need to learn the sound of my voice so that when you hear me speak, you will know who is addressing [them].” These words can be used to characterize ANOMIA in general, a book in which Utopia can be any small rural place not just in Canada but the world more broadly, as it is defined more by the pace at which passions cool and dreams refuse to die than by any culture or creed. After all, one of the novel’s central questions—what would one do for love and how does one recognize when a relationship is no longer a form of love—is not limited by such artificially constructed parameters.
One of the effects of Wallace’s ‘avoidance’ of pronoun use is that the characters feel like they are fully in the moment, constantly moving and acting rather than simply observing. This is true even in cases where a character has a flashback to something that happened in the past, such as the first time Fir remembers Blue. The smooth movement from present to past and back to the present make these moments feel more like temporal transitions rather than flashbacks, which are more often characterized by a snappiness, a suddenness that implies there is something bad about reminiscing too much. Similarly significant is the letter written by Blue that creates an interspliced timeline as it begins: “I did not expect to be standing in my kitchen when I was told how and when my life would end.” While the line refers to a particular narrative development in the novel, it also connects to the idea of queer time proposed by scholar Lee Edelman, who noted how queer individuals are excluded from heteronormative society because time is defined by reproduction and a person’s ability and willingness to have kids. Edelman invites his readers to imagine what queer temporality that acknowledges queer futurity looks like.
Wallace does provide a conclusion to the novel’s immediate plot, yet by the time it is revealed within the last third of the book, the ‘why’ becomes less pressing, cooling off compared to the bigger picture that has come into sharper focus around it. In fact, ANOMIA is a sort of picture, a landscape of images and affects bound together to create a place with such a recognizable geography that it becomes difficult to believe it cannot be found in the real world. ANOMIA is not an explicitly Canadiana novel, although the mention of the Carolinian forest gives some sense of geography and partly disproves this point. Significantly, the one forest that is named—the Unwood, which locals are said to fear—reads more as an organism than simply a space, consuming physically and psychologically. Wallace’s descriptions give the novel the atmosphere found in visual media like the show Gravity Falls or the indie video game Night in the Woods, both also located in places that can be tethered to real locations with varying degrees of relevance, yet both also working cohesively without this certainty.
In a similar way, ANOMIA is a text with a ‘now’ that continuously extends into an amorphous future. Although Wallace gives a sprinkling of closure at the very end, the novel’s greater interests—in identity, in finding a self among a constantly evolving set of states—are shown to be fluctuating processes that are driven as much by the one doing the searching as by those around them.
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Margaryta Golovchenko (she/her) is currently a PhD candidate in the art history department at the University of Oregon, where her research focuses on human-animal relationships within 18th and 19th century art. The author of three poetry chapbooks, most recently Daughterland (Anstruther Press, 2022), her individual poems have appeared in publications such as Pinhole Poetry, Talking About Strawberries All of the Time, Channel Magazine, Prairie Fire, Menacing Hedge, and others. She has also written literary and art criticism for a variety of publications.