What was the last dark literary novel you read about a woman solving a mystery with a baby in tow? Montpelier author Miciah Bay Gault’s The Nobody Code, released on August 11, fits that unusual bill.
Gault’s protagonist, new mother Dinah, knows she’s supposed to settle down and follow the “rules” — a concept with which she has a lifelong fascination. And one unspoken cultural rule is that moms don’t do the hero thing. When a woman reaches that stage of life, Dinah notes trenchantly, “You weren’t a hero, because your help was expected, your care was habitual.” But Dinah, raised on fairy tales and promises of “enchantment,” isn’t ready to fade into the background and keep the home fires burning. She has main character energy to spare.
Gault teaches at Smith College and the Vermont College of Fine Arts and directed the Vermont Book Awards for a decade. She also told the story of a woman who can’t move on from her childhood in her 2019 debut, Goodnight Stranger. Despite a superficially similar premise, The Nobody Code is a different beast: heftier, thornier, more acerbic and bursting at the seams with ambition. Some readers will judge Dinah for her unapologetic selfishness. Others will find her relatable. And still others may have more complicated reactions, because this is the kind of book that makes readers reflect on their own choices.
The novel’s central mystery has its roots in small-town Vermont. As a lonely teen in 1990, Dinah connected with a group of fellow outcasts who called themselves Nobody. Led by the mysterious Rex, Nobody performed vigilante actions, punishing high school boors and bullies and lecherous teachers under cover of anonymity.
The novel opens 10 years later, when the young adult Dinah reconnects with Rex in New York City. She’s still fiercely in love with him, but he slips from her grasp and vanishes, leaving behind enigmatic clues.
Fast-forward another decade, and Dinah is a 35-year-old zoo nutritionist with a picture-perfect husband and an 11-month-old child. After a strange series of events puts her job in jeopardy, she abandons her stable life to return with baby Brandon to her Vermont hometown. She believes the elusive Rex is trying to goad Nobody by seeding their lives with chaos: vandalism at Dinah’s zoo, an unexplained fire.
As the adult members of Nobody reunite to face this possible threat, Dinah revisits her history with the group. At 15, she believed wholeheartedly in Rex’s gospel: “What they were doing was not what other teenagers did. It was more important.” But was that true, or did Rex simply use the members of Nobody to his own ends?
Told in close third person, in a voice generally indistinguishable from Dinah’s, The Nobody Code liberally deploys repetitive metaphors and motifs, sometimes slipping into fabulism as Dinah’s life merges with the fairy tales she loves. Animals — who don’t follow human rules — are her kindred spirits. The book has a personable ursine character known as Thin Bear, and occasionally Dinah hears cats and crows speak in words. Few chapters go by without imagery of animals and rivers, sometimes both: “She was a wild animal. Thirsty and drinking cool water. She was the cool water. She was the river.”
Though The Nobody Code does have twists and turns suggestive of a suspense novel, its true mysteries lurk in Dinah’s whimsical psyche.
Readers expecting a straightforward psychological thriller may lack patience with these flights of fancy. Though The Nobody Code does have twists and turns suggestive of a suspense novel, it’s essentially literary fiction, with its true mysteries lurking in Dinah’s whimsical psyche.
Take Rex, who is the adult Dinah’s ostensible motivation for her escape from conventional life — her version of Tyler Durden in Fight Club. Dinah wants everything to be an exquisite puzzle, and Rex has a talent for “[making] puzzles out of life. This was one more puzzle, and the solution was there, if she could just line the clues up in the right order.”
Yet readers may not share Dinah’s view of Rex as a magnetic mastermind. Even in the flashbacks, he seems more controlling than charismatic, like an insecure kid trying to start a cult. When the young Dinah wonders how another Nobody member “kept from being irritated with Rex all the time,” Gault is cluing us in to her protagonist’s unreliability.
Accordingly, the reader spends much of the novel wondering when Dinah will grasp the emptiness of her idol — only to realize that Gault has been laying the ground for more nuanced revelations. As The Nobody Code progresses, it evolves organically from a story of adolescent romantic obsession into something surprisingly closer to a mother-daughter story.
Dinah has always seen her hardworking single mom, El, as a joyless rule follower. “Who could love being a mother?” the young Dinah wonders. “If it meant worrying all the time, if it meant a litany of dos and don’ts, sleepless nights and bad dreams, and your body and face shriveling before your eyes.”
In another passage, toward the novel’s end, the adult Dinah speculates on why so many female coming-of-age stories end in the teen years:
Maybe for all women no time was more exciting than adolescence — those years when all of it still lay before you, all the world a promise, the future like a made-up story, like something you alone created, a work of art, and you were the artist …
The tragedy? The moment you realize you’re not an artist after all, that you’re not creating anything, that things are actually pretty well prescribed for you. All that creative energy evaporates. And: Poof! You’re ordinary. You’re like your mother.
No wonder that the older Dinah, returning to her mom’s home with her child, is ambivalent about her own motherhood, or that she expects a man — Rex — to rescue her from this dreaded ordinariness. One of The Nobody Code’s strongest, stealthiest themes is that mothers can be artists, too, and that the creative, rule-breaking energy of Nobody is part of Dinah’s maternal legacy.
The novel could be tighter and less repetitive, and its rhetorical excesses can feel self-indulgent. But Gault’s meta commentary on storytelling — whose stories are told and why — distinguishes it from the current crop of novels about “messy,” rule-breaking women. And the frustration in passages such as the one above has real immediacy. Feminism was supposed to banish the sense of wasted potential, but tell that to an exhausted new mom who is doing “so much laundry,” as Dinah puts it.
Gault depicts mothers, wives and daughters who are angry and needy and horny and scrappy and far from paragons of self-sacrifice. They try to make men the center of their universe, but in the end, they always fall back on each other, even if they sabotage other women as often as they support them. Dinah’s unruly restlessness is reminiscent of early Margaret Atwood heroines; she may not always be likable, but she’s most definitely somebody. ➆
The original print version of this article was headlined “Are You Nobody, Too? | Book review: The Nobody Code, Miciah Bay Gault”
This article appears in August 19 • 2026.
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