Jade Wallace's ​Anomia

Reviewed by Amanda Earl

(Palimpsest Press, 2024)

Anomia was a quirky and delightful surprise, a compelling read that had me fascinated from the first page to the last. I can easily image this novel as a film, thanks to Wallace’s vivid descriptions, humour, and precision of language.
 
The novel opens with Slip, a solitary trailer-park resident, “a little ghost of a person,” who comes upon bones in the Underwood, a large clearing on the fringes of Euphoria, where “everything that is other than a tree, grows ardent and reckless.”
 
The bones become companions of sorts for Slip, who names them “The Corpses.” The Corpses are transported to Slip’s trailer in a backpack where they are spotted through the window by teen neighbour Limn and Limn’s friend, Mal, who discuss the matter in the Utopia Video Store where Fir works. Fir is curious after overhearing some of their conversation and wonders if they might be discussing a couple of missing persons Fir knows, Blue and Culver. Fir discusses this with friend Fain, who helps Fir in a search for the couple.
 
The title of the book, Anomia, refers to the inability to name objects or to recognize the written or spoken names of objects. Interestingly, names are quite important in the novel. Anomia can also refer to the idea of being outside the law, and in many ways the characters are outsiders, on the fringes in a small town, at the edge of it in the trailer park. The novel opens with an epigraph by American artist and filmmaker Harry Dodge, “There’s not a name for every thing.”
 
Yet names are very important in this book, as evidenced in Slip’s decision to name the bones, “The Corpses:” “carcasses sounded too predatory, cadavers too clinical, dead bodies too casual, victims too presumptuous, bones too reductive, remains too antiquated, vestiges of flesh too unspeakably pompous.”
 
Throughout the novel, Wallace’s narrators are precise in their use of language and the naming of things. It begs the question, what is difficult to name? What is unspoken?
 
Blue and Culver are unlikely love matches, but they fall in love and get married. All this is background we learn as we follow the search for the missing couple by Fir and Fain. There is something comedic about their search as they wander through their home and find items that reveal Blue and Culver’s eccentricities and interests, but there is melancholy too as we learn that Fir was in love with Blue, and we eventually learn the reason why Blue and Culver are missing. I would say more but I don’t want to spoil the novel’s ending for you. It is a delightfully twisty and surprising end.
 
There is a circularity to the structure of this work that goes with its otherworldly or liminal nature as if chronological time itself is an arbitrary structure. The narrative alternates between the characters, and moves from the discovery of the bones back in time through Fir’s relationship with Blue, and Blue and Culver’s relationship. At times, I found it necessary to return to an earlier chapter to confirm my sense of time, what happened when. This also helps to underline the feeling that the work and the town have an otherly sense of time. Slip finds bones. Mal and Limn spot the bones in Slip’s living room. In an early chapter, Fir and Fin are looking for Blue and Culver. Then later in the book, we flash back to an earlier time when they decide to look for the couple. Then we flash back to a scene with Fir and Blue.  The rest of the book unfolds in this way, radiating out from the central plot of the missing couple and The Corpses, which we are led to believe early on are their remains.
 
The book contains both modern technology, such as the internet, and things that are not common at all in contemporary society when it was published—coins, a corded telephone and videos, a video store where one goes to rent them—adding to the book’s feeling of timelessness. Slip feels an affinity to The Corpses: “I’m not really of the time I’m living in anymore. Neither are you. That’s why it makes sense for us to be here together.”
 
There are poetic and philosophical asides, such as Fathoms, and Polyonymous, meaning having or being known by various names, a discussion of the names of bodies and how the name for body changes as it moves from birth to death and after death. These asides both complement and disrupt the narrative. They feel like they are outside the story, told by an omniscient narrator, rather than the rest of the story which is told in third-person limited through the eyes of Slip, Fir, Fain, Blue and Culver. These omniscient passages therefore feel separate in some ways but serve to complement the story. I could happily read these asides as a series of prose poems.
 
The language of the book is poetic, giving me more reasons to slow down and linger, rather than try to speed through the novel to figure out the mystery of what happened to The Corpses.
 
Anomia is a hybrid work of poetry and fiction, part mystery, part long poem. It works outside the laws of time, gender and genre boundaries through its lack of gender pronouns and its play with narrative structure and time. The book is a beguiling fairytale, a true crime fan’s delight, an exploration the Gothic horror of small-town life with its lore and undercurrents of trauma and tragedy, grief and struggle. 

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Amanda Earl (she/her) is a writer, editor, visual poet, publisher, reviewer and literary events organizer, living on the unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishinaabeg Peoples, colonially known as Ottawa, Ontario. Her latest book is Beast Body Epic, a long-poem collection about her near-death health crisis. For more information, please consult AmandaEarl.com.