Them Bones: The Power of Indeterminate Language - Zachary Thompson Reviews Jade Wallace's Anomia
October 24, 2024
Anomia. Jade Wallace. Palimpsest Press. $21.95, 230 pp., ISBN: 978-1-990293-75-7
Everywhere is a middle place in Anomia, the debut novel by Ontario poet, writer, editor and critic Jade Wallace. Set in the fictional town of Euphoria, Anomia charts a world that is both claustrophobic and dense, inhabited by characters who appear transient but are in many respects rooted in place. The plot of the novel concerns grave matters of life and death, yet the story unfolds quietly, in remote bedrooms and lonely trailer parks. Anomia exists somewhere between dirty realism and a gothic fairytale, not just because of its setting and tone but largely as a result of Wallace’s rejection of determinant, particularly gendered, language. It is this refusal to commit to the rules of language, and by extension the rules of the world, that makes Wallace’s novel such a haunting—and politically radical—success.
The story of Anomia concerns a character named Slip, an elderly person residing in a trailer home near Euphoria’s woodland outskirts, known to residents as the Unwood. Slip is a dreamy character, one who takes long walks, generally avoids contact with others, and feels perfectly adrift in the novel’s ethereal not-quite-reality. When Anomia begins, Slip is holding tightly onto stones taken from the ground of the Unwood, because the stones are “rough-skinned and heavy in the hand,” reassuring Slip that it is “impossible to think of reality as an optical illusion.” The reader might not be so sure: very quickly, Slip discards the rough stones and stumbles upon what appear to be the bones of human remains. Slip decides to pack up the bones and take them home to the nearby trailer park, showing an almost familial concern for the discarded remains and the living people they may have once belonged to.
The novel’s other key characters are two pairs of close companions: teenage besties Limn and Mal, who frequent the local video rental store Utopia Video; and adult friends Fir (who works behind the cash register at Utopia) and Fain. There is also the disembodied presence of Blue and Culver, whose tumultuous (“neither happy nor unhappy”) romance also involved an affair between Blue and Fir, and whose sudden disappearance has left Fir in a restless malaise. With some insistence from the more gregarious Fain, Fir begins a search of Euphoria in hopes of finding Blue and Culver. A series of coincidences and chance encounters puts Limn and Mal in increasingly close proximity to Slip. Throughout, the identity of the deceased (“the Corpses” as Slip begins addressing them), and the fate of Blue and Culver, remain two mysteries whose respective solutions may or may not be drifting disastrously close to each another.
Despite all this macabre intrigue, Anomia is an unusually quiet novel. All five of the central characters, with the occasional exception of Fain, are gentle and mild-mannered. The rare appearance of a character outside the core narrative—a police officer, librarian, or gas station attendant, for instance—immediately puts both Wallace’s characters and their readers on edge, as though the action of the novel is not to be shared with the more boorish inhabitants of Euphoria and its surrounding areas. That all five main characters are so isolated and lonesome adds to this heightened intimacy between reader and text: at one juncture, Fir acknowledges the fact that Fain is “the only friend that Fir had talked to in the past few weeks”; at another point, Slip’s “fumbling attempts at profundity” prevent a chance encounter with an interested bar patron from ever progressing beyond an awkward initial exchange. These characters have been living in the small town of Euphoria their entire lives (it is noted that the “population has changed little throughout the past several decades”), yet they have established precious few meaningful relationships or stable means of supporting themselves.
None of the characters in Anomia are ever gendered; this includes not only no reference to binary his/her pronouns, but also no reference to the non-binary they/them. This is an important aspect of the novel’s language. It clarifies that, rather than interpreting these non-gendered characters as gender non-binary, we are actually just never made privy to their gender identities at all. Wallace has acknowledged that some of the inspiration for this decision comes from the 1986 novel Sphinx by avant-garde French author Anne Garréta. Garrétta’s novel chronicles a love affair between a nameless narrator whose gender is never identified, and an anonymous partner who is similarly never gendered. Interest in Sphinx amongst English-speaking readers has increased dramatically in the past decade, starting with a stellar English translation by Emma Ramadan being made available through Deep Vellum press, and then further buzz was stirred up in academic circles following the 2018 publication of Annabel L. Kim’s revelatory essay “The Riddle of Racial Difference in Anne Garréta’s Sphinx.” In her essay, which examines the way in which gendered language functions uncomfortably alongside racialized language, Kim says of Garréta that her “mobilization of the novel to engage in literary formal experimentation does [the] political work of dismantling identity.”
The statement could just have easily been written in 2024 about Wallace’s novel. By denying reference to gender entirely, rather than only eschewing the male-female binary, Wallace has thrown into relief how gendered language so much shapes conventional constructs of gender to begin with. None of the characters in Anomia read as inherently non-binary or gender queer, any more than they do female or male. While this occasionally leads to some awkward referents in place of pronouns (Slip’s aforementioned barroom companion is referred to as “barmate”), the effect is of creating an entire linguistic space wherein gender simply isn’t a consideration.
Relations of power still exist in this world, as when Fir, intimidated by a police officer’s questioning, is “suddenly less afraid of being disbelieved and more afraid of being seen as a person-of-interest,” but the role gender plays in such a power relation is only inferred from the reader’s own experience of the world, outside of the text of Anomia. Similarly, sexuality and lust don’t cease to exist in Anomia simply because gender is removed from the text. In recounting Fir’s past affair with the missing Blue, it is clear that sexual passion, regardless of gender, was present; Fir recalls condemning Blue: “Let me guess…you fucked me so you could figure out whether your marriage [to Culver] still meant anything to you.” Later, Blue’s belated lament to Fir in a farewell letter addresses not only the interpersonal impossibility of their failed affair, but also applies to the rigidity of gender constructs which Wallace evades throughout the novel: “The roles have been assigned and they limit what you and I can be to one another.” Wallace seeks to transcend these roles and limits through their own radical writing.
I suspect that many writers will find inspiration in Anomia, as Wallace found inspiration in Sphinx. And like Wallace, they will take that inspiration as an incentive to attempt more radical experiments, imagine further ways of writing beyond the determinacy of gendered language. The past few years have seen a stunning array of texts from non-binary and gender queer Canadian writers (MLA Chernoff’s [SQUELCH PROCEDURES], Mx. Sly’s Transland, and Steacey Easton’s Daddy Lessons come to mind, among many others). Each of these writers explores identity, sex and gender in a host of imaginative ways, both overt and subversive, literal and poetic. Jade Wallace adds their own powerful voice to this diverse chorus, and in doing so makes a major contribution to a utopian queer vision of language, one which acknowledges language’s power in shaping our reality and which imagines better possibilities for that reality. As Wallace writes, “the seemingly infinite details of every waking moment have to blur into the broad shapes of history.” Like Sphinx before it, Anomia will serve as a balm for today and a blueprint for tomorrow, an important contribution to the broad shaping of a more equitable literary history.
Zachary Thompson (he/him) is a freelance writer living in Hamilton, Ontario. He received a Bachelor’s Degree in English Literature from York University, and a Certificate in Creative Writing from the University of Toronto. He has presented his work at the Lit Live Reading Series in Hamilton, as well as at the 2021 Conference of the Comics Studies Society. Some of his most recent work appears in the Literary Review of Canada’s Bookworm supplement on Substack.