As well as offering a peculiar and captivating story, this winner of France’s Prix Goncourt prize, for the “”best and most imaginative prose work of the year,” stands out as wonderfully French. Le Tellier describes his characters in gutting detail while maintaining a distant nonchalance, inviting readers to share in his weariness at how emotionally finished these people are. Among them is Victor Meisel, who resembles “a healthy Kafka who made it past forty” and is writing a book called The Anomaly; André, an architect who’s desperate to hold onto the love of his much-younger girlfriend, and Lucie, that girlfriend, who’s drifting away; David, who’s facing a deadly illness; and Slimboy, a famous singer who spends all his energy maintaining the facade that he’s straight. Their shredded emotions are on display in the lead up to a Paris-New York trip, with each then depicted as one of a handful of strangers on, and the pilot of, a flight that experiences near-lethal turbulence with a bizarre aftermath. Emotions are just one of the problems faced by the survivors, who find themselves captive in a situation that involves not only the CIA and FBI but even the President of the United States (“a fat grouper with a blond wig”). Viewers of Netflix’s hit series Manifest will recognize some elements of this story, but the book and the show are unrelated and the aftermath of the flight is different enough to enthrall fans of the show and to keep them reading to the end.
