ALU Summer Book Club: Team Discussion

Which characters in Anomia resonated with you the most? Who was the most reliable character? Who were the unreliable characters?

Laura: I was intrigued by Slip- by the intuition driving Slip, and the sense of unexplained history beneath the surface surrounding them.

Mandy: I thought all the characters had redeeming qualities and I liked them for different reasons – Fir strikes me as a hopeless romantic, Blue is indecisive which makes them an interesting character, Limn is kind-hearted, Fain is the kind of friend you want in your corner. The unreliability for me came down to each character having their own perspective on things as humans do. What’s true to one isn’t to another.

Tan: I think Limn resonated with me most – a slightly shy teen, into art and mysteries. Also, potentially the most reliable of the characters – Limn didn’t really mislead anyone as far as I can recall. Fain seems pretty straight forward as well. Blue and Fir seemed least reliable, most likely to bend the facts to suit their perceptions.

Lauren: I always gravitate towards the “witchy” or “hermit” characters, so I loved Slip and their odd attachment to the bones they found in the forest. Like my colleagues, I also was attracted to Fain’s forthrightness and helpfulness to their friend.

I think all of the characters are unreliable in one way or another, not out of any maliciousness but rather in protecting their own fragility. When they do allow themselves to be vulnerable, we see community and friendship build – whether it’s Slip choosing to trust the teens in the trailer park or Fir working with Fain.

What was the experience of reading a novel that contains no gendered pronouns? How did it impact your reading of the story?

Laura: I found it liberating to read a narrative without gender references. Also, I loved the poetic language of Anomia. There were many sentences that left me marvelling at their seemingly effortless moves.

Lauren: Kudos to Jade Wallace for writing this novel so seamlessly that it was easy to forget there weren’t gendered pronouns being used in the first place. The names of the characters are (I think deliberately) gender-neutral and Jade avoided using too many neutral pronouns, in favour of simply naming them again. It was not distracting at all, for which I’m glad, because while this is a fantastically executed writing constraint, it’s far from all that this book had to offer. 

All that said, Laura mentioned it was freeing to think of character this way, free from gender, and I agree. I didn’t take any of the gendered baggage with me to conceiving of who these characters were or what their motivations might be.

Tan: This worked for me for most characters, I pictured them as mainly androgynous people, a little fuzzy on the details, but that allowed them to exist in the story without expectations. 

Mandy: One of my favourite novels in university was Winterson’s Written on the Body, which was the first book I read that had a gender-ambiguous narrator, so I was very excited to read Anomia. And it didn’t disappoint! Gender doesn’t exist at all, which is so impressive on its own. I also found the characters to be bigger in some ways; I was freer to imagine them once the container of gender was removed. In terms of picturing the characters, I kind of saw them like when you remove your glasses and there’s an outline but the details are missing. It made me pay closer attention to the story, to the beautiful words. I think Jade Wallace has created something trailblazing here.

Memory is a big theme in this book: slipping memories, things misremembered, people forgotten. What do you think the author is saying about memory?

Mandy: Memory and truth, whose truth, subjective truth, objective truth, all came into question.

The characters have different perspectives on this single situation. Fir is looking for their lost love; Fain is in it for friendship and remains a bit objective; Limn and Mal are into the crime stuff. Then there’s the perspective we end up getting from the two characters that are at the centre of the whole mystery. Everyone is coming at this single event from different places. And we know memory is faulty, that memory is just perceptions not facts – all of that ties so well into the central mystery of the book. Maybe the author is solidifying that memory and truth coexist but are independent of each other.

Tan: It’s subjective, something each of us is building for ourselves, not a set of facts. 

Laura: It all seems very subjective and elusive. Meanings shift, even within a single conversation. The labels we often take for granted, such as spouse or friend, can appear more expansive, or less, depending on the context.

In medicine, the word “Anomia” refers to the difficulty in spontaneously finding words during conversation or in naming tasks, and is considered a manifestation of impaired word access or representation. In sociology, anomie or anomy is a social condition defined by an uprooting or breakdown of any moral values, standards or guidance for individuals to follow. Why do you think the author chose this title?

Lauren: I think the second definition, “an uprooting or breakdown of moral values,” suits what’s happening as the narrative opens in Euphoria. In a way, the town is a lawless place – the police don’t do anything – and it’s clear, from the long absence of the lovers Culver and Blue, that the town’s neighbours aren’t really looking out for each other, either, so it’s a careless place, too. As the characters open up to each other and learn to trust, they are overcoming the anomie that’s plagued their town.

Laura: I’m going to guess here – the frame and title suggest, a resistance to the certainties we claim when using names as labels. It’s questioning the shared understandings of naming and fixed standards. 

Tan: The sociological meaning seemed more prominent to me, in that some of these characters seemed to lack a shared set of morals upon which to act. They keep so much to themselves. Also, there seem to be no authority in town/the police aren’t interested in any of these missing people. Perhaps the medical meaning refers to the lack of pronouns, named genders. The choice of names for the characters were all fitting, but were they “real” names, or assumed names/nick names?

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