Euphoria is a town nestled next to the Unwood, woods in which “You’ll survive,” but “don’t stay still for too long.” As a novel, Anomia successfully blends reality with mythology, getting the balance just right even as gender is left to the assumption of the reader. Having given up on more than one work of Canadian fiction this year for heavy-handed generalizations, I found this refreshing. By the time this lottery of assumptions has settled and characters have formed — with readers perhaps considering why they may have made those assumptions — the result is a long and valuable experiment in seeing people as complicated. A fable related near the end touches on the idea that this particular fable is retold, “re-envisioning itself, never quite resolved.” People are perhaps the same.

I was tempted to object to some character description closer to the end of the book when a character named Blue, we’re told, has “hair as dark as crow feathers.” Shouldn’t the reader have been given this before? And then it hit me: black and blue. It’s possibly a hint at the history of the character, but regardless, a character morphs a little and resettles in an unconventional but intriguing way.

All of this is blended with dialogue that can feel quite real, and skillful use of description: “The Singing Frog, the sign announces, though the image is evidently a rendering of a green toad, its skin nodular and mossy, its body stocky and its nose broad.”

A novel needs an impressive beginning and Anomia has one, but returns to profound, arresting thoughts throughout. A particular chapter begins “If the human mind were a place, it would be a body of water, immeasurably deep, where fish, aquatic plants, and microorganisms multiply too quickly to be tracked. Many are consumed as soon as they are born, others persist for years. Of those who endure, some are bright and gaudy and splendid and show themselves off to the glittering sunlight. They are impossible to miss. Others – who can say what they look like – hide away in the remoteness of shadows, seen rarely if at all by other creatures.”

Novels with a somewhat mythological feel still require character motivation and Wallace is careful to provide it. Fir, a character searching for Blue, remembers meeting Blue as “one of life’s scarce glimpses of paradise, when what one wanted and what one had were exactly the same thing.”

Nitpicks? Not many. I think for the omniscient narrator to use the occasional word like “avoirdupois” lifts the reader out of the novel in favour of being aware of a writer reaching for elevated language. And leaving out gender only occasionally interferes with believability (I don’t know of any teenager who’ll refer to “my parent,” in an unspecific way). But all that is more easily shrugged off in the context of a novel that blends our world with a slightly mythological take on it. Adorably, it’s a world with video rental stores even as other more recent technologies are around, like current phones.

I don’t think any great work of literature can be said to have relied on sweeping generalizations, and writers sometimes don’t always seem to recognize there are both unfashionable ones and immensely fashionable ones. This is a novel that neatly sidesteps all that from the start, given it can be quietly assembled in different ways, all while enjoyably well-written and peppered with interesting ideas. The paradox of movie theatres is that they “let you be close to other people without ever speaking.”

If the job of literature is to nudge us into new perspectives and new ways of thinking without being heavy-handed about it (so that people, you know, actually listen) Anomia succeeds admirably.