![]() I was hoping someone like Meredith would come along. Fortunately I skipped ahead for a look at the Princeton chapter, which begins at Fine Hall (on a campus that’s “trying to look like Hogwarts”) with two unkempt genius mathematicians - “a probabilities expert” named Adrian Miller and his coworker Meredith Harper, the British topologist he at first glance thought “plain ugly” with “her overthin legs and her overtidy brown hair, her overlong nose and her overdark eyes.” Now, after a few beers, she’s becoming “irrationally attractive” as she blows through the small talk (he wants to ask her about “specifically symmetrical spaces,” she wants to get “conscientiously drunk”) with a haphazard story-of-her-life monologue about her “crappy bungalow in Trenton” and how long it’s been since she slept with anyone, which ends: “How about you, Adrian? Everything okay? House, car, sex life?”Īmazing, suddenly a sympathetic character dances off the page, thanks to the author’s obvious affection for the anomaly of appearances (the “sweet disorder in the dress” syndrome). The characters, including the assassin, left me cold. One thing the two books have in common is that I almost put aside The Anomaly. The question now is how can it compare with a literary mystery timed for the misinformational, confrontational turbulence of the current Omicron moment, on the eve of the first anniversary of the January 6 assault on democracy? ![]() 145 years from takeoff, A Simple Heart has arrived. So I put the book aside, figuring that the life of a servant in the provinces could not compare with the story of a star-crossed adulteress. When I first read that sentence, I was a college sophomore on the rebound from Madame Bovary. Le Tellier’s novel begins, “It’s not the killing, that’s not the thing.” The speaker is a passenger on Air France Flight 006, a hired assassin “who builds his life on other people’s deaths.”įlaubert’s novella begins, “Madame Aubain’s servant Félicité was the envy of the ladies of Pont-l’Évêque for half a century.” By definition, then, Flight 22, Paris to Princeton, will be an anomaly about an anomaly, fueled by the fact that the only thing these two enterprises appear to have in common is that both were translated from the French and are landing on the same page at the same time. A ccording to Merriam-Webster, the “full definition” of anomaly is “something different, abnormal, peculiar, or not easily classified.” My first column of 2022 brings together Gustave Flaubert’s A Simple Heart, a 72-page novella published in 1877, with Hervé Le Tellier’s The Anomaly, a 389-page novel published last year.
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