Having read and loved Miciah Bay Gault’s “Goodnight Stranger,” I was thrilled to dig into her newest novel, “The Nobody Code.” The exquisitely crafted book of this Falmouth native, who summers here regularly as the stepdaughter of Flying Elbows band member Tom Hodgson, does not disappoint. Gault takes us on a mysterious journey where imaginative folklore, a possible death, maybe a ghost, and perhaps a touch of haunting weave an engrossing tale. Gault keeps the suspense high with flickers of foreboding, poetic metaphors, and disconcerting happenings that keep us guessing … and turning the page, while the elegance of her prose makes us savor each one.
In her author’s note, Gault shares, “I so hope you enjoy ‘The Nobody Code’ and its wild explorations of girlhood and motherhood, lovers and villains, moonlight-streaked rivers and pine forests, talking crows and cats and bears.” This, then, is the world Gault drops us into, beginning her narrative with our protagonist, Dinah, who, at 25, is rushing to meet Rex, her high school boyfriend, whom she just happened to run into after not having seen him for years
Odd things start happening right away when she goes to Rex’s apartment to pick him up for their date. The door is ajar, but there’s no trace of him, not even a comb or toothbrush; only a single blue button-down shirt hangs in the closet — with its pocket cut out. Gault writes, “She held the shirt on its hanger and peered through the empty square of the missing pocket, but even through this frame he didn’t appear.” Upon further inspection of the pristine rooms, there are two overturned little ceramic salt-and-pepper ghosts, and a “red blossom the size of a dime.” In an interview, Gault says, “Rex having gone missing becomes the shadow and tangle over her whole adult life.”
We then meet Dinah 10 years later, as a new, overwhelmed mother whose marriage is fraying at its edges, made worse by very strange events at work, including her boss’s puzzling behavior and the news that a childhood friend who still lives in the Vermont town where Dinah grew up was mysteriously injured in a fire. A final fight with her husband sends Dinah back to the town, where, she believes, there is more to the incident than meets the eye, and it has ties to the gang she ran with in high school.
Gault alternates between the present day and Dinah’s teenage years with this vigilante group of misfit “invisible” kids — the Nobodys — who live by a moral code by which they perform covert acts of revenge on those who hurt the underdog. As one of the members says, “I guess you could say we help people who can’t help themselves.”
Dinah believes what they sowed in youth has come back to haunt them. Gault writes, “She saw so clearly the ways in which the actions of the past had rippled exponentially, had affected all their lives in small and large ways.”
Dinah’s ponderings go beyond just the choices made as a youth, but all the ones to the present. “Every moment, constantly choosing. Did she want the life of romance and danger, thorns and crowns and quests and — yeah, loneliness? Uncertainty? Grief. Or did she want the 9-to-5 life, the hot dinners, alarm clocks, savings accounts. Did she want that comfort even if it meant giving up the enchantment? And then of course, there was the question of whether what she wanted even mattered?”
The seeds for “The Nobody Code” came to Gault while she was driving her daughter back and forth to daycare. She’d pass an island in a river with a small, abandoned house like the one that becomes the Nobodys’ secret headquarters. Gault started imagining characters and came up with, she explains, “teenagers meeting at night under the moonlight and wondering what they are doing there. They became vigilantes. The story unfurled from there. What happens to me is that I’m not working toward an ending. I’m setting up a mystery that even I don’t know the solution to until I’ve gotten through most of the book, and then I have to figure it out.”
First and foremost, Gault hopes “The Nobody Code” is, as she says, “a fun puzzle keeping readers wondering what is happening, whom they can trust, and the solution to the mystery. Beyond that, I want readers to think about their adolescence and the rules they followed, broke, or enforced. By rules, I don’t just mean school rules but also the unspoken rules of a community or society’s code. And to think about what rules they’re living by now, and which ones they want to break and how they rebel in big or small ways — or even if they do so.”
“The Nobody Code: A Novel” by Miciah Bay Gault, available at Edgartown Books and Bunch of Grapes.
