Rivka Galchen, American Innovations, Fourth Estate, 2014.
Read The Last Order from this collection in the New Yorker
A short-story collection from one of America’s brightest young talents.
In one of these intensely imaginative stories a young woman’s furniture walks out on her. In another, the narrator feels compelled to deliver a takeout order that has incorrectly been phoned in to her. In a third, the petty details of a property transaction illuminate the complicated dependences and loves of a family.
Following spiralling paths towards utterly logical, entirely absurd conclusions, Galchen’s creations occupy a dreamlike dimension, where time is fluid and identities are best defined by the qualities they lack. The tales in this groundbreaking collection are secretly in conversation with canonical stories, allowing the reader the pleasure of discovering familiar favourites in new guises. Here ‘The Lost Order’ covertly recapitulates James Thurber’s ‘The Secret Life of Walter Mitty’, while ‘The Region of Unlikeness’ playfully mirrors Jorge Luis Borges’s ‘The Aleph’.
By turns realistic, fantastical and lyrical, all these marvellously uneasy stories share a deeply emotional core and are written in dryly witty, pitch-perfect prose. Whether exploring the tensions in a mother-daughter relationship or the finer points of time travel, Galchen is a writer of eye-opening ingenuity
“The stories in American Innovations proceed through indirection, association, and surprise, making a world in which daily life becomes a dream of life. Their narrators go in search of emotional resolution, but instead find that the furniture is getting up and leaving the house. Galchen’s stories can read almost as meditations on themselves, and their gift to the reader is the sudden and pleasurable awareness of the things we understand the least—the deaths of parents, breakdowns in love, and the hopeful pursuit of joy.” —Donald Antrim
“I am always declaiming to whoever will listen that Rivka Galchen is one of the best things going. She writes for the joy of it and so artfully, and conforms to no one else's standards. Joy and artfulness: why are these so rare? But they are. Galchen is a stand-alone talent.” —Rachel Kushner
“Rivka Galchen writes about the strangeness of being alive--not that anyone has any other state to compare being alive to, which doesn’t make it any less strange. She writes with intelligence, wit, and great originality. These stories are amazing.”—Roz Chast
“Rivka Galchen is like the pinball wizard of American letters, with a narrative voice that can ricochet from wonder to terror to hilarity in the breadth of a breath. These ten stories of profound loss and profound joy give the Kantian sublime a Key Lime twist, and reveal what happily haunted space cadets we all are in the echo chamber of our ‘ordinary’ American lives. You'll feel compelled to read Galchen’s sentences to strangers on buses. The delicacy and brilliance of what she is doing doesn't yet have a name.” —Karen Russell
In this story collection—which follows her debut novel, the well-received Atmospheric Disturbances (2008)—Galchen, one of the New Yorker’s 20 Under 40, continues to plumb the unbelievable and unknowable mysteries of existence.
These are literary short stories, but there’s a detective lurking in their author, who peels back fine layers of life with close observation to uncover clues about the physics of daily living and how we process the world. In the title story, a woman wakes one morning to discover a third breast has grown on her back; she has to wrestle with societal expectations of beauty and identity. In "Once an Empire," the narrator says, “I’m a pretty normal woman…,” which immediately cues the reader to wonder what isn’t normal about her, or the story; soon she's watching the contents of her apartment—furniture, utensils and objects—get up and walk out. Do these things represent her life, and if they’re so important to her, why is she willing to watch them leave? And things get stranger in "The Region of Unlikeness": A woman discovers that her crush, a man she met at a cafe, is supposedly a time traveler, and his friend, whom she doesn’t much care for, is his father—and maybe her potential future husband. Not all the stories venture into the fantastic, though; many poke and prod at the challenges of the everyday, as in "Sticker Shock," which compares the finances of a mother and daughter and is written in the tone of an accountant’s review, and "The Lost Order," in which a woman obscures the fact that she’s lost her job from her husband and ponders what her life will be like as "a daylight ghost, a layabout, a mal pensant, a vacancy, a housewife, a person foiled by the challenge of getting dressed….”
Galchen’s stories feel remarkably believable, despite their suggestion of alternate worlds and lives. This is a collection to read and keep on the bookshelf. It will stand the test of time. - Kirkus Reviews
Unassuming characters meet confounding and uncanny situations in Galchen’s first collection of short stories. “The Lost Order,” which opens the collection, features the unemployed wife of Walter Mitty, who takes a food delivery order over the phone from a person who has dialed the wrong number. It is one of the many stories in the collection that approach classic tales from the perspective of a female character. The title story reimagines the plot of Nikolai Gogol’s “The Nose” with a library sciences student at the center; but rather than losing her nose (like Gogol’s narrator), she finds that a third breast has grown on her side. And in “The Region of Unlikeness,” which considers Borges’s “The Aleph,” an engineering student becomes spellbound by a duo of effusive self-proclaimed professors cooking up equations for time travel. Many of Galchen’s characters are trained in the hard sciences—quantum mechanics, epigenetics, dangerous molds—and bring an empirical authority to off-kilter situations. Coming eight years after her widely acclaimed debut, Atmospheric Disturbances, Galchen dips further into the dazzlingly disorienting. These stories balance on the surreal, striking the borders of the logical and the hypothetical. There is the author of a self-published book of correspondence who meets one of his few readers in Mexico City; the furniture that flees through an apartment window one night, only to reappear in the nearby market the next week; the remembrance of a painful first love: a McDonald’s clerk with the one shining white tooth. Here, language and humor lift the ideas off the page. With her second book, Galchen continues to secure a place for herself among today’s great prose stylists. - Publishers Weekly
I like American Innovations by Rivka Galchen because when I picked it up I was like, “Uh-huh, baby has to have it” which is a line in “Poemland” by Chelsey Minnis. By the way, when is “Poemland 2” coming out? All of a sudden I feel very concerned for Chelsey Minnis. Is anyone Facebook friends with her? I just checked Facebook. Chelsey Minnis isn’t on facebook. The only recent mention I could find of her was in a review of Patricia Lockwood’s MOTHERLAND FATHERLAND HOMELANDSEXUALS. Uh-huh, baby needs some of that too. In the review Minnis is compared to Lockwood. The review seems to be about how “bros” are stupid and should kill themselves which is a pretty good retirement plan. Business idea: an investment firm specializing in training college “bros” how to kill themselves. Don’t even bother leaving a jar of “bro” sperm behind. Earth and human life should continue on fine without you.
To be honest, we should never feel sad when a white man dies. A few weeks ago, a white man named “Robin Williams” killed himself and everyone got really sad. Instead of getting sad, I think we should have been like, “Hey, good job. Thank you for clearing up some more space for the ladies and the non-whites.” Whenever a white man dies I’m reminded of the famous line about how the only good white male heterosexual is a dead white male heterosexual. Of course, it’s not that simple because every time a white man kills himself everyone is like, “Hey let’s talk about the guy who doesn’t exist anymore until the whole world becomes more sad than it was earlier when we weren’t talking dead white men for so long our teeth fell out. Anyway, I’m sort of a “bro” too so I should probably kill myself for the good of society, but I’m trying my best not to be a white person anymore if that’s possible and if I could I would sex Tom Brady until the NFL stopped existing…
Hmmmm I am doing a very bad job of talking about how much I like American Innovations. I guess this review isn’t really going to be about the book which is sort of the same dumb thing I always do when I review stuff. I did read two and a half reviews for this book. Each of them seemed to be doing the same thing. They were all like, “Wow, Rivka did the female versions of all our favorite male short stories neat wow good job Rivka.” One review in the New York Times even said she’s “Like Hemingway writing about fishing. Or Scorsese mythologizing lowlifes. Or Bob Dylan releasing an album’s worth of cover versions and calling it “Self-Portrait.” And earlier in the review she was compared to Woody Allen. I’m surprised they didn’t staple Updike’s penis on the cover of her book and then be like, “This book is cool because it’s has a dead white male’s penis stapled on it.” Anyway, if you’re interested in reading the full New York Times review, I’ve pasted it below:
The stories in American Innovations aren’t stories because wow can you believe it’s been so long since Galchen’s first book came out. What is wrong with her? Did you know Galchen does teaching and makes me “he he.” She is very imaginative and often funny!!!! Imagine, a woman being funny#$@! But why are her plots so minimal and unusual? Who is that stupid suburban dad who did unusual things in his plots. Anyway, she’s so weird. One story is about time travel and another is about talking furniture. It’s like she’s the Bill Clinton version of Stephen King if Stephen King was David Sedaris, only wearing Garrison Keillor’s face back when Keillor was still trying to date Cormac McCarthy’s pillow because it was made from the skin of Roberto Bolaño’s dead body.
Oh boy. I really did something there. Now everyone is pointing at me and like, “That boy is criticizing the New York Times, but isn’t he sort of doing the same thing he’s criticizing? I mean is it really any better to talk about people talking too much about men? Isn’t this like the same thing? So far in his review he’s just made fun of ‘bros’ and how they’re always saying, ‘Hey do you want to read about the time I was white and sexed some shit with my penis so hard they gave me some goddamn trophies bitch don’t make my dad cum thirty years ago at the moment of my conception please instead make him do a rainbow from his dingy so my skin can be rainbows and I don’t have to be the same stupid dead white heterosexual when I die that my dad will be when he dies.’”
Anyone who bothers to read this will probably be like, “I wish he would shut up and just talk about the book and why does he keep saying the word ‘like’?”
Maybe I will try talking about the book. Like most books, American Innovations by Rivka Galchen started with a sentence. The first sentence was: “I was at home, not making spaghetti”. This line feels both careless and insanely constructed which is why I like it. I sort of want this line to become my canned response whenever someone asks what I did last night. Her writing has that literature bent without feeling capital-L literature beating everyone over the head with how literature-y it is. I felt very refreshed while reading. Deep on the surface of the writing there is a confused beauty that makes me do tears. The teardrops remind me of this white guy I once knew who died. I think he picked up a rifle and got killed somewhere. Good job white guy. - Mark Baumer
In Rivka Galchen's fiction, minds and bodies often come apart. There is a dazed quality to the stories in American Innovations, as the narrators observe themselves from the outside and puzzle over the strange view. "I felt as if the real me were out there somewhere, waiting for my return," says the narrator of "Once an Empire". In a strikingly beautiful image, the narrator of "Wild Berry Blue" imagines "the right side of a person lifting up a velvet rope and leaving the left side behind". Curious things happen in these stories – characters mysteriously disappear, ironing boards become animate and walk out of apartments, a woman wakes up to find a breast has grown on her back – but their main subject seems to be how strange it is to exist at all. "Having a body is problematic no matter what," notes one character, as if there might be some other option.
Galchen's much-praised debut novel, Atmospheric Disturbances, locked the reader inside the mind of its narrator, Dr Leo Liebenstein, a psychiatrist who believes that his wife has vanished and been replaced by a "simulacrum". American Innovations features subtler kinds of unreliable narrators, but the crucial action still takes place inside the mind. Where Leo is scornfully certain that his theories are correct, the narrators in American Innovations – almost all of them are unnamed women in their 20s or 30s – are ambivalent, constantly qualifying their statements with maybes and I thinks. They say things like, "My window [was] dark: probably just the coordinated demise of several bulbs, I told myself. Or something."
The reluctance of Galchen's characters to make firm pronouncements about reality is not surprising given they remain a mystery even to themselves. One character travels to Mexico City where she ends up pretending to be a journalist named Alice. At one point, she wonders, "Whose life was this? Not mine." That question could be an epigraph for American Innovations. (It also recalls another Alice, Lewis Carroll's: "I can't explain myself," she tells the Caterpillar, "because I'm not myself, you see.")
At their best, Galchen's stories are funny and inventive. Many of them slyly translate the concerns of 19th-century fiction – money, property, gender – into the affectless, ironic voice of modern American fiction. Sometimes, however, they are too knowing. The narrator of "The Region of Unlikeness" describes two men indulging in "the kind of reference-laden conversation that unfortunately never fails to attract me". In this, the narrator resembles Galchen herself, who has a weakness for scattering her stories with names such as Heidegger and Kant.
In "Dean of the Arts" the narrator refers to "that scene, which may or may not be in Dante … where the narrator is in some boat, crossing some river into the underworld, maybe the Styx, or Lethe". These hesitations are Galchen's attempt to make such references less showy and more plausible as thoughts that might occur to her characters. The effect is to make them more intrusive.
One of the pleasures of American Innovations is the way the stories quietly echo and seep into one another. But without some kind of payoff, these internal connections risk becoming hermetic and self-indulgent. Galchen withholds so much information about her characters that the stories have little emotional weight, and while the prose is always expertly controlled, there are few memorable sentences. The absence of these pleasures puts more pressure on the stories to deliver intellectually, and too often they are undercooked. American Innovations focuses on people lost in their own minds. By the end, I began to feel that the author had fallen into the same trap as her characters. - David Wolf
Rivka Galchen’s 2008 debut, Atmospheric Disturbances, fit nicely alongside the other books Marco Roth dubbed “neuronovels,” literary fiction “wherein the mind becomes the brain.” It was witty and weird enough to earn her comparisons to Murakami and Pynchon, but the sometimes bewildering book just felt like it was going a little too off the rails, even for a novel with a narrator as unreliable as Galchen’s Dr. Leo Liebenstein. Atmospheric Disturbances showed a ton of promise, but in fiction, promise doesn’t always deliver.
Since 2008, Galchen has published short stories and written a Times “Bookends” column, and, although her first attempt left me a little underwhelmed, I’d been waiting for the announcement that a new book was on the way. American Innovations, Galchen’s new collection of stories, shows that the author can take all of that wit and talent and boil it down into something concise and immensely enjoyable. Not only that, but in the short-story format, she can do it over and over.
While the flap on the dust jacket states that the stories in American Innovations “are secretly in conversation with canonical stories, re-imagined from the perspective of female characters,” you wouldn’t necessarily have to be familiar with James Thurber’s “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” to read and reread the book’s opener, “The Lost Order.” The story starts off with the narrator telling us about the time her phone rang, with “Unavailable” popping up in the caller ID. For some reason she answers the phone, and takes a food delivery order for a man who has called the wrong number. It’s a silly anecdote, and once Galchen starts in on the next paragraph, it isn’t immediately clear how it fits in with the rest of the story, but then one thing unfolds, then another, and you’re going back over things to try and figure out if the woman is depressed and in denial, or just likes to see how far she can take a lie.
The book’s title story is maybe the most interesting. “American Innovations” is a tale that “revisits” Gogol’s “The Nose,” something Philip Roth tried (and largely failed) to do with his 1972 novella (which also mixed in a nice spoonful of Kafka) “The Breast.” It’s here that we see the sort of brilliance Galchen only hinted at in her debut novel. Oddly enough, Galchen’s retelling of Gogol’s story also involves breasts; first there’s the narrator’s aunt, who she called Tina Turner, “because her styling was similar — also, she had once seen Tina Turner in a grocery store in Los Angeles, and they nodded knowingly at each other.” Her aunt tells her about her “September 11th,” when she noticed a lump that she was sure was cancer, but ends up being one of her silicone breast implants, slipped down into her back. Over a year later, the narrator finds her own lump, wonders if it was her “inheritance,” worries it might be cancer, and, well, I won’t really ruin it for you from there. Let’s just say that Pinterest and BuzzFeed make an appearance.
All in all, American Innovations is a joy to read. It has a few awkward moments, since few short story collections are without their little bumps in the road. But overall, Rivka Galchen has delivered a little book full of tiny wonders. -
Rivka Galchen’s 2008 debut, Atmospheric Disturbances, fit nicely alongside the other books Marco Roth dubbed “neuronovels,” literary fiction “wherein the mind becomes the brain.” It was witty and weird enough to earn her comparisons to Murakami and Pynchon, but the sometimes bewildering book just felt like it was going a little too off the rails, even for a novel with a narrator as unreliable as Galchen’s Dr. Leo Liebenstein. Atmospheric Disturbances showed a ton of promise, but in fiction, promise doesn’t always deliver.
Since 2008, Galchen has published short stories and written a Times “Bookends” column, and, although her first attempt left me a little underwhelmed, I’d been waiting for the announcement that a new book was on the way. American Innovations, Galchen’s new collection of stories, shows that the author can take all of that wit and talent and boil it down into something concise and immensely enjoyable. Not only that, but in the short-story format, she can do it over and over.
While the flap on the dust jacket states that the stories in American Innovations “are secretly in conversation with canonical stories, re-imagined from the perspective of female characters,” you wouldn’t necessarily have to be familiar with James Thurber’s “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” to read and reread the book’s opener, “The Lost Order.” The story starts off with the narrator telling us about the time her phone rang, with “Unavailable” popping up in the caller ID. For some reason she answers the phone, and takes a food delivery order for a man who has called the wrong number. It’s a silly anecdote, and once Galchen starts in on the next paragraph, it isn’t immediately clear how it fits in with the rest of the story, but then one thing unfolds, then another, and you’re going back over things to try and figure out if the woman is depressed and in denial, or just likes to see how far she can take a lie.
The book’s title story is maybe the most interesting. “American Innovations” is a tale that “revisits” Gogol’s “The Nose,” something Philip Roth tried (and largely failed) to do with his 1972 novella (which also mixed in a nice spoonful of Kafka) “The Breast.” It’s here that we see the sort of brilliance Galchen only hinted at in her debut novel. Oddly enough, Galchen’s retelling of Gogol’s story also involves breasts; first there’s the narrator’s aunt, who she called Tina Turner, “because her styling was similar — also, she had once seen Tina Turner in a grocery store in Los Angeles, and they nodded knowingly at each other.” Her aunt tells her about her “September 11th,” when she noticed a lump that she was sure was cancer, but ends up being one of her silicone breast implants, slipped down into her back. Over a year later, the narrator finds her own lump, wonders if it was her “inheritance,” worries it might be cancer, and, well, I won’t really ruin it for you from there. Let’s just say that Pinterest and BuzzFeed make an appearance.
All in all, American Innovations is a joy to read. It has a few awkward moments, since few short story collections are without their little bumps in the road. But overall, Rivka Galchen has delivered a little book full of tiny wonders. - Jason Diamond
What is it that I was so drawn to? The phrase that keeps coming to mind is that Galchen excels at a kind of taut, structured looseness – and that contradiction is deliberate. She makes such fluidity look easy but it’s not simple to pitch something precisely on the edge of clarity and chaos. Let me give you as an example the opening paragraph of the book, from the first story, The Lost Order.
I was at home, not making spaghetti. I was trying to eat a little less often, it’s true. A yogurt in the morning, a yogurt at lunchtime, ginger candies in between, and a normal dinner. I don’t think of myself as someone with a ‘weight issue’, but I had somehow put on a number of pounds just four months into my unemployment, and when I realized that this had happened – I never weigh myself; my brother just said to me, on a visit, ‘I don’t recognize your legs’ – I wasn’t happy about it. Although maybe I was happy about it.
Actually, this is half the first paragraph, and already here if there are ‘rules’ for short story openings, Galchen seems to be breaking them with her apparent meanderings, her wordiness. Yet, she is setting this story up perfectly. Eight of the ten stories here are in the first person and they could be seen, if you squint a little, as sort of being the same character, or a similar set of people. And one of the things that echoes across many of the stories is the not-doing of things (‘not making spaghetti’) and this apparent indecisiveness: ‘I wasn’t happy about it… although maybe I was happy about it’. That’s one of the things I loved, Galchen’s embrace in her fiction of a sort of existential uncertainty, a truth about how it is often inside our heads – or perhaps just in mine!
She doesn’t do neat endings, no epiphanies here, much is left unexplained, which is the kind of story I like. Each story left me altered, it created such a strong atmosphere, I felt and tasted it, I was right inside her world. The first story, were I to sum up the plot, would appear mundane, centring around a newly-unemployed woman who doesn’t really do all that much, but it brings in so many ideas of usefulness, of society, of love and marriage, of relations between ourselves and others. Other stories deal with more surreal subject matter, such as time travel and (in a separate story) what happens if you witness all your belongings exiting from your apartment unaided. One story tells of a mother and daughter entirely through their finances (Sticker Shock), which some might call gimmicky but which worked for me.
There are some stories which strike me as potentially autobiographical, which is always the trap the reader of fiction has to watch out for, because in my opinion it shouldn’t matter. But of course, somehow, it does. Wild Berry Blue begins:
This is a story about my love for Roy, thought first I have to say a few words about my dad, who was there with me at the McDonald’s every Saturday, letting his little girl, I was maybe nine, swig his extra half-and-halfs, stack the shells into messy towers. My dad drank from his bottomless cup of coffee and read the paper while I dipped my McDonaldland cookies in milk and pretended to read the paper. He wore gauzy striped button-ups with pearline snaps. He had girlish wrists, a broad forehead like a Roman, a terrifying sneeze.
Although this might be ripped apart in a creative writing class (‘Why tell us it’s a story about Roy and then go off somewhere else? Who is our narrator?’), I defy anyone not to want to read on – especially with the fabulous combination of her dad’s qualities given in the last line.
All the stories have a dream-like feel to them, which, once again, I like very much. For me, the tone and style worked seamlessly with the content – Galchen is attempting to convey the inherent instability of everything we take for granted – jobs, husbands, parents, furniture, the space-time continuum and our ideas about our own identity. She had me hooked from the opening line. - Tania Hershman
Is it true that everyone remembers the day death was first explained to them? I was seven and a hamster had died. The hamster had been given to me, perhaps, so that it could die and facilitate the conversation I then had with my mother. I remember not wanting to pay too close attention to what my mother was defining for me, so I listened instead to the faint sound I heard coming from downstairs. It was my father playing a record. I strained to make out the lyrics of the song and realized that, by doing so, I could somewhat ignore the words my mother spoke. This was the first moment of what would become a most useful skill—the ability to divert focus from what is the front-facing reality: that my life, all life, is meaninglessly short.
Rivka Galchen's approach to life and death is an epistemological one. Central to American Innovations, Galchen's new collection, is this question: How might we keep ourselves from knowing the only thing we could know—that life is unavoidably marked by losses big and small until all is lost, completely and totally? Dead fathers, distant mothers, truant husbands, and disappearing friends populate the backgrounds of Galchen's stories. These abandonments are met not with the protagonists' contemplation, but with their dogged avoidance.
Accordingly, "The Lost Order" begins by telling us what is not happening. "I was at home, not making spaghetti," the narrator explains. She glosses over the fact that she's left her job, and only hints that her husband is being unfaithful: He's misplaced his wedding ring; he is urgently telling her he loves her on the phone. The points are quickly dodged and, instead, we receive the inner ramblings of the newly stay-at-home wife, interrupted by an odd call from a man who has mistaken her phone number for that of a Chinese take-out restaurant. Her failure to fulfill his request for the speedy delivery of garlic chicken is something she allows herself to feel guilty about, while weightier problems lurk at the periphery. Similarly, in "The Entire Northern Side Was Covered with Fire," a novelist avoids learning why her husband has abruptly left her and their unborn child, though the answers may be readily available in the husband's secret blog, "I-Can't-Stand-My-Wife-Dot-Blogspot-Dot-Com." When a friend urges her to read the husband's posts and share her feelings, she changes the subject.
Galchen is skilled at obscuring the tension of a story. With humor and linguistic sleight of hand, Galchen, like life, dazzles us into forgetting certain inevitabilities. Galchen's finest writing occurs when her characters dangerously dip below their own surfaces and finally acknowledge something. In one striking passage, the unnamed narrator of "The Lost Order" elegizes her now-gone job: "I handled quite a large number of mold cases. I filled out the quiet fields of forms. I dispatched environmental testers. The job was more satisfying than it sounds, I can tell you. To have any variety of expertise, and to deploy it, can feel like a happy dream."
Many of these stories feature a type of avoidance that often takes the pattern of a male character asking a direct question and a female narrator responding as if she hasn't heard or doesn't understand the question. In "Dean of the Arts," our narrator flees to Mexico City to vaguely escape a vague problem: "I was going through an intense bout of fearfulness that is too irrational and stupid and elusive to explain," then encounters an odd mystery (there are two men who may or may not be named Macheko. Are they, in fact, one and the same Macheko? Our protagonist investigates). The husband wants to address the danger at home, but his wife swats it away: Yes, but what about this Macheko mystery? This pattern of deflection can feel repetitive, as the "real danger" posed to characters is brought to the reader's attention in the same way over and over: through scenes of two people speaking meaninglessly to one another.
This is not to say that the depiction of two people speaking meaninglessly to each other isn't an artful device. Readers of Galchen's widely appreciated debut novel, Atmospheric Disturbances, will be familiar with her unique ability to make (mis)communication at once funny and painful. What this device points to, if a bit too finely in this collection, are the other questions asked by the book. When loss occurs, why does it leave in its wake so much that is unknowable? How is it that people we love can become strangers to us, or disappear without explanation? Even the small details circle the theme of inexplicable absence. In "The Late Novels of Gene Hackman," the narrator has, for a trip to Key West, packed a book about Ettore Majorana, the famous particle physicist who vanished in 1938. In the final story, "Once an Empire," the narrator watches helplessly from the street as every object she owns escapes unaided out her apartment window, down her fire escape, and off into the night. The most interesting conversations occur metatextually. "The Lost Order" ends with line-by-line similarities to "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty"; Gogol's the "The Nose" and Borges's "The Aleph" are reimagined in Galchen's "American Innovations" and "The Region of Unlikeness." Why the story-to-story ekphrasis? The most thematically fitting reason would be a tender attempt to keep a beloved story alive, to extend its life by entwining it with the DNA strands of a new story.
There are many mysteries and few discoveries in this collection. Each story reiterates what is, perhaps, the only plausible reality: In the end, we are alone with no answers. Still, Galchen's characters do their best to deny this. One says to another: "Maybe I'm not in pain." The other responds: "I'd put my money on pain. It's the Kantian sublime, what you're experiencing. There's your life, and then you get a glimpse of the vastness of the unknown all around that little itty-bitty island of the known." American Innovations ultimately points us toward the preferably ignored truth of the vast unknown, the fact that—as one narrator says while considering various paradoxes—"At the heart of it is the inescapability of our fate." - Chloé Cooper Jones
American Innovations has a literary genealogy traceable from U.S. short-story doyenne Ann Beattie through Lorrie Moore to Rebecca Lee (another ex-pat and heir-apparent to Moore in light of her terrific 2012 collection Bobcat and Other Stories), with traces of Aimee Bender’s dark fairy dust and Julie Hecht’s delightfully tangential and neurotic anti-heroine. Add a splash of David Foster Wallace, shake well (don’t stir), and you have a thoroughly Galchean concoction – funny, intellectual, and playfully dark.
I know, because the book jacket tells me so, that some of these stories are responses to classic works by the likes of Thurber, Borges and Gogol. In all honesty, I wouldn’t have noticed. These are narrative similarities, rather than those of style and voice, and it is style and voice that elevate these remarkably vibrant stories into something transcendent.
Stuff happens, yes: a woman’s furniture leaves her, another grows an extra breast, and a wrong-number take-out-orderer harasses yet another unravelling 21st-century gal. Stories take place in Manhattan, Key West, and Oklahoma; wedding rings are lost, science-fiction-author conferences attended, and recovering heroin addicts crushed on.
But it’s in putting words to feelings, in capturing the often unsayable, that Galchen hits it out of the park again and again. “We hadn’t always conversed in a way that sounded like advanced ESL students trying to share emotions, but recently that was happening to us.” “I felt that my love for Roy shamed my people, whoever my people were, whoever I was queen of, people I had never met, nervous people and sad people and dead people, all clambering for air and space inside me.” A lawyer specializing in toxic-mold litigation wakes up one day and thinks, “I am a fork being used to eat cereal. I am not a spoon. I am a fork. And I can’t help people eat cereal any longer.”
And here’s a woman looking back on the height of childhood queasiness during a weekly McDonald’s ritual: “Though the surface of the milk often remained pristine, I could feel the cookie’s presence down below, lurking. Like some ancient bottom-dwelling fish with both eyes on one side of its head.”
The stories can be rambling, yet profound. A number of them appear constructed of unrelated elements, but attain a feeling of complete convergence. In Dean of the Arts, set in Galchen’s childhood home of Norman, Oklahoma, the disparate elements are the discovery of a self-published book called The Collected Correspondence of Manuel Macheko, a fired professor (the purported author of said book), a high-school debating tournament and, years later, a trip to Mexico City and a close encounter with Ralph Ellison. The way Galchen delivers a scene, jumps in time, and then allows all the seemingly disparate parts to rub up against each other until a staticky resonance is achieved, is reminiscent of Alice Munro’s sleight of hand.
As in Atmospheric Disturbances, Galchen’s acclaimed debut novel, there are communications with the dead, and the possibility of other, slightly off-kilter, universes where things like time travel are scientifically possible. Or are they? In my favourite story, The Region of Unlikeness, Galchen combines an unwieldy love triangle with the speculative, resulting in a kind of mash-up of Back to the Future and Truffaut’s Jules et Jim, although rather than Jeanne Moreau’s free-spirited Catherine, the woman here is a lonely and insecure graduate student in civil engineering. The happiest days of her life begin when she meets Ilan and Jacob by chance in a Moroccan coffee shop on Upper West Side. “They were discussing Wuthering Heights too loudly, having the kind of reference-laden conversation that unfortunately never fails to attract me,” revealing everything we need to know about her and the men.
These stories made me feel alive and alert in the same way that “the girl” in The Region of Unlikeness felt so briefly with her mysterious new friends. But unlike Ilan and Jacob, the stories remain true on this and other planes of existence. - Zsuzsi Gartner
The other week at the Cork World Book Festival, I heard the London-based Spanish writer Susana Medina discuss her story “Oestrogen” from this year’s Best European Fiction collection and her relationship to objects. She pointed out every object is the result of a thought. Rivka Galchen’s first short story collection, American Innovations, humorously explores the après-thoughts and relationships to objects (and situations) that follow rather than pre-empt their creation. Likewise, the collection is a multilayered exercise in response since many of these stories respond to earlier works by Gogol, Borges, Keats, Wallace Stevens and James Thurber.
American Innovations follows her much-heralded, distinctive debut novel Atmospheric Disturbances. Galchen remains as funny, warm and unpredictable in the short story form as the novel.
Much of this collection offers portraits of lives or moments in lives, abrupt pauses, interruptions, where contradiction, contrast and loss are the reigning components. Characters’ dilemmas hinge on misunderstanding, secrecy and the general perplexity and mortification of being a human.
Galchen explores and thwarts contradiction to comic effect. (“I bought the book, but in some small attempt at dignity I didn’t read it.”) She’s also hewing possession, fetishization of “things” and specifically the emotional register of the loss of “things.” In two stories, “Once An Empire” and “The Entire Northern Side Was Covered With Fire,” for example, the loss of a fork (“Oh fork, how does it feel to be a bat?”) and a Parmesan cheese grater feature prominently. (“We had a particularly nice Parmesan grater and he had taken that. But he had left behind his winter coat. Also a child.”) It’s hard not to salute any writer who could execute an entire text so amply around a woman’s attachment to her white fork!
In “The Lost Order” a woman who is “not making spaghetti” receives a telephone call from a Chinese takeout customer. Rather than tell the misdialing man she is not the Chinese takeout, she becomes embroiled in the man’s order, then subsequently conflicted over failing to tell him that she is not, in fact, the Chinese takeout. Meanwhile, on the other line, her husband has lost his wedding ring and asks her to go in search of it, but, again, in the moment of arrival at the spot he may have lost it, she finds herself muted and unable to ask the security guard about it. Instead she resolves her multiple dilemmas by overhearing two delivery people discussing their working experiences. Thus, her lack of transparency with the misdirected takeout customer and aversion to vocalizing on the lost ring, ultimately, lead her to contemplate the actual working lives of people who bring items to other people. It’s an unexpected, circuitous route to understanding, but the unexpected is precisely what Galchen thrives on.
The strongest summoning of the unusual is found in the final story “Once An Empire,” where “a pretty normal young woman, maybe an extremely normal one” witnesses her furniture climbing out a window. Sound incredible? Up on planet Galchen there exists no such thing. It’s ultimately a compact story about a woman’s relationship with a single and particular fork, while living in an apartment whose “window looks out on to the Jehovah Witness Watchtower building whose enormous light bulb billboard broadcasts the temperature in Fahrenheit, the time, then the temperature in Celsius, then the time again, then the updated temperature in Fahrenheit, and so on, unto eternity.”
The deadpan delivery throughout this collection manifests much chortle. In “The Late Novels of Gene Hackman,” a story set at a seminar in Florida, Q remarks to her stepdaughter J, about their Hidden Paradise accommodation:
“I mean it’s nice. But it’s very American.”
“Well, we are in America,” J said. “Sort of.”
A paragraph later, J offers Q a point of clarification on the term “dog cleaning”: “With animals it’s called grooming, not cleaning. Cleaning is for carpets.”
These are the deceptively bland snips that speckle Galchen’s prose and tickle your ear. Q, we learn, married J’s father two years after J’s mother died. They end at a birthday party for seniors roiling in an hypochondriacal wrestle match about people they do not seem to know. The whole tale is a delightful mash-up on intergenerational neurosis and presumptions and dead-dull seminars.
These stories afford us a way inside generational dilemmas (first jobs, taxes, property ownership and lack of, on all fronts) without resorting to the vacuous ambling that infects many of the alternative offerings in this realm. The only minor stylistic tics that wobble the work are an occasional clunky transition, excessive qualifying tags in sentences, over explaining/narrating through dialogue and too many references to being a writer, the whorls of publishing, inter-scribe-tribe jealousy and disappointments. Meta-fictional pokes, sure, but overly obvious choices for a writer with imaginative access to so very much more. “Wild Berry Blue” is a much better marker, the voice and thoughts of a crushing teenager, so carefully laid down it would give you brain freeze.
There’s only one story where the region of unlikeliness starts to feel like a joint that has lost its cartilage and is grinding. In “The Region of Unlikeness” an unnamed woman befriends two males, Jacob and Ilan, in a café and becomes happily mottled between the two of them. One dies and the other is difficult. The difficult one continues to be difficult and asks her to murder him because the dead male friend was a time traveller, mix in some gabble about the grandfather paradox in science fiction and rather like the protagonist’s conclusion on the difficult male friend, it renders us unto avoidance. Galchen lost me at a character lobbing St. Augustine natter in this one. Ideas that felt taped on top of the prose rather than farmed from within. The Tardis levitating above the sidewalk needed to touch down.
Readers have an additional layer should they wish it, as they can seek out the stories that Galchen responded to and determine their influence. I chose not to explore them at this time, preferring to determine whether the collection could hold its own. I determined this partly by reading it aloud to someone driving a car in another time zone (I was sitting in the car, not time travelling) and reading the stories up a mountain with altitude sickness. It can, it does and they do. There’s a wonderful warmth and inventiveness to American Innovations, Rivka Galchen’s stories compound the peculiar with joyful wit. - Anakana Schofield
ypically it takes bribery to get me to read straight through a short story collection. It happened last year with George Saunders’s masterful, much-feted Tenth of December, but the last (and only) time before that may have been college, when a knowing instructor passed me Haruki Murakami’s The Elephant Vanishes. Reading short story collections—no matter how cohesive, how gracefully threaded together, how substantive—has always left me feeling like I recently housed some Chinese food: disgustingly overwhelmed for a short time, and then starved for more nutrients.
TALENT IS A PRECARIOUS THING. It’s even more precarious when paired with youth, and then widely-broadcast; few are the writers who establish long, stable careers and remain — for any amount of time — deservedly in the center of an intellectual culture. Though we can think immediately of the people whose first novels were wake up calls to the human psyche: Philip Roth, Donna Tartt, E.L. Doctorow, Margaret Atwood, Haruki Murakami, Toni Morrison — and who went on to become living literary giants — the fact is that the large majority of writers struggle to publish even one widely-praised book.
And yet — youth always sells — and so various magazines and institutions can often be found celebrating, with gusto, a new group of literary youngsters. Under-40 Writers are tapped for inclusion in prestigious cliques — there is the National Book Foundation’s “5 Under 35,” the New York Public Library’s “Young Lions Award,” The New Yorker’s “20 Under 40” list, and even Narrative Magazine’s well-publicized “30 Below” category. The result? As they age, these writers’ successes — and failures — are played out on the biggest available stages; much bigger, or at least louder, now than they were in the days of Roth and Morrison.
Witness the career of Alix Ohlin: a debut novel, The Missing Person,lauded by seemingly everyone. Then, inclusion in The New Yorker’slist. Then, in 2012, a second novel, savaged by William Giraldi in The New York Times in a brutal review that used the adjectives, “cliché-strangled,” “appalling,” “leaden,” and “insufferable.” Not surprisingly, Giraldi’s assessment spread through Twitter feeds and Facebook status updates like a digital brush fire. So, this is what young, talented writers are dealing with today: on top of the normal anxieties of writing (“I dreamed my mother was telling me I should submit more to The New Yorker”), they must negotiate a public evernow that’s alwayson — and hungry to judge and buy (the twin preoccupations of the Internet).
For Rivka Galchen, a young Canadian-American novelist, this harrowing drama may be played out at any minute. Her inventive first novel, Atmospheric Disturbances, was published in 2008, translated into over 20 languages, and awarded the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing. Its premise was risk itself: it featured a character with her father's name, Tzvi Gal-Chen, who believes his wife has been replaced by a clone. The New York Times approved, comparing Galchen to Jonathan Lethem, Franz Kafka, Primo Levi, Thomas Pynchon, and Jorge Luis Borges.
For this reason, Galchen’s collection of stories, American Innovations, would seem to be doomed. It’s a hopeless enterprise — to enter a room while others proclaim your greatness. Galchen is now attempting to perform the literary equivalent of Evel Knievel hurtling over 13 double-decker buses in Wembley Stadium: the leap to repeat critical success is a daunting, and seemingly unlikely, endeavor. And if she fails, people will watch it live, and share it with their friends.
The marvel here is that she succeeds as often as she does — with a text that is full of innovation, grace, cold-minded intensity, and humor. The collection is a strong one, with its roots in a handful of literary antecedents — writers with whom Galchen wishes to have a conversation. Billed as “updates” or “riffs” on canonical works by Borges, Thurber, and Gogol, Galchen’s stories nonetheless have their own lives, rooted primarily in 20th and 21st century North America. These are pieces about brainy, careful characters; characters who are — by and large — struggling with the anxieties of this particular moment in time.
“Gross income for the daughter in 2007 was $18,150,” begins the collection’s third story, “Sticker Shock” (which appeared in The New Yorker in 2012as“Appreciation”). “Gross income for the mother in 2007 was $68,742. Gross income for the daughter in 2008 was $23,450; in 2009, it was $232,476; in 2010, $140,702; and in 2011, $37,853.” This story works, in part because of its clinical beginning; when it opens out into lyrical softness in a few pages, you feel relief. And the basic human dilemma the story seeks to portray — the inability of a mother and a daughter to get along — is sharpened by its linguistic ingenuity. “Sticker Shock” also contains the best three-page paragraph I’ve read this side of David Foster Wallace, which, in turn, contains the best summation of the absurdity of consumer culture since YDAU, The Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment:
But, as the mother explained to her daughter, the Jenny Consultant said that, while it was true that Jenny Craig did sell the armband on-site at the Centre, and that the consultant and the program did both believe that the armband could be a positive friend in any weight loss or weight maintenance regimen, still, the armband was not a Jenny Craig armband per se, and the Jenny Craig Centre did not represent the armband, or the armband makers, nor did the armband or its makers represent the Jenny Craig Centre, and the Jenny Craig Centre did not even formally endorse the armband’s makers, or vice versa — there was no real relation — and so the mother needed to address her inquiries or complaints not to the Jenny Craig Centre but to the armband company directly.
Comparisons to George Saunders’s In Persuasion Nation are inevitable.
Which is to say, this is a story collection that’s as much about language as anything else, about the many ways in which a story can be told. Its best moments are either surprising and beautiful (“The tea tasted like damp cotton.”), or funny (“Who was talking about not liking you? You’re just in pain.” “Maybe I’m not in pain.” “I’d put my money on pain. It’s the Kantian sublime, what you’re experiencing.”). But what I thought of most, reading these stories, wasn’t Kant’s formulation of awe (“The starry heavens above me, and the moral law within me”), but rather Longinus — who wrote that a literary work can be sublime if, in its transgressions, it is “bold, lawless, and original.”
Some stories are stronger than others. Particularly good is “Wild Berry Blue,” which is narrated in the first-person by a precocious young girl, who falls briefly, and incandescently, in love with a one-toothed, recovering heroin addict at a McDonalds in Oklahoma. She is in the restaurant with her father, the town’s psychiatrist. Galchen portrays the father with tenderness and affection: “This is a story about my love for Roy, though first I have to say a few words about my dad, who was there with me at the McDonalds every Saturday, letting his little girl, I was maybe nine, swig extra half-and-halfs, stack the shells into messy towers.” It’s a passage that conjures a specific material object — the fragile, corrugated creamers that are, for many 30- and-40-year old Americans, the equivalent of Proust’s madeleine. Though sentimentalism often feels like the great flaw of American popular culture — and this is one of the few stories that does in fact stray into a sentimentalist mood — Ms. Galchen handles the premise with enough grittiness to make it work.
Both “Real Estate,” and the title story, however, fall flat. “Real Estate” is too slight to amount to much, and “American Innovations” never overcomes the oddness of its central conceit (a woman grows a “dorsal breast”) — whether or not it is in conversation with Gogol’s “The Nose.” Yet it is a testament to Galchen’s skill as a writer that when she goes astray she doesn’t stray far. The collection’s essential life remains intact. When a character says, in “Real Estate,” that another character is, “carrying Being and Time, which didn’t immediately make me dislike him, maybe because I liked his hair and maybe because he carried it like it was a car repair manual,” you’re reminded of the author’s wit and intellect. What kind of car would you use Heidegger to fix? If only I was a certain kind of comedian — then this space would have a certain kind of joke in it.
“Once an Empire,” originally published in Harper’s in 2010, is the plainest story in the collection. It is also mysterious and affecting. Its premise is the stuff of magical realism: a woman returns from dinner to find all of her possessions leaving her apartment — via a darkened window and the fire escape. They are not being stolen, necessarily. They are just leaving of their own accord. The protagonist, dazed and lost, has a series of decentered conversations about this circumstance. “But when love is real, there’s no such thing as Time. I wasn’t the criminal, was I? I wasn’t Wanted. Mistakes could be made, though. Misidentifications.” It’s tempting to see this as Galchen arguing on her own behalf, in the writing world — where she must relinquish all of her possessions, for better or worse.
An archival obsessive could spend hours thinking about the ways Galchen chose to edit some of the stories — particularly “The Late Novels of Gene Hackman”— even after they appeared in magazines. “Gene Hackman,” has some quizzical alterations — for example, Galchen switches the “name” of the protagonist from “J” to “B.” She also adds a single-sentence, stand-alone paragraph to its start: “The outcome could have been known from the beginning.”
Richard Ford talks about understanding voice in fiction as "the music of the story's intelligence." It's been a long while since I've read short fiction by a new writer who makes that idea seem so definitive. But here is American Innovations, the first collection by Rivka Galchen. She lives in New York City, attended medical school, writes for the New Yorker, and has already published one novel. And now, she's brought out these stories that seem like the smartest around.
Though I think the title ought to be American Eccentric: Galchen's voice appears to be an odd fusion of insight and inner speech that practically defines the notion of eccentricity. She writes about slightly off-center marriages or love affairs, about the thin boundaries in childhood between wonder and perversion, about real estate and, of all things, existential loneliness. Sometimes she employs passages that sound — and I know this sounds a little crazy, but she herself mentions the names on the same page — like an amalgam of Heidegger and Will Ferrell. But however off center things may seem, she nearly always hits the mark.
Here's a taste of it: In the title story, a salute to and reworking of the spirit of Kafka's "Metamorphosis" — or is it Gogol's "The Nose," or Philip Roth's The Breast, or all of them — the narrator tells of waking up on a North Carolina morning. "I washed my face," she says, "with peach scrub and took care, as I generally do, not to look into the mirror too gesamtkunstwerk-ily. Instead, only in close patches."
"Gesamtkunstwerk-ily!"
A German philosophical term about the total nature of the work of art, first introduced by a mid-nineteenth century German aesthetician named Trahndorff — also by the composer Richard Wagner — and appearing here in Galchen's story as part of the question of how the narrator feels about seeing her early morning face in thein the bathroom mirror? What other story writer, old or new, has converted such a term into an adverb and gotten away with it?
The narrator then looks at herself in a hall mirror, which shows her back, and discovers that a mass has appeared, a mass that turns out to be something quite unexpected. "I would say," she tells us, "what I saw was a wow. Even though it was modest, maybe a B cup in size. It didn't need support." And here come these odd rhythms and singular diction again: "It manifested all the expected anatomy, the detailing of which I feel is private."
Because she slants in at a subject or situation at such odd angles, Galchen's sentences catch your attention, and hold it with a tight fist. In the story called "Wild Berry Blue" — which appears to be Galchen's homage to Joyce's masterpiece "Araby" — a prepubescent girl in Oklahoma fixates on an ordinary guy who works in a fast food restaurant. His name is Roy. "I felt so unsettled," says, Galchen's young heroine, "Roy's fingers on my palm as I thrummed my hand along a low wooden fence. I had so little of Roy and yet he had all of me and the feeling ran deep to the most ancient parts of me."
However bold and distinctive, statements like these don't overshadow the story line and characters. They become the essence, the particular curious nature of story and character. The characters are wildly divergent, from that young Oklahoma girl to New York coffee house philosophers, science-fiction writes in Key West, a molecular biologist in Mexico City, and a novelist who's written "a love story between a bird and a whale." So that even though in these pieces, Galchen tries to give the impression of writing her versions of Borges or Gogol, she can't help being anyone but herself; someone for whom the existential confusions of everyday life are a rich field of material for fiction.
In the opening story called "The Lost Order," her narrator can't even answer a telephone without plucking at the very thread of what holds the universe together.
Field Geology: An Interview with Rivka Galchen
Rivka Galchen on American Innovations: Stories
Rivka Galchen, Author of 'American Innovations,' on Writing and Uncertainty
Rivka Galchen talks about putting a female twist on iconic stories
Rivka Galchen' texts in The New Yorker
Rivka Galchen, Atmospheric Disturbances: A Novel, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008.
excerpt
Imagine what it might be like to realize that the person you love is, in fact, not the person you love but a doppelgänger: or, what Leo Liebenstein coolly terms a "simulacrum" of his wife Rema at the outset of Atmospheric Disturbances. David Byrne's infamous cry that "this is not my beautiful wife" seems the most likely response, but Leo's reaction to this sea change takes unpredictable and dazzlingly plotted turns in the story that follows. Leo's journey to recover the "real" Rema is nothing short of byzantine; among its many mysteries is the delightfully inscrutable Dr. Tzvi Gal-Chen, a master meteorologist who in cleverly constructed flashback sequences takes up residence in the daily rhythms of Leo and Rema's marriage and becomes as much a focus of Leo's obsession as his wife's whereabouts. (Think Vertigo but directed by Charlie Kaufman.) Make no mistake: this is dizzying debut fiction, bursting at the spine with beautifully articulated ideas about love, yes, but also--and with maddening resonance--about the private wars love forces us to wage with ourselves. Be sure to keep a pen or pencil handy: it's impossible to resist underlining prose this good. - Anne Bartholomew
In this enthralling debut, psychiatrist Dr. Leo Liebenstein sets off to find his wife, Rema, who he believes has been replaced by a simulacrum. Also missing is one of Leo's patients, Harvey, who is convinced he receives coded messages (via Page Six in the New York Post) from the Royal Academy of Meteorology to control the weather. At Rema's urging, Leo pretends during his sessions with Harvey to be a Royal Academy agent (she thinks the fib could help break through to Harvey), and once Re- ma and Leo disappear, Leo turns to actual Royal Academy member Tzvi Gal-Chen's meteorological work to guide him in his search for his wife. Leo's quest takes him through Buenos Aires and Patagonia, and as he becomes increasingly delusional and erratic, Galchen adeptly reveals the actual situation to readers, including Rema's anguish and anger at her husband. Leo's devotion to the real Rema is heartbreaking and maddening; he cannot see that the woman he seeks has been with him all along. Don't be surprised if this gives you a Crying of Lot 49 nostalgia hit. - Publishers Weekly
An unprovable theory: Before everything, before finishing her first book, even, a writer makes a certain, unique sound. Perhaps this means that the writer hears a certain sound or is tuned to a certain pitch. That sound can’t be faked or changed; it may be that the difference between writers who fulfill their promise and writers who don’t is that, no matter what they do, those who do just can’t help themselves—they make the sound they make and no other. In her first novel, Atmospheric Disturbances, Rivka Galchen is clearly tuned, preternaturally, to the key of Auster, Borges, and perhaps Sebald. Multiple alternate worlds whistle between these lines; characters are loose in their signifiers; things—people, places, identities—appear and disappear in a sort of weird, really smart, obsessive way that is by turns rueful, paranoid, melancholy, clever, and anxious. Indeed, the sentences and situations are endlessly variable, like a Rubik’s cube. If they seem, sometimes, to be turning slightly more from a love of perpetual motion than from any sort of urgency, that may be in Galchen’s favor. This is her sound; this is her way of moving—the girl can’t help it.
The uncanny reigns supreme here. The events in the novel cluster around the (very) strange disappearance of Dr. Leo Liebenstein’s wife, Rema. It is a disappearance, however, that is visible only to him, because Rema’s double, along with a peculiar russet puppy that she carries in her purse, has taken up residence in Liebenstein’s apartment. She looks just like the missing Rema, but she isn’t, Liebenstein is sure, actually her. She is a “simulacrum,” an “impostress,” an interloper who makes tiny but telling mistakes in her imitation of the real Rema. She lies; she drinks her tea the wrong way; her face isn’t quite right. She says telltale impostressish things like “The real is good for deception.” A lover knows, despite any and all appearances to the contrary, and Liebenstein is sure he knows. And since he is a psychiatrist to boot, he feels uniquely qualified to find his way out of this psychotic hall of mirrors called his life. To this end, Liebenstein begins to search, of course, but before the search can even properly get off the ground, Harvey, one of his psychotic patients, also disappears, and a psychotic patient who isn’t Harvey appears, insisting that someone has stolen his leg. Liebenstein perseveres, finding clues in any and all absurd occurrences and coincidences, tracking his missing wife through New York’s Hungarian Pastry Shop, Buenos Aires, Patagonia, and his dreams. Wound through his search is a critical subplot involving the Royal Academy of Meteorology, a meteorologist named Dr. Tzvi Gal-Chen, and Doppler radar, which can apparently aid in understanding the appearance of doppelgängers, such as the false Rema. Also, the Royal Academy of Meteorology, which is real in the book (not in the real world, though in the real world, there is actually a Royal Meteorological Society), plays a key role in a highly paranoid fantasy of Harvey’s. Just so we’re clear.
To attempt to follow the clues in this novel is to engage in a fruitless exercise, like trying to climb the stairs in an Escher woodcut. She’s not there, and you can’t find her that way, anyway. As Liebenstein tacks back and forth in increasingly paranoid circuits through his inner and outer worlds—there are diagrams in this novel, found photographs, and a drawing of the Doppler effect—a weight, beautifully, accumulates in the white space. Liebenstein’s profound loneliness is in that unseen weight. The shape that he’s drawing with increasing franticness on the page doesn’t really matter, we begin to see; the tension of the novel derives from everything he has no word or diagram for: his heart, mysteriously forlorn. It is to Galchen’s credit that she never explains what the source of Liebenstein’s melancholy is. Instead, it is as if she sees the universe as divided into frenzied verbal clusters of overdetermined, semidelusional scribbles that are never what they say they are versus a vast, silent expanse of inchoate grief.
It’s a very charming vision, and her clusters are meticulously drawn. But Liebenstein is most heartbreaking not in his ceaseless, involuted motion, but in the small, still moment when, on eating too many butter cookies, he looks at the kitchen ceiling and notices, uncomfortably, that “the shapes that normally morph and merge out upon the random pattern of such a ceiling did not morph and merge for me as I sat there, though I waited for them to do so, even just playfully, but they didn’t, which made it seem as if I’d become the worst kind of literalist . . . as if I really believed in a world . . . where people, oddly enough, meant just what they said.” How Liebenstein eventually makes his way to something like that literalism, or at least a pretty good imitation of it, is the actual trajectory of this existential fairy tale, even as he continues to insist on his version of the really real reality he knows is there, if only he could graph it. This trajectory is quite charming as well, though by the end of the book, I sometimes wished for at least a hint of more random weather, emotional and otherwise, the spontaneous movement of a cloud or burst of sunlight that wasn’t part of some crowded mind’s more or less paranoid system. But overthinking should be the worst thing that happens to a first novelist. Galchen’s idiosyncratic, echo-filled sound comes through loud and clear anyway. - Stacey D’Erasmo
In 1835, Georg Büchner, a young sometime medical student, began to write “Lenz,” a story that inhabits the schizophrenic breakdown of the eighteenth-century poet Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz. It opens simply, like a Romantic stroll: “The 20th, Lenz walked through the mountains.” There is snow on the peaks and fog in the valleys. And then, seven sentences into it, something strange happens: “He felt no fatigue, except sometimes it annoyed him that he could not walk on his head.” Like Lenz, we have suddenly entered an upside-down world. Lenz imagines that someone is communicating to him in hieroglyphics; he runs around manically, in the middle of the night; he thinks himself possessed of miraculous powers; he tries to bring a dead girl back to life. “When he was alone or reading, things got even worse, at times all his mental activity would fix upon a single idea; if he thought about another person, or vividly pictured them, it was as if he became that person, he grew completely confused, and yet at the same time he felt the constant urge to deliberately manipulate everything around him in his mind.”
So far, this could be farce, trompe l’oeil, Ionesco, Magritte. But the story quickly changes course. Seeking a logical explanation for the presence of the interloper (it can’t be a case of “Rema-based psychosis,” he conveniently concludes), Leo delves into the research of a quasi-paranormal scientific association called the Royal Academy of Meteorology, in particular the publications of a man named Tzvi Gal-Chen, whose work on Doppler radar, “initial value problems” and “atmospheric modeling” may contain the key to the “real” Rema’s disappearance. Tzvi Gal-Chen has his drawbacks: for one thing, he appears to be dead; for another, the “fake” Rema may be impersonating him; but at least he’s accessible by e-mail. Also, Gal-Chen once presented a scientific paper in Buenos Aires, and Rema was born there. Could these two random occurrences be related? Leo hops a plane to Argentina to find out, using Gal-Chen’s research on retrieving “thermodynamic variables from within deep convective clouds” to guide his own blundering “attempts at retrieval” of the “real” Rema. No, this is not chick lit.
It’s unusual — in fact (why be coy?), it’s extremely rare — to come across a first novel by a woman writer that concerns itself with such quirky, philosophical, didactic explorations; a novel in which the heart and the brain vie for the role of protagonist, and the brain wins. While the voice and mood of the novel are masculine, clinical and objective (Leo registers Rema’s distress with detachment, recording it but not feeling it), the book’s descriptions of colors, smells, clothing and bodies show feminine perception: Rema’s hair has the “smell of grass”; a woman has “wet cement eyes”; a ’70s shirt with a butterfly collar has “pearline” fasteners. This attention to detail doesn’t pass without comment. Rema teases Leo for the attention he pays to clothes, while Leo mocks his mother’s “excessive aesthetic sensitivity” even as he tries to dictate the color, fabric and buttons of a new coat for a Rema clone in Patagonia.
Galchen’s inventive narrative strategies call to mind the playful techniques of Jonathan Lethem, Franz Kafka, Primo Levi and Thomas Pynchon. But she also, quite deliberately, echoes the Argentine giant Jorge Luis Borges. Like Borges, she sabotages concepts of identity, reality and place, fraying her protagonist’s ties to all three. Like Borges, she makes Argentina her favored locale for memory retrieval. And, as Borges often did, she gives her own name to a character. But there’s a still more obvious link: in his short story “Borges and I,” Borges complains of an identity crisis akin to Leo’s — albeit a crisis over his own identity, not someone else’s. There are two different Borgeses, he explains: the other Borges shares his tastes, “but in a vain sort of way that turns them into the accoutrements of an actor.” In “Atmospheric Disturbances,” Leo’s deprecating attitude toward the Rema imitator resembles Borges’s attitude toward his double. Galchen operates on Borges’s conceit, adapting it, expanding on it, giving it a new face.
If this were a different kind of novel, the central mystery wouldn’t revolve around puzzles of identity, subjectivity and objectivity. It would concern itself with the question of how an unpleasant, middle-aged, Aspergic loner like Leo Liebenstein ever managed to bag a dishy wife like Rema, with her warmth, her youth, her enticing rhythmic gait, her way of giving people “the impression that she loves them in a very personal and significant way.” In fairness, this thought had occurred to Leo. The first time the two met was at the Hungarian Pastry Shop in Manhattan. After speaking to her, ascertaining her nationality and noticing that she wasn’t edging away from him, Leo courted her by shrewdly avoiding the mention of Borges, so as not to “appear showy.” Because of this reticence, because of a mille-feuille sugar high, or for some other unknown reason, Rema succumbed to his suit. And yet, years into the marriage, Leo remains on perpetual alert, unsure of true possession, his antennae quivering to pick up any signal that Rema has discovered she’s out of his league and acted on this knowledge. He pretends he isn’t jealous. “I didn’t necessarily know at every moment exactly where she was or what, precisely, in Spanish, she said over the phone to people who might very well have been perfect strangers to me,” he admits. But that alone doesn’t mean that she “was, or is, in love with some, or many, other people.”
How reassuring. And yet, like the tormented narrator of Ford Madox Ford’s novel “The Good Soldier” — who longed to believe that his marriage was sound and that his wife was “a goodly apple,” and who began to regard other people as “incalculable simulacra amidst smoke wreaths” — after learning of her infidelity, Leo is haunted by doubts. The difference here is that Leo has betrayed himself, pre-emptively robbing himself of the possession he most values to protect himself against its loss. “Who can ever really know about anyone’s happiness, even one’s own?” he rationalizes. A true scientist, he argues, must be willing to accept “unwelcome and confounding data,” to “make discoveries that shatter one’s most deeply held beliefs.” Maybe, he adds, “we discover that a man is not an expert on himself.” Whether or not this is true, it’s certain that a hologram can’t cheat on you.
In a different kind of novel, we would sit back and watch Leo gaslight himself into wrecking his marriage, from time to time stealing glimpses through a peephole at Rema’s secret activities, if any. But Galchen and her narrator prefer radar to romance. Leo likes to picture Rema’s duplicates as figures on a Doppler weather radar pattern. “Let us imagine a source from which a Rema look-alike emerges every second,” he posits. If he “begins walking toward the source of Remas, then a Rema will pass by me more frequently than every second, even though Remas are still exiting the source at the precise rate of one per second.” He calls this the Dopplerganger effect. Immersed in one of these experiences, Leo scrutinizes the Rema mimic, noticing “fine lines of age on her face. Tiny crow’s-feet, and not just when she smiled. ... This look-alike Rema, I began to realize, was not such a perfect look-alike; it would seem Rema was being played by someone older. ... Someone pretty, but not as pretty.” Rema may not have taken a lover, but she has been manhandled by time.
You don’t have to be a weatherman to see that Galchen’s brainteasing book, whatever its pretexts, is an exploration of the mutability of romantic love. Although she has intellectualized and mystified her subject, intentionally obscuring it in a dry-ice fog of pseudoscience, the emotional peaks beneath her cloud retain their definition. The reader senses Rema’s anguish, whether or not Leo has empathy for it. Captive to his soothing psychosis, Leo can’t see his wife as anything but an impersonator, her voice “less sharp, less fiercely lovable, less accented than Rema’s,” her grip too firm, her hair incorrectly styled. He tells her, “I’ve met complete strangers who remind me more of Rema than you do,” but he’s the stranger. “It’s you,” Rema sobs, “It’s you who’s not yourself.” Anyone who has suffered the everyday calamity of the lessening of love, the infinitesimal diminutions of regard that drain a relationship of its power, knows what a relief it would be to blame science fiction. This cerebral, demanding, original new writer helps make the charges stick. - Liesl Schillinger
Giving voice to a character as weird as Leo is quite a tightrope act but Galchen, in this excellent first novel, confidently pulls it off. The twitchy, digressive prose and idiosyncratic phrasing (tourists in a Patagonian town are described as 'the local culture of nonlocal pleasure seekers') are counterbalanced by Leo's analytical cast of mind and hypersensitivity. He knows his actions make him seem irrational and he is constantly accounting for this. When evidence weighing against his quest threatens to overwhelm it, Galchen wrongfoots us with a twist that suggests he might have been on the right track all along.
The novel is also very funny. The sheer oddness of Leo's thoughts, and the inadvertently comical way in which he articulates them, break the tide of analytical information and make the story race along. Galchen owes debts to Thomas Pynchon: her sinister meteorological collective, the 49 Quantum Fathers, is surely a reference to Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, a book similarly preoccupied with cults.
Meteorology, in Galchen's hands, becomes a fertile field, yielding insights into emotion and, in particular, the anxiety caused by knowing that we can never truly fathom the person we love. - Killian Fox
In Atmospheric Disturbances, Rivka Galchen's debut novel, psychiatrist Dr. Leo Liebenstein is firmly under the suspicion that his young Argentinian wife Rema has disappeared and been replaced by a sumulacrum, a copy that looks and sounds like Rema but in vaguely distinguishable aspects is certainly not her.
What's more, Harvey, a patient of Leo's who believes that he is able to control the weather and has in fact been employed as a secret agent for the Royal Academy of Meteorology to do so, has gone missing. All of this and more (including the Royal Academy's evil counter-society, the 49 Quantum Fathers) in the first 20 pages, drawing the reader relentlessly forward into Galchen's irresistible tale about perception, relationships, and meteorology.
Rivka Galchen's use of science for literary purposes is hardly surprising. Prior to pursuing her M.F.A. at Columbia, she received a medical degree in psychiatry from Mount Sinai School of Medicine. But Galchen mines more than her psychiatric background in Atmospheric Disturbances. In an attempt to reign in Harvey's meteorological delusions, or at least keep them closer to home, Leo pretends that he too is employed by the Royal Academy, and that he gets his orders straight from one of the Academy's fellows, one Tzvi Gal-Chen, which also happens to be the name of Rivka Galchen's father, who also happens to have been a meteorologist. Galchen's inclusion of her father in the novel is well done, not overwrought. But it is certainly more than incidental and clearly the seed from which many of the ideas within grew.
Leo descends further into his own delusions, pursuing them into South America while he, in turn is pursued by Rema, or Rema's doppleganger, and we are thrust into a maelstrom of deceit, double agents, and intrigue that at times touches on some heady meteorological concepts such as wind retrieval and single Doppler radar.
Leo's own voice - often awkward and ever-unreliable - is the vehicle through which Galchen delivers line after line of poetry and humor. Phrases such as "My heart always goes out to beautiful people, which I realize isn't fair, but at least my heart goes somewhere," and "peculiarity is something true rumpling the bedsheets of assumption," are found throughout the novel. Atmospheric Disturbances is a fantastic medley of compelling plot and beautiful prose. - Mark Flanagan
Rivka Galchen’s riveting debut, Atmospheric Disturbances, toys with many of the traditional mystery-novel tropes and makes us question, yet again, what distinctions exist, if any, between so-called “literary” and “genre” fiction. Between art and not art. But this is no ordinary whodunit: there’s a whole lot more at work here, intellectually speaking, than you’ll find in those airport potboilers. Maybe it’s a kind of anti-mystery. As in some of Paul Auster’s most mind bending, early fiction, Atmospheric Disturbances brilliantly raises more questions than it answers. If anything, we know even less when it’s all over than we did when we started. But Galchen is no Paul Auster nor is she meant to be—she might be even better. - Andrew Ervin
The man who mistook his wife for a simulacrum
The answer to this question will inevitably go beyond a mere list of facts. Our knowledge of another person can’t be reduced to a combination of characteristics—there’s also an intuition or instinct we have about them. This sense of “knowing” is unpredictable and hard to explain, mostly because it’s somehow internal to us.
As such, it can easily be disturbed, especially when someone acts contrary to your expectations. “I don’t even know you anymore,” we exclaim. But is it the other person who has changed? Or is it just that the person in our head was never entirely real?
These are not small questions, but they’re explored with a lot of insight in Rivka Galchen’s complex and impressive debut novel, Atmospheric Disturbances.
At the simplest level, Atmospheric Disturbances is about a psychiatrist, Dr Leo Liebenstein, who becomes convinced one day that his wife has been replaced by another woman. He’s not especially perturbed by this state of affairs, nor does he really question why or how this was achieved. He does, however, decide that his real wife has been “taken”, somehow, somewhere, and he is determined to find her.
Leo Liebenstein is utterly unshakeable in his certainty that the woman living in his apartment is not actually Rema, his younger Argentinean wife. She “feels” wrong, an intuition that Liebenstein tries to ascribe to any number of perceived differences. She is too emotional; and sometimes not emotional enough. She loves dogs, where the real Rema (we are told) did not. Her movements are different, although sometimes eerily similar. Even when she is exactly like Rema, Liebenstein attributes this to clever mimicry.
To put it crudely, Liebenstein is crazy. As a psychiatrist, he is constantly on the lookout for signs of psychosis or dysfunction in himself, yet there are gigantic blind-spots in his self-perception. Even as he relentlessly assesses his own thought processes, he apparently finds nothing odd in his conviction that Rema has been replaced by an almost identical woman for no conceivable reason. Further, he feels that his approach to finding Rema, including using the technical papers of an eminent meteorologist, is, if not rational, then at least reasonable. Leo does not even question his subsequent receipt of communications and advice from a long-dead man. These are the sorts of things that happen every day in Leo’s world, it seems.
For a man who frequently contrasts his patients’ delusions with the “consensus view of reality”, he is remarkably unconcerned that no one else shares his view of things. In fact, the only person who sees nothing odd in Dr Liebenstein’s absurd quest for Rema is Harvey, a patient who believes that he is a secret agent for the Royal Academy of Meteorology and receives instructions through the New York Post. Even this is probably because Leo’s quest is mostly inspired by Harvey’s fantastic world.
The problem with Liebenstein (or merely one of the problems) is his ability to rationalise almost anything with a veneer of pseudo-science. He twists his own psychiatric analysis to justify his own muddled thinking. He gains strange meanings and significance from meteorological papers that were never intended and which he barely understands himself. For Liebenstein, it’s a case of science, not actually as it is, but as it feels.
Liebenstein’s quixotic quest and the bizarre circumstances he encounters bring to mind Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, another story of a man searching vainly for his missing wife. The key difference has to be that where Murakami’s narrative is deliberately counter-realist, it quickly becomes apparent to the reader that Atmospheric Disturbances is operating in a largely rational universe. Any strangeness is predominantly in the mind of the narrator.
While we can sympathise with a sane narrator being confused by an insane world (as in Murakami), Dr Liebenstein is a more troubling protagonist. In particular, we can only imagine the impact on the “ersatz Rema” of Leo’s behaviour, especially when we have no reason to suppose she is actually a replacement beyond our unreliable narrator’s suspicions. It reminds the reader too clearly of the pain inflicted on loved ones by dementia or serious mental illness.
From a more selfish angle, sometimes following Leo on his odyssey just gets tiring. His mental “connections” and leaps can leave the reader feeling as if they must have missed a vital link three chapters back. Galchen keeps things sufficiently interesting and the prose is always engaging; it’s just that one chapter of crazy thinking starts to look a lot like the others.
Even so, while there might not be much method in Dr Liebenstein’s madness, there is in Galchen’s approach. By looking at a disordered mind and a truly dysfunctional relationship, she manages to draw out many of the complexities of much more conventional lives.
Even without the complicating factor of Leo’s psychosis, the Rema-Leo pairing is a difficult one. The age and cultural gaps are significant and their personalities are less complementary than flat-out opposing. Rema is emotional and spontaneous—unfortunately an overused personality type for the Latin woman character—whereas Leo is literal and rather humourless. Unfortunately for marital happiness everywhere, mismatches like these are not uncommon.
Tension in this kind of relationship is inevitable. Leo clearly so little understands his wife or her motivations that it’s laughable that he regards himself as able to identify an imposter. He loves her, yet he’s not exactly clear on who it is that he loves. He’s a hopeless romantic in one sense and yet his romantic feelings are so poorly directed—especially once he abandons the woman living with him to go in search of her “true” doppelganger.
The power of Atmospheric Disturbances is not in its depiction of psychosis, although that’s impressive enough—it’s in how effectively it symbolises this kind of romantic confusion. So often people “fall in love” with little mutual knowledge and understanding—and are so shocked when the other is thought to have “changed”. If not everyone processes this by deciding that their partner is a stand-in, well, the metaphor is no less true.
It’s a deeply sad novel in that it shows how misguided and self-deluding we can be. Yet it also shows the extraordinary self-sacrifice and love that people are capable of. In the messiness and drama, Atmospheric Disturbances pretty much encapsulates the sheer chaos and beauty of human relationships better. - David Pullar
Leo Liebenstein, Rema’s husband and the narrator of the novel, doesn’t hesitate to tell the simulacrum that he doesn’t believe she is Rema. The woman laughs at her 51-year-old psychiatrist husband, attributing his odd statement to a migraine headache. All the while, he is totting up the odd ways in which she is just like his wife: the same Argentine accent, the same walk, the same hair, but somehow not the same Rema.
It seems like a clue that one of his patients, the meteorologically-obsessed Harvey, disappeared only two days before the real Rema did. Harvey had a habit of disappearing, but Rema and Leo had cooked up a scheme to keep Harvey close to home: the creation of Tzvi Gal-Chen, a fellow with the Royal Academy of Meteorology, who instructs Harvey to monitor the weather in New York City, his home town. Reality overlaps into the novel here, so far as the reader can tell: Gal-Chen is Galchen, apparently the author’s real-life father, apparently actually a member of the Royal Academy of Meteorology; the pictures that appear in the book appear to really be pictures of Tzvi Galchen and his family, including the author. But where does reality begin and where does it end?
That, dear reader, is the question the whole book asks—and never answers. Indeed, perhaps that is a question that cannot be answered, not by this book, and not by anyone.
Leo mounts a search for the real Rema, thinking to find guidance somehow in the meteorological writings of Tzvi Gal-Chen. He travels to Argentina and meets with Rema’s mother, Magda, whom he has never met before. The mystery deepens when Magda asks him whether he has ever met Rema’s husband, stating that she doesn’t much like the husband. Leo has no idea how to search for Rema, especially because he doesn’t trust Magda sufficiently to advise her of the problem or even of his own identity as her real husband. Then he finds Harvey, who is also in Argentina on a meteorological mission, apparently on orders of Gal-Chen. Leo starts communicating with Tzvi Gal-Chen himself, via Blackberry; he soon finds out that Gal-Chen is dead but still communicating with him. Before long, Leo has given up the idea of practicing psychiatry and has taken a meteorological job in Patagonia, posing as a 27-year-old Bowdoin College ice climber.
Is Leo insane? Who has been posing as Gal-Chen and answering his emails? Who is Rema? What does Harvey really have to do with anything? How did Leo get that job in Patagonia? Did Rema have a different husband at some point in time? Was Gal-Chen really a meteorologist in real life? (That appears to be the case, according to Wikipedia, but we all know how unreliable Wikipedia can be; the author of this novel could have written the entry as an extended part of her novel, for all we know.) On the other hand, you can buy a book called Mesoscale Meteorology—Theories, Observations and Models (NATO Science Series C: (closed)), edited by D.K. Lilly and Tzvi Gal-Chen, from Amazon, so perhaps … well. The nature of reality is definitely questionable, as this novel makes us appreciate.
Atmospheric Disturbances can give you a migraine as severe as the ones from which Leo suffers if you try too hard to follow his various speculations, but it is worth just about every throb of the temples. Few novels are so strange, and so thoroughly, thematically, consistently strange, never once falling into the understandable or the sensible.
Unfortunately, Galchen’s novel is perhaps 50 pages too long. As an author, she seems to get stuck in her own spirals, mazes and conundrums, and to be unable to get her characters out and into a resolution, or to find a way to simply abandon them in absurdities. A sort of tedium sets in toward the end of the book, as oddities pile up higher and higher; frankly, were I Rema, I would have had Leo involuntarily committed for his own safety at about page 150 (if not before). But perhaps that is my own unreasonable penchant for underlying realism asserting itself into a scenario in which it doesn’t belong. Still, Atmospheric Disturbances is a promising start on a career of a talented absurdist or fabulist; you choose the label. This is simply the sort of weird, off-center, strange story that I love to read. - Terry Weyna
Atmospheric Disturbances, Rivka Galchen's debut novel, begins with a bold statement: "Last December a woman entered my apartment who looked exactly like my wife" (p. 3). It's a perfect hook into the paranoid world of the novel's narrator and protagonist, fifty-one-year-old New York psychiatrist Leo Liebenstein, as he recalls the loss of his original wife, Rema. My interpretation of this mystery was contextualised by the two epigraphs preceding it: the first being a quotation from the meteorologist Tzvi Gal-Chen stressing that the difficulty of predicting the weather at the human scale is due to our inability to understand the weather as experienced moment to moment; the second taken from Gilles Deleuze's Proust and Signs (original publication 1964), stressing the centrality of silent interpretation throughout the process of being in love. Together, they signpost the centrality of interpretation within the text, ensuring my scrutiny of Leo's tale of swapped wives and sinister plots.
Leo's disowning of the "impostress" has no immediate perceptual basis, as he concedes that she was identical to the original: "Same everything, but it wasn't Rema. It was just a feeling, that's how I knew" (p. 3). Indeed, Leo's only real argument against Rema's authenticity is that she occasionally behaves in ways that he would not expect her to; and this could possibly be seen as a reflection of his professional pride, his need to feel that he fully understands the people around him. To Leo, individuals are comprised of a series of traits that they must slavishly adhere to. The main reason for his suspicion, for example, is that the simulacrum has brought home a dog; an action uncharacteristic of the "real" Rema, who has no love of canines.
Leo's reliability is thus a crucial question. He has a tendency towards self examination, which offers some illuminating clues as to his subjective perspective, such as his confession that: "I've sometimes had the feeling that my life was insignificant, and even that my love was nothing more than an accumulation of contingencies—still, all that ran contrary to the enduring phenomenon of my own sense of great importance" (p. 213). He is at once totally convinced of his superiority and yet also deeply insecure about his popularity and the strength of the relationship he has with his young and glamorous wife. The extent of Leo's self absorption is illustrated when he responds to his wife's replacement by feeling like "a cuckolded husband in an old movie" (p. 5), as opposed to worrying about her safety.
I believe that Galchen uses the science fictional device of the simulacrum as a deliberate ploy, recalling Philip K. Dick stories such as "The Father-Thing" (1954) and films including Don Siegel's Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), wherein sinister forces replace people with copies who fool consensus opinion, but whose imperfection is uncovered by those closest to them as they experience a sense of the uncanny. Readers attuned to sf reading practices will thus be directed to at least attempt to give credence to Leo's perspective on events. A number of seemingly corroborative fantastical events are alluded to in quick succession when we meet Harvey, a missing patient of Leo's with a diagnosis of "schitzotypal personality disorder" (p. 11) manifesting in a "conflict with the consensus view of reality" (p. 12). He describes himself as an agent for the Royal Academy of Meteorology, engaged in their battle to prevent the 49 Quantum Fathers from manipulating the weather for financial gain through their access to the events occurring in possible alternate worlds. Through the lens of sf reading practices, I felt cued to question whether Harvey had been misdiagnosed, and was prepared to find that he had access to knowledge beyond that of those who had deemed him to be ill.
Leo's wife had urged him to identify with Harvey by posing as another agent from the Royal Academy, pretending to report to an actual member of the organisation, the epigraph-providing Tzvi Gal-Chen (a fictional representation of the author's father who, despite being dead within the fictional world, appears to communicate with Leo and Harvey later in the text). This pretence spills over into Leo's relationship with Rema; they started to discuss Tzvi as though he were a close friend, indicating that the lines between reality and imagination had already become blurred for the psychiatrist even before Rema's "disappearance." Leo makes a connection between the arrival of the simulacrum and Harvey's disappearance a couple of days earlier, slowly coming to suspect that the 49 and/or the Royal Academy are responsible for both events. The ensuing action sees him scouring familiar haunts around New York before travelling to Buenos Aires and Patagonia, following interpretive readings of Tzvi's meteorological essays and confused telephone conversations with a temporary member of staff at the Royal Academy.
Far from uncovering evidence to support Leo and Harvey's theories, these investigations make it increasingly difficult for a reader to believe in their version of reality. Despite contact with Tzvi via email, Leo witnesses no objectively extraordinary events and the clues he sees as patterning his attempts to track down Rema seem forced and self created, ultimately leading to an anticlimactic meeting with a member of the Royal Academy that ends with their refusal to speak to him. When Leo and Harvey encounter one another in a Patagonian hotel, it seems to suggest more that the two have become enmeshed in one another's delusions (with several clues that Harvey is the person writing the correspondence from Tzvi), rather than offering any hint that the battle with the 49 exists in reality outside of their shared imaginings.
A strong case can be made that Leo's inability to recognise Rema as his wife is a manifestation of Capgras' delusion, described by V.S. Ramachandran as:
one of the rarest and most colourful syndromes in neurology. The patient, who is often mentally quite lucid, comes to regard close acquaintances—usually his parents, children, spouse or siblings—as impostors. (Phantoms in the Brain [1998], p. 161)
In Atmospheric Disturbances this is mentioned during an exchange between Leo and Rema, wherein the psychiatrist is presented with reports on similar syndromes. Leo's pride and professional expertise combine to make his rejection of her suggestions inevitable. He does not allow the evidence that Rema presents to dissuade him from the "truth" that his wife has been replaced, reasoning that:
If a story seems too random, or perhaps too brilliant, for a "madman" to have conceived of it himself, then consider that the "author" might be reality and the "madman" just the reader. After all, only reality can escape the limits of our imagination. (p.160)
The growing battle of wills between husband and wife is without doubt the central theme of the novel, as Rema attempts to persuade him that he needs to seek help and Leo vehemently defends his interpretative faculties. Clues are provided throughout the narrative to support Rema's position, as Leo's self analysis suggests that his breakdown might be the result of a life of anxious doubt:
all my life, so many alarms seem always to be sounding, and so it becomes near impossible ever to say what a particular alarm might be signaling, or what might have set it off, or if it in any way ought to be heeded. (pp. 15-16)
Whatever the true nature of reality within the text, Leo's interpretations are utterly real to him. I found myself questioning his narration throughout, wondering to what extent his subjectivity had distorted the events he relayed.
For example: he repeatedly exhibits aversion to manifestations of emotion, preferring to retain a professional distance even within personal relationships. It is therefore entirely possible that the whole narrative is his fictionalised account of the emotions he cannot face whilst he falls out of love with his wife, as is suggested by an internal voice: "I'd thought you didn't even love her that much anymore, some part of me taunted. Some parts of me are so mean" (p. 57). Leo is both old fashioned and sexist in his views, not understanding why women would feel the need for a career and valuing them in terms of their beauty. Therefore, Rema's aging may have played a part in his rejection of her as an inferior copy, remaining oblivious to the distress his behaviour has caused his wife: "then I noticed that she—the simulacrum—had fine lines of age on her face. [...] Someone pretty, but not as pretty" (p. 36).
Leo's obstinacy—he consistently blames others for his misfortunes—at times makes the text a frustrating read, but I think that this emotion is central to engagement with Atmospheric Disturbances. It is to Galchen's credit that such an unhappy, arrogant protagonist can hold our attention throughout digressions and rambling self justification for the length of the novel. Galchen sparingly deploys a number of devices to maintain this engagement, such as lengthy sentences that start to lose their meaning when clauses cease to refer to one another, reflecting his distracted, confused state of mind. The short, three or four page chapters are reminiscent of journal entries, adding another layer to the text as the reader imagines it to be the private thoughts of this troubled individual; perhaps an exercise in self examination?
Atmospheric Disturbances certainly lends itself to many alternative readings, but for me the novel's main success is in depicting the inexorable dissipation of a relationship between two people. There is no grandiose sf adventure; Leo's inability to interpret the changes time and circumstances have wrought upon Rema is summed up by his tragic observation that: "usually we were tender to each other through moody periods, but sometimes we'd get struck by a dark mood at the same time and then we'd be lost" (p. 199). It seems obvious that Rema is trying to help him navigate through these troubled times, but that he is too far engaged in the logic of his interpretative entanglement to perceive that he will inevitably lose what he has been striving to regain. However, I think familiarity with sf reading practices enhance the narrative, as it makes one reticent to dismiss the possibility of Leo's story being true for quite some time. The gradual shift towards conviction that he is unreliable is sustained through a willingness to accept the possibility of non-consensus versions of reality existing within the fictional world of the novel. It haunts the text throughout, reminding us that we rely upon cues and conventions in our reading practices, linking us to the novel's interpretative project.
At the end of the novel there is no sense of closure, just a temporary respite, as Leo agrees to return home with Rema, despite continuing to see her as a simulacrum. He even acknowledges that he will one day resume his quest to find the real Rema, suggesting that the events in the novel will become a cyclical occurrence, that all he has experienced will happen again. Despite such a seemingly bleak prospect, the final note is oddly optimistic, suggesting that Leo finds some comfort in searching for a lost, perfect love, predicting that at such a time: "I'll at least know the purpose of the rest of my life" (p. 240). - David McWilliam
In Rivka Glachen's debut novel, Atmospheric Disturbances, a psychiatrist discovers that his wife, Rema, has been replaced with an almost perfect double. The appearance of this doppelgänger, imposter, this "Ertaz Rema" -- an incidental pleasure of the book is seeing how many synonyms Galchen can find for "double" -- who claims in fact to be the real Rema, sends the protagonist on a quest that leads him from the Morningside Heights neighborhood of Manhattan to Buenos Aires and Patagonia, hunting for the authentic wife that he has reason to believe has fallen into the clutches of a world-wide, perhaps even multiverse-spanning, weather manipulation syndicate.
Communication with the dead, theories of infinite universes, The Royal Academy of Meteorology, and one Tzvi Gal-Chen are all part of the novel's ingeniously constructed plot. In spite of these wild ingredients, it's a calm, inward work, held together by the even-tempered and relentless intellection of the protagonist. As the book review cliché runs, this is a "remarkably assured debut." More than that, Atmospheric Disturbances is a fiercely inventive meditation on love, a serious page-turner, and a filebin of weird and beautiful sentences.
I sat down with Galchen at the Hungarian Pastry Shop -- one of the novel's Morningside settings -- for coffee and cookies and the following chat.
You wrote for The Believer on the "many worlds Interpretation" of quantum mechanics -- which also plays a role in your book. Where is the scientific consensus on that these days? Are there many universes?
There was recently a 50th anniversary symposium on the subject at Oxford. The BBC made a documentary that seemed to say that there was almost no debate, that everyone takes it as the reality. But it does have pretty big flaws, especially in probability theory. It's an emotionally appealing idea, but it's still open to debate.
If there are infinite universes created by every...
Decision point.
Right, decision point, does that mean that there's a parallel universe where, right now, everything is the same except that half my face is covered in purple polka dots and there's an elephant sitting at the corner table, flapping its wings?
Yeah, I think that is what it means.
Thank you! I've asked scientists about that and they never answer my question.
There are also universes where the laws of our universe don't apply.
But that would mean that there'd have to be one -- or infinite ones -- where the "many worlds interpretation" didn't obtain! Hmmm, suddenly we're sucked into a black hole of interpretive vertigo... in other science news, there's also a lot of meteorology in your book. How much do you actually know about the subject?
I'm interested in it, but I'm more interested in gross misappropriations of the authoritative language of science. It feels rife with clarity, and yet you don't understand what it means. And I think that's beautiful.
Your narrator repeatedly uses the term "initial value problem," which suggests that we can't accurately project the future because we don't know where we are in the present. He applies the term to the world at large, but seems to have a pretty large blank spot when applying it to himself. I reread Dostoevsky's The Double after I read your book and one thing the two books have very much in common is that both your narrator and Golyadkin are continually self-analyzing...
But to no avail.
Right, there are these huge blank spots in their self-analysis.
In my own experience, the one person I feel like I have the least epistemological access to is me. If I hear my voice on an answering machine, I'm shocked, it's awful. My mom, for instance, can perfectly analyze people around her, but it's like she doesn't even know who she is. I see it all the time. I do it all the time, too.
One of my favorite passages in the book has the narrator sitting across from a woman who is crying. We get an extended mental digression from him on how to emotionally distance oneself from crying people. Finally the woman says something, and he looks down, and he realizes that he's been compulsively eating red pistachios, and his fingers are covered in red coloring, and it occurs to him that he must have been making the loudest cracking and sucking noises while she was crying.
That kind of moment holds a lot of interest for me in life in general. I find it seductive when someone is like that. I have a lot of friends who are deeply awkward, and I'm kind of seduced by the things that cripple them. But it's also a little bit cruel, even though it's seductive and interesting.
Speaking of cruelty, you committed something of a capital crime in the novel, referring to what we're drinking here at The Hungarian Pastry Shop as "a terrible coffee that pleases only for bearing the name coffee and being hot."
Sometimes at night I get stressed out about that. I'm afraid I might get called out on that.
Did you give galleys of your book to anyone here?
No, maybe I should have.
There's a real Morningside Heights thing going in the book. Not a neighborhood you see much represented in fiction.
I know, I feel like I'm battling Brooklyn.
Tzvi Gal Chen -- that's your father's name?
Yes.
And he's dead.
Yes, he died in 1994.
So the information in here as pertains to him is...
It's pretty accurate. He used to come here to the Hungarian a lot, which I didn't know. When I was in medical school I used to study here, and one time I told my mom to meet me here, and she said, "Oh, I know this place. Your father was getting fatter and fatter eating the cakes here every day." So it's almost genetic.
It's a really interesting act, creating your father as a character in fiction. How hard was this for you -- say, composing e-mails from Tsvi Gal-Chen.
I knew that if I tried to create a character that was actually my dad and actually shared his qualities, that it would be idealized or false and weird. But [the method I used in the book] has a lot of appeal to me because I sort of made him into a mock hero rather than a hero. Other characters mistake him for being grossly more important than he could possibly have been. They mistake him for having wisdom, for his work being significant beyond its literal significance -- a pointer in the direction of something else. And that was appealing. It gave me permission to play with those emotions. In my life, he's large because he's my dad, and large because he's gone. And also larger because growing up in Oklahoma, I didn't know anyone else even kind of like him -- I didn't have a context for him. If I had grown up somewhere else with more foreigners, or more this or more that, he wouldn't somehow represent "all of interest in Russian literature." But he was that big in my landscape, so it's fun to actually build him up as a possible hero, though he doesn't quite hold together.
He's also a locus for the emotions that are otherwise foreclosed for the narrator. The narrator projects all the family feeling that is absent in his relationship with his wife onto a photo of Tsvi and his family. And later he has a discussion via e-mail about the afterlife with Tsvi, who he's by then realized is dead. It's hard to imagine getting away with this type of potentially-sentimental discussion in a contemporary novel without some ingenious device of this sort.
I feel that the fictional endeavor can be a kind of useful misdirection. Take emotion that might seem sentimental or useless or weird and project it out into some other arena where it takes on its own shape. While the narrator was sending his attention, involvement and emotions to the wrong person -- not his wife -- the opposite was true for me. My emotional energy was distorted in a way that I enjoyed distorting it, just by paying attention to the book, and then the narrator refocuses my energy where it would actually be, on sentimental family feelings.
If you Google your father, the single match that comes up is a reference in the bibliography of someone else's book to a paper he coauthored called "Volcanic eruptions and long-term temperature records: an empirical search for cause and effect" -- a paper which appeared in none other than The Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society. Which is such a fantastic name -- even the narrator himself comments that he can't hardly believe it's for real.
It is a great name. And my father isn't a fellow of the Royal Meteorological Society, he's a fellow of the American Meteorological Society -- but that's not a great name.
The image of weather patterns that is printed in your book, and which purports to be from one of Gal-Chen's papers -- is that really his?
Yes, though it's grossly misused. It's got a Rorschach quality about it that I really liked.
I loved your narrator's quote about it: "That image from the first Gal-Chen paper I'd seen, back in the library: in addition to reminding me of Rema, it also looked to me like a lonely man, in an alien landscape, glancing back over shoulders as if to ask something of someone who he was not sure was there." It's a beautiful line, but it's also very typical of the narrator -- he's always qualifying his statements.
I do sort of like that his problem is that he can't stop amending the things. That's an eerie thing in Dante -- he'll ask people, "what's up with you," and they're like, "this is my story." The narrator here can't do that.
The following appeared on the Galleycat blog when the sale of your book was first announced Publisher's Marketplace: "This is one super-smart young writer and person, and it's both inevitable and sad that Galchen's book will likely garner the same backlash that greeted Marisha Pessl last summer. Because lord help you if you're young, female and want to write a -- gasp! -- novel of ideas that tries to bridge science and literature."
Well, my mom's very upset that my real age is published everywhere -- she thinks I'm not so young. And I guess I'm not so young. I would be honored if someone disliked me. There was always something mild and bland about me. That would be great. That would be exciting.
Right, you could have your own tag on Gawker. You picked a medical degree before you ditched that in favor of writing and an MFA and all that, so I'm curious: which did you like better, Columbia's MFA program or medical school?
I remember in the MFA program I felt a little embarrassed. I think I lacked the proper cynicism. You're supposed to be: "Oh, I'm so disappointed, it's not this, it's not that." And I was like, "Wow, this is amazing."
In a conversation with Nathan Englander that appeared last year on the Bomb website, you said to him: "Often people hypothesize other writers as an author’s main influences, but it’s always struck me that a donut shop or a girl band or a fourth-grade crush might be far more influential; who or what are your real influences? Or what do you wish they were? Or does this whole notion of influence just make you want to vomit?" I liked that; how would you answer it?
I spent a lot of years just copying one person after another. I wouldn't want to humiliate them by saying who they were. I didn't read tons when I was young. My parents were from Israel, we didn't have a lot of English language books. So I reread the same books a lot, and I also watched a painful amount of TV. I'm not answering this very well... someone who's a contemporary writer who I really love -- if I was going to cite one book in the last ten years that's meant the most to me -- it would probably be The Verificationist by Donald Antrim. He's sort of in the Bernhard tradition, but funny in a different way. Part of what I love about his work is that he's so internal, it's almost like a phenomenology: and then I thought this, and then I had that thought, and this thought. It's an interesting subject matter -- it could be not interesting, because who cares? But he's so articulate and so funny. The Verificationist is all inside the narrator's head over a short period of time. It's not the great social novel, it's something else. An internal landscape. He means a lot to me. My agent wouldn't let me, but I wanted to title my novel "Fleas Mutely Festivaling."
Probably just as well you followed his advice.
The actual three words are a little something my narrator says in a moment when he's describing why he can't fall asleep next to the simulacrum. It's a line in my book that kind of articulates the particular phenomenology of my narrator's mind and, by the by, of the mind of the narrator of The Verificationist.
There’s this idea that recurs throughout Proust, that people from our past are literally not the same people as they were before, not only because they’ve changed, but because our own past selves -- the “I” that had known them -- no longer exists.
I’m not that interested in the medical side of the narrator’s condition -- did he get hit on the head with a board? Is it dementia? I’m more concerned with the emotions behind it. One idea that comes up with theories of multiple universes is that if there are all these other versions of ourselves running around, we should somehow care about them. But if we can’t have any contact with them, what does it matter? In a way, it’s the same with our past and future selves. - Interview by Mark Doten
What Are Your "Classics"? A Q&A With Fiction Writer Rivka Galchen
Read The Last Order from this collection in the New Yorker
A short-story collection from one of America’s brightest young talents.
In one of these intensely imaginative stories a young woman’s furniture walks out on her. In another, the narrator feels compelled to deliver a takeout order that has incorrectly been phoned in to her. In a third, the petty details of a property transaction illuminate the complicated dependences and loves of a family.
Following spiralling paths towards utterly logical, entirely absurd conclusions, Galchen’s creations occupy a dreamlike dimension, where time is fluid and identities are best defined by the qualities they lack. The tales in this groundbreaking collection are secretly in conversation with canonical stories, allowing the reader the pleasure of discovering familiar favourites in new guises. Here ‘The Lost Order’ covertly recapitulates James Thurber’s ‘The Secret Life of Walter Mitty’, while ‘The Region of Unlikeness’ playfully mirrors Jorge Luis Borges’s ‘The Aleph’.
By turns realistic, fantastical and lyrical, all these marvellously uneasy stories share a deeply emotional core and are written in dryly witty, pitch-perfect prose. Whether exploring the tensions in a mother-daughter relationship or the finer points of time travel, Galchen is a writer of eye-opening ingenuity
“The stories in American Innovations proceed through indirection, association, and surprise, making a world in which daily life becomes a dream of life. Their narrators go in search of emotional resolution, but instead find that the furniture is getting up and leaving the house. Galchen’s stories can read almost as meditations on themselves, and their gift to the reader is the sudden and pleasurable awareness of the things we understand the least—the deaths of parents, breakdowns in love, and the hopeful pursuit of joy.” —Donald Antrim
“I am always declaiming to whoever will listen that Rivka Galchen is one of the best things going. She writes for the joy of it and so artfully, and conforms to no one else's standards. Joy and artfulness: why are these so rare? But they are. Galchen is a stand-alone talent.” —Rachel Kushner
“Rivka Galchen writes about the strangeness of being alive--not that anyone has any other state to compare being alive to, which doesn’t make it any less strange. She writes with intelligence, wit, and great originality. These stories are amazing.”—Roz Chast
“Rivka Galchen is like the pinball wizard of American letters, with a narrative voice that can ricochet from wonder to terror to hilarity in the breadth of a breath. These ten stories of profound loss and profound joy give the Kantian sublime a Key Lime twist, and reveal what happily haunted space cadets we all are in the echo chamber of our ‘ordinary’ American lives. You'll feel compelled to read Galchen’s sentences to strangers on buses. The delicacy and brilliance of what she is doing doesn't yet have a name.” —Karen Russell
In this story collection—which follows her debut novel, the well-received Atmospheric Disturbances (2008)—Galchen, one of the New Yorker’s 20 Under 40, continues to plumb the unbelievable and unknowable mysteries of existence.
These are literary short stories, but there’s a detective lurking in their author, who peels back fine layers of life with close observation to uncover clues about the physics of daily living and how we process the world. In the title story, a woman wakes one morning to discover a third breast has grown on her back; she has to wrestle with societal expectations of beauty and identity. In "Once an Empire," the narrator says, “I’m a pretty normal woman…,” which immediately cues the reader to wonder what isn’t normal about her, or the story; soon she's watching the contents of her apartment—furniture, utensils and objects—get up and walk out. Do these things represent her life, and if they’re so important to her, why is she willing to watch them leave? And things get stranger in "The Region of Unlikeness": A woman discovers that her crush, a man she met at a cafe, is supposedly a time traveler, and his friend, whom she doesn’t much care for, is his father—and maybe her potential future husband. Not all the stories venture into the fantastic, though; many poke and prod at the challenges of the everyday, as in "Sticker Shock," which compares the finances of a mother and daughter and is written in the tone of an accountant’s review, and "The Lost Order," in which a woman obscures the fact that she’s lost her job from her husband and ponders what her life will be like as "a daylight ghost, a layabout, a mal pensant, a vacancy, a housewife, a person foiled by the challenge of getting dressed….”
Galchen’s stories feel remarkably believable, despite their suggestion of alternate worlds and lives. This is a collection to read and keep on the bookshelf. It will stand the test of time. - Kirkus Reviews
Unassuming characters meet confounding and uncanny situations in Galchen’s first collection of short stories. “The Lost Order,” which opens the collection, features the unemployed wife of Walter Mitty, who takes a food delivery order over the phone from a person who has dialed the wrong number. It is one of the many stories in the collection that approach classic tales from the perspective of a female character. The title story reimagines the plot of Nikolai Gogol’s “The Nose” with a library sciences student at the center; but rather than losing her nose (like Gogol’s narrator), she finds that a third breast has grown on her side. And in “The Region of Unlikeness,” which considers Borges’s “The Aleph,” an engineering student becomes spellbound by a duo of effusive self-proclaimed professors cooking up equations for time travel. Many of Galchen’s characters are trained in the hard sciences—quantum mechanics, epigenetics, dangerous molds—and bring an empirical authority to off-kilter situations. Coming eight years after her widely acclaimed debut, Atmospheric Disturbances, Galchen dips further into the dazzlingly disorienting. These stories balance on the surreal, striking the borders of the logical and the hypothetical. There is the author of a self-published book of correspondence who meets one of his few readers in Mexico City; the furniture that flees through an apartment window one night, only to reappear in the nearby market the next week; the remembrance of a painful first love: a McDonald’s clerk with the one shining white tooth. Here, language and humor lift the ideas off the page. With her second book, Galchen continues to secure a place for herself among today’s great prose stylists. - Publishers Weekly
I like American Innovations by Rivka Galchen because when I picked it up I was like, “Uh-huh, baby has to have it” which is a line in “Poemland” by Chelsey Minnis. By the way, when is “Poemland 2” coming out? All of a sudden I feel very concerned for Chelsey Minnis. Is anyone Facebook friends with her? I just checked Facebook. Chelsey Minnis isn’t on facebook. The only recent mention I could find of her was in a review of Patricia Lockwood’s MOTHERLAND FATHERLAND HOMELANDSEXUALS. Uh-huh, baby needs some of that too. In the review Minnis is compared to Lockwood. The review seems to be about how “bros” are stupid and should kill themselves which is a pretty good retirement plan. Business idea: an investment firm specializing in training college “bros” how to kill themselves. Don’t even bother leaving a jar of “bro” sperm behind. Earth and human life should continue on fine without you.
To be honest, we should never feel sad when a white man dies. A few weeks ago, a white man named “Robin Williams” killed himself and everyone got really sad. Instead of getting sad, I think we should have been like, “Hey, good job. Thank you for clearing up some more space for the ladies and the non-whites.” Whenever a white man dies I’m reminded of the famous line about how the only good white male heterosexual is a dead white male heterosexual. Of course, it’s not that simple because every time a white man kills himself everyone is like, “Hey let’s talk about the guy who doesn’t exist anymore until the whole world becomes more sad than it was earlier when we weren’t talking dead white men for so long our teeth fell out. Anyway, I’m sort of a “bro” too so I should probably kill myself for the good of society, but I’m trying my best not to be a white person anymore if that’s possible and if I could I would sex Tom Brady until the NFL stopped existing…
Hmmmm I am doing a very bad job of talking about how much I like American Innovations. I guess this review isn’t really going to be about the book which is sort of the same dumb thing I always do when I review stuff. I did read two and a half reviews for this book. Each of them seemed to be doing the same thing. They were all like, “Wow, Rivka did the female versions of all our favorite male short stories neat wow good job Rivka.” One review in the New York Times even said she’s “Like Hemingway writing about fishing. Or Scorsese mythologizing lowlifes. Or Bob Dylan releasing an album’s worth of cover versions and calling it “Self-Portrait.” And earlier in the review she was compared to Woody Allen. I’m surprised they didn’t staple Updike’s penis on the cover of her book and then be like, “This book is cool because it’s has a dead white male’s penis stapled on it.” Anyway, if you’re interested in reading the full New York Times review, I’ve pasted it below:
The stories in American Innovations aren’t stories because wow can you believe it’s been so long since Galchen’s first book came out. What is wrong with her? Did you know Galchen does teaching and makes me “he he.” She is very imaginative and often funny!!!! Imagine, a woman being funny#$@! But why are her plots so minimal and unusual? Who is that stupid suburban dad who did unusual things in his plots. Anyway, she’s so weird. One story is about time travel and another is about talking furniture. It’s like she’s the Bill Clinton version of Stephen King if Stephen King was David Sedaris, only wearing Garrison Keillor’s face back when Keillor was still trying to date Cormac McCarthy’s pillow because it was made from the skin of Roberto Bolaño’s dead body.
Oh boy. I really did something there. Now everyone is pointing at me and like, “That boy is criticizing the New York Times, but isn’t he sort of doing the same thing he’s criticizing? I mean is it really any better to talk about people talking too much about men? Isn’t this like the same thing? So far in his review he’s just made fun of ‘bros’ and how they’re always saying, ‘Hey do you want to read about the time I was white and sexed some shit with my penis so hard they gave me some goddamn trophies bitch don’t make my dad cum thirty years ago at the moment of my conception please instead make him do a rainbow from his dingy so my skin can be rainbows and I don’t have to be the same stupid dead white heterosexual when I die that my dad will be when he dies.’”
Anyone who bothers to read this will probably be like, “I wish he would shut up and just talk about the book and why does he keep saying the word ‘like’?”
Maybe I will try talking about the book. Like most books, American Innovations by Rivka Galchen started with a sentence. The first sentence was: “I was at home, not making spaghetti”. This line feels both careless and insanely constructed which is why I like it. I sort of want this line to become my canned response whenever someone asks what I did last night. Her writing has that literature bent without feeling capital-L literature beating everyone over the head with how literature-y it is. I felt very refreshed while reading. Deep on the surface of the writing there is a confused beauty that makes me do tears. The teardrops remind me of this white guy I once knew who died. I think he picked up a rifle and got killed somewhere. Good job white guy. - Mark Baumer
In Rivka Galchen's fiction, minds and bodies often come apart. There is a dazed quality to the stories in American Innovations, as the narrators observe themselves from the outside and puzzle over the strange view. "I felt as if the real me were out there somewhere, waiting for my return," says the narrator of "Once an Empire". In a strikingly beautiful image, the narrator of "Wild Berry Blue" imagines "the right side of a person lifting up a velvet rope and leaving the left side behind". Curious things happen in these stories – characters mysteriously disappear, ironing boards become animate and walk out of apartments, a woman wakes up to find a breast has grown on her back – but their main subject seems to be how strange it is to exist at all. "Having a body is problematic no matter what," notes one character, as if there might be some other option.
Galchen's much-praised debut novel, Atmospheric Disturbances, locked the reader inside the mind of its narrator, Dr Leo Liebenstein, a psychiatrist who believes that his wife has vanished and been replaced by a "simulacrum". American Innovations features subtler kinds of unreliable narrators, but the crucial action still takes place inside the mind. Where Leo is scornfully certain that his theories are correct, the narrators in American Innovations – almost all of them are unnamed women in their 20s or 30s – are ambivalent, constantly qualifying their statements with maybes and I thinks. They say things like, "My window [was] dark: probably just the coordinated demise of several bulbs, I told myself. Or something."
The reluctance of Galchen's characters to make firm pronouncements about reality is not surprising given they remain a mystery even to themselves. One character travels to Mexico City where she ends up pretending to be a journalist named Alice. At one point, she wonders, "Whose life was this? Not mine." That question could be an epigraph for American Innovations. (It also recalls another Alice, Lewis Carroll's: "I can't explain myself," she tells the Caterpillar, "because I'm not myself, you see.")
At their best, Galchen's stories are funny and inventive. Many of them slyly translate the concerns of 19th-century fiction – money, property, gender – into the affectless, ironic voice of modern American fiction. Sometimes, however, they are too knowing. The narrator of "The Region of Unlikeness" describes two men indulging in "the kind of reference-laden conversation that unfortunately never fails to attract me". In this, the narrator resembles Galchen herself, who has a weakness for scattering her stories with names such as Heidegger and Kant.
In "Dean of the Arts" the narrator refers to "that scene, which may or may not be in Dante … where the narrator is in some boat, crossing some river into the underworld, maybe the Styx, or Lethe". These hesitations are Galchen's attempt to make such references less showy and more plausible as thoughts that might occur to her characters. The effect is to make them more intrusive.
One of the pleasures of American Innovations is the way the stories quietly echo and seep into one another. But without some kind of payoff, these internal connections risk becoming hermetic and self-indulgent. Galchen withholds so much information about her characters that the stories have little emotional weight, and while the prose is always expertly controlled, there are few memorable sentences. The absence of these pleasures puts more pressure on the stories to deliver intellectually, and too often they are undercooked. American Innovations focuses on people lost in their own minds. By the end, I began to feel that the author had fallen into the same trap as her characters. - David Wolf
In 2008, Rivka Galchen published her first novel, “Atmospheric Disturbances,” about a man who believes his wife has been replaced by a replica of herself. Enfolded into the story was also one Dr. Tzvi Gal-Chen, who shares his name (down to the hyphen) with Galchen’s own father, a meteorologist who died in 1994. Combining aspects of her own biography, the physical sciences and psychiatry — Galchen is herself a medical doctor, trained in psychiatry — she created a vertiginous narrative about the nature of love and loss. Even if the book’s momentum ultimately flagged, it showed Galchen to be a bold, inventive and smart young writer.
Now Galchen returns with “American Innovations,” a collection of 10 stories each of which is, in many respects, like her novel in miniature. Her formal and thematic concerns recur. One again finds bits of her biography, particularly the invocation of a dead father like Galchen’s. There are references to the physical sciences, and fully half of the stories involve some manner of unrealism, whether distorted perception or something more bizarre — a woman sprouts a third breast on her back, time travel is possible. The primary difference between the novel and the stories resides in the fact that the novel was narrated by a man in his 50s while most of the stories (“secretly in conversation” with canonical works, according to the publisher) feature variations of a particular sort of woman: in her 30s or younger and usually childless, single, divorced or heading in that direction. She is also existentially or emotionally adrift, suffering from some malaise whose cause is obscure even to herself. In three stories this precipitates the breakdown of her marriage. In another she is abandoned by her husband, and the story obliquely suggests this pains her, though its tone downplays any strong reaction; what seems to disconcert her most is replacing the Parmesan grinder her husband has taken, the “kind that works like a mill,” with “a handle that was fun to turn.”
This wry, airy tone characterizes all the stories but one, and in most instances functions to evade turbulent feelings, as if suggesting the most honest way to express emotion is by deflecting it. Where one expects the narrator to feel one way, she usually feels the opposite. In “The Region of Unlikeness,” she becomes infatuated with a handsome, enigmatic man who doesn’t return her affections. She nevertheless spends a great deal of time with him and his strange friend, whom she doesn’t like. “I got absolutely no work done while I was friends with those guys. And hardly any reading, either,” she reports. “What I mean to say is that those were the happiest days of my entire life.” In another story, the narrator — “going through an intense bout of fearfulness that is too irrational and stupid and elusive to explain” — flees to Mexico City, leaving behind a husband and daughter who factor minimally. At one point she calls the husband, seeking his help, peculiarly, with an Internet search. She contemplates asking after her daughter, but decides against it. “I knew that would just seem defensive, probably even be defensive, seeing as I felt pretty sure about how she was doing; children, I remember this from my own experience, are, I think, very resilient and flexible, and one shouldn’t let people tell one otherwise.” Is it plausible that a mother would feel this way? The tone, however, invites the reader to suspend disbelief. From story to story, the narrator maintains this ironic distance. Her thoughts and feelings are often equivocal, as if, despite her obvious intelligence, she fears committing. Many statements are qualified with the word “maybe,” or the vague “something.” “I like being near kids,” the narrator of the title story says. “It takes me out of myself; or, it does something.” The imprecision feels idiomatic, a property of contemporary speech and thought.
Reading these stories, one feels both frustrated with and sad for Galchen’s narrators. The frustration is a result of the ironic, cerebral distancing that undermines drama. The stories, like Galchen’s novel, exhibit a kind of antipathy toward conventional narrative momentum. Instances of confrontation are usually provided in summary, and when there is confrontation, Galchen finds a way — however clever — to dampen the heat. “I language along,” one narrator says of an argument with her husband. Yet the sadness arises from the sense that Galchen’s narrators are genuinely unhappy, unable to isolate the reason and incapable of imagining a remedy. How different they seem from similar female narrators of previous generations: Think of Grace Paley’s protagonists, who superficially resemble Galchen’s own. Paley also wrote quasi-autobiographically about secular New York Jews, young mothers, writers or artist types, sometimes married, sometimes divorced, often trying to make themselves understood to loving and cantankerous elders. Yet Paley’s characters — even if wryly self-knowing — are not plagued by disconnection and ennui. On the contrary, they are immersed in married and domestic life, the raising of children and the caring for parents, and also the various emancipatory political movements of the time: feminism, socialism, civil rights. Their troubles come from being overburdened, trying to reconcile multiple responsibilities and convictions. Galchen’s heroines suffer from precisely the opposite — from an absence of responsibilities and convictions. Liberated from traditional gender roles, they are not bound to children or housework. Nor do they subscribe to any of the old (perhaps discredited or exhausted) revolutionary movements. What Galchen’s characters have instead is a lulling late-stage capitalism: which is to say, tremendous personal autonomy and no idea what to do with it. Even if they sometimes worry about money — “prison bars of not-money grew around me in dreams, like wild magic corn,” one narrator confesses — there is never any danger of genuine poverty. They live in New York apartments, go to movies and patronize coffee shops. Some have even experienced critical and financial success as writers, but they too are uneasy with themselves. Is it enough to conclude they represent the times? Or is it something more particular, a response to the childhood trauma of losing a beloved father (whose spirit haunts many of these stories, both figuratively and literally)? Are detachment and irony the inevitable responses?
Though nine of the stories in “American Innovations” would support this conclusion, one refutes it. “Sticker Shock” seems in nearly all respects akin to the others, yet it manages to employ the same tools to heighten rather than diminish tension. Written in the third person, it relates a quarrel between a character called “the daughter” and another called “the mother.” At the heart of the conflict is an “asset/apartment” the mother purchased for the daughter but which, when the daughter wishes to redeem it for an “apartment/asset to live in as a home,” the mother withholds because she disapproves of the daughter’s decision to leave her marriage: “Whatever unhappiness and fears were keeping the couple apart were pure childishness. . . . Women who don’t have babies become alcoholics, which ruins their figures.” Though the lines are ridiculous and funny, the pain beneath them is undeniable. The story continues in this vein, providing a concrete and detailed account of the disagreement between the daughter and the mother. There are no evasions and nobody merely “languages along.” When the daughter meets the mother for coffee, she snaps, “All you care about is money and weight; and you give me all this advice; but I’m thinner than you and I make more money than you.” Yet despite the hostility and resentment, the story is both empathetic and objective. The scene in the coffee shop ends: “The daughter left. The mother paid the bill.” The story proves that Galchen is able to find the means to harness her intelligence, imagination and wit in the service of unabashed feeling. - David Bezmozgis
The stories in “American Innovations,” the new collection by Rivka Galchen, the author of the 2008 novel “Atmospheric Disturbances,” don’t behave like typical short stories. Sure, they bear strong physical resemblances to selections you would find in an anthology with the words “Best American” in its title. Though Ms. Galchen favors misdirection and indirection, her writing is skillful, imaginative, often funny.
When reductively described, her minimal plots don’t sound altogether unusual. In “The Lost Order,” an out-of-work lawyer, prone to idle fantasy and introspection, halfheartedly ventures out to find her husband’s lost wedding ring. In “The Region of Unlikeness,” a graduate student develops a “Jules and Jim” sort of relationship with a pair of weedy intellectuals who may be experimenting with time travel. “Sticker Shock” describes the dissolution of a mother and daughter’s relationship in the dispassionate voice of an accountant chronicling each character’s income and net worth. “Once an Empire” finds a Brooklyn woman watching with wonder and dismay as her worldly belongings develop their own wills and vacate her apartment. In the title piece, the narrator develops a third breast.
Ms. Galchen’s work in this collection has been inspired by — or is, according to the book jacket, “secretly in conversation with” — classic short stories (not so secretly, when the jacket trumpets this information). One, “Dean of the Arts,” riffs on Roberto Bolaño. “The Region of Unlikeness” represents Ms. Galchen’s take on Jorge Luis Borges’s “The Aleph.” “American Innovations” suggests Nikolai Gogol’s “The Nose” by way of Philip Roth’s “The Breast.” “Sticker Shock” reads like a mash-up of 19th-century concerns and late-20th-century style: William Thackeray meets David Foster Wallace. And “The Lost Order” specifically refers to James Thurber’s “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.”
But, except for the case of “Mitty,” knowing Ms. Galchen’s influences — though useful enough for those seeking to construct a nifty reading list — proves less helpful than you might suppose in guiding the reader through her work. For Ms. Galchen’s stories resist and often defy the styles and structures of her forebears. Epiphanies are few; expected conflicts and resolutions rarely materialize; characters avoid rather than confront destinies; stories trail off, veer onto tangents or end abruptly. This sometimes thrilling yet disorienting effect brings to mind the experience of watching a crisscross firework that shoots up like a normal shell, but explodes in unpredictable directions. Even the most familiar-seeming story here — “Wild Berry Blue,” which describes a 9-year-old girl’s impossible and vaguely disturbing crush on a recovering heroin addict who works at McDonald’s — ends with the girl abandoning the absurd plan she has spent a majority of the tale trying to engineer.
As you proceed through Ms. Galchen’s collection, you begin to see her stories not so much as individual works but as fragments of a self-portrait drawn by a clever, Mittyesque writer, inscrutable to the last, imagining alternative existences for herself. Themes recur, motifs overlap; characters from different stories grapple with similar concerns: time, impermanence, literal and metaphorical weight.
In much the same way as, say, Woody Allen has variously played a TV writer, a sportswriter, a talent agent and a pimp while at the same time always playing Woody Allen, Ms. Galchen’s narrators possess different job descriptions. But there is a sameness to their occupations. They include an environmental lawyer with an expertise in toxic mold litigation, a molecular biologist specializing in epigenetics, graduate students in civil engineering and library sciences, writers of literary fiction. Though remarkably cultured, they forget names of movies they have seen. They frequent divey establishments that sound like settings for Tom Waits songs — “a Peruvian chicken joint,” a “small Moroccan coffee shop,” an outdated, family-run gyro restaurant. “All the gyro places I’ve ever visited have been outdated,” Ms. Galchen writes.
And yet, the symmetries, repetitions and recurrences do not irritate but instead illuminate the presence of a singular, readily identifiable voice whose signature obsessions and tendencies recur no matter what story she tells. Like Hemingway writing about fishing. Or Scorsese mythologizing lowlifes. Or Bob Dylan releasing an album’s worth of cover versions and calling it “Self-Portrait.” In that grand tradition of American innovators, perhaps Ms. Galchen’s greatest artistic creation is herself. - Adam Langer
Rivka Galchen’s 2008 debut, Atmospheric Disturbances, fit nicely alongside the other books Marco Roth dubbed “neuronovels,” literary fiction “wherein the mind becomes the brain.” It was witty and weird enough to earn her comparisons to Murakami and Pynchon, but the sometimes bewildering book just felt like it was going a little too off the rails, even for a novel with a narrator as unreliable as Galchen’s Dr. Leo Liebenstein. Atmospheric Disturbances showed a ton of promise, but in fiction, promise doesn’t always deliver.
Since 2008, Galchen has published short stories and written a Times “Bookends” column, and, although her first attempt left me a little underwhelmed, I’d been waiting for the announcement that a new book was on the way. American Innovations, Galchen’s new collection of stories, shows that the author can take all of that wit and talent and boil it down into something concise and immensely enjoyable. Not only that, but in the short-story format, she can do it over and over.
While the flap on the dust jacket states that the stories in American Innovations “are secretly in conversation with canonical stories, re-imagined from the perspective of female characters,” you wouldn’t necessarily have to be familiar with James Thurber’s “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” to read and reread the book’s opener, “The Lost Order.” The story starts off with the narrator telling us about the time her phone rang, with “Unavailable” popping up in the caller ID. For some reason she answers the phone, and takes a food delivery order for a man who has called the wrong number. It’s a silly anecdote, and once Galchen starts in on the next paragraph, it isn’t immediately clear how it fits in with the rest of the story, but then one thing unfolds, then another, and you’re going back over things to try and figure out if the woman is depressed and in denial, or just likes to see how far she can take a lie.
The book’s title story is maybe the most interesting. “American Innovations” is a tale that “revisits” Gogol’s “The Nose,” something Philip Roth tried (and largely failed) to do with his 1972 novella (which also mixed in a nice spoonful of Kafka) “The Breast.” It’s here that we see the sort of brilliance Galchen only hinted at in her debut novel. Oddly enough, Galchen’s retelling of Gogol’s story also involves breasts; first there’s the narrator’s aunt, who she called Tina Turner, “because her styling was similar — also, she had once seen Tina Turner in a grocery store in Los Angeles, and they nodded knowingly at each other.” Her aunt tells her about her “September 11th,” when she noticed a lump that she was sure was cancer, but ends up being one of her silicone breast implants, slipped down into her back. Over a year later, the narrator finds her own lump, wonders if it was her “inheritance,” worries it might be cancer, and, well, I won’t really ruin it for you from there. Let’s just say that Pinterest and BuzzFeed make an appearance.
All in all, American Innovations is a joy to read. It has a few awkward moments, since few short story collections are without their little bumps in the road. But overall, Rivka Galchen has delivered a little book full of tiny wonders. -
Rivka Galchen’s 2008 debut, Atmospheric Disturbances, fit nicely alongside the other books Marco Roth dubbed “neuronovels,” literary fiction “wherein the mind becomes the brain.” It was witty and weird enough to earn her comparisons to Murakami and Pynchon, but the sometimes bewildering book just felt like it was going a little too off the rails, even for a novel with a narrator as unreliable as Galchen’s Dr. Leo Liebenstein. Atmospheric Disturbances showed a ton of promise, but in fiction, promise doesn’t always deliver.
Since 2008, Galchen has published short stories and written a Times “Bookends” column, and, although her first attempt left me a little underwhelmed, I’d been waiting for the announcement that a new book was on the way. American Innovations, Galchen’s new collection of stories, shows that the author can take all of that wit and talent and boil it down into something concise and immensely enjoyable. Not only that, but in the short-story format, she can do it over and over.
While the flap on the dust jacket states that the stories in American Innovations “are secretly in conversation with canonical stories, re-imagined from the perspective of female characters,” you wouldn’t necessarily have to be familiar with James Thurber’s “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” to read and reread the book’s opener, “The Lost Order.” The story starts off with the narrator telling us about the time her phone rang, with “Unavailable” popping up in the caller ID. For some reason she answers the phone, and takes a food delivery order for a man who has called the wrong number. It’s a silly anecdote, and once Galchen starts in on the next paragraph, it isn’t immediately clear how it fits in with the rest of the story, but then one thing unfolds, then another, and you’re going back over things to try and figure out if the woman is depressed and in denial, or just likes to see how far she can take a lie.
The book’s title story is maybe the most interesting. “American Innovations” is a tale that “revisits” Gogol’s “The Nose,” something Philip Roth tried (and largely failed) to do with his 1972 novella (which also mixed in a nice spoonful of Kafka) “The Breast.” It’s here that we see the sort of brilliance Galchen only hinted at in her debut novel. Oddly enough, Galchen’s retelling of Gogol’s story also involves breasts; first there’s the narrator’s aunt, who she called Tina Turner, “because her styling was similar — also, she had once seen Tina Turner in a grocery store in Los Angeles, and they nodded knowingly at each other.” Her aunt tells her about her “September 11th,” when she noticed a lump that she was sure was cancer, but ends up being one of her silicone breast implants, slipped down into her back. Over a year later, the narrator finds her own lump, wonders if it was her “inheritance,” worries it might be cancer, and, well, I won’t really ruin it for you from there. Let’s just say that Pinterest and BuzzFeed make an appearance.
All in all, American Innovations is a joy to read. It has a few awkward moments, since few short story collections are without their little bumps in the road. But overall, Rivka Galchen has delivered a little book full of tiny wonders. - Jason Diamond
“I had not always – had not even long – been a daylight ghost, a layabout, a mal pensant, a vacancy, a housewife, a person foiled by the challenge of getting dressed and someone who considered eating less a valid primary goal”I knew from reading several of these stories in the New Yorker that I would enjoy Rivka Galchen’s collection, but I wasn’t prepared for how I would devour it – half the stories in one sitting, something I never, ever do – and how much I loved it. If I enjoy a short story collection that usually means I adore many of the stories, but as individual works. This book I enjoyed, devoured, as a whole, a single entity, which, to me anyway, is a rare thing, especially for one not labelled as linked or themed in any way.
What is it that I was so drawn to? The phrase that keeps coming to mind is that Galchen excels at a kind of taut, structured looseness – and that contradiction is deliberate. She makes such fluidity look easy but it’s not simple to pitch something precisely on the edge of clarity and chaos. Let me give you as an example the opening paragraph of the book, from the first story, The Lost Order.
I was at home, not making spaghetti. I was trying to eat a little less often, it’s true. A yogurt in the morning, a yogurt at lunchtime, ginger candies in between, and a normal dinner. I don’t think of myself as someone with a ‘weight issue’, but I had somehow put on a number of pounds just four months into my unemployment, and when I realized that this had happened – I never weigh myself; my brother just said to me, on a visit, ‘I don’t recognize your legs’ – I wasn’t happy about it. Although maybe I was happy about it.
Actually, this is half the first paragraph, and already here if there are ‘rules’ for short story openings, Galchen seems to be breaking them with her apparent meanderings, her wordiness. Yet, she is setting this story up perfectly. Eight of the ten stories here are in the first person and they could be seen, if you squint a little, as sort of being the same character, or a similar set of people. And one of the things that echoes across many of the stories is the not-doing of things (‘not making spaghetti’) and this apparent indecisiveness: ‘I wasn’t happy about it… although maybe I was happy about it’. That’s one of the things I loved, Galchen’s embrace in her fiction of a sort of existential uncertainty, a truth about how it is often inside our heads – or perhaps just in mine!
She doesn’t do neat endings, no epiphanies here, much is left unexplained, which is the kind of story I like. Each story left me altered, it created such a strong atmosphere, I felt and tasted it, I was right inside her world. The first story, were I to sum up the plot, would appear mundane, centring around a newly-unemployed woman who doesn’t really do all that much, but it brings in so many ideas of usefulness, of society, of love and marriage, of relations between ourselves and others. Other stories deal with more surreal subject matter, such as time travel and (in a separate story) what happens if you witness all your belongings exiting from your apartment unaided. One story tells of a mother and daughter entirely through their finances (Sticker Shock), which some might call gimmicky but which worked for me.
There are some stories which strike me as potentially autobiographical, which is always the trap the reader of fiction has to watch out for, because in my opinion it shouldn’t matter. But of course, somehow, it does. Wild Berry Blue begins:
This is a story about my love for Roy, thought first I have to say a few words about my dad, who was there with me at the McDonald’s every Saturday, letting his little girl, I was maybe nine, swig his extra half-and-halfs, stack the shells into messy towers. My dad drank from his bottomless cup of coffee and read the paper while I dipped my McDonaldland cookies in milk and pretended to read the paper. He wore gauzy striped button-ups with pearline snaps. He had girlish wrists, a broad forehead like a Roman, a terrifying sneeze.
Although this might be ripped apart in a creative writing class (‘Why tell us it’s a story about Roy and then go off somewhere else? Who is our narrator?’), I defy anyone not to want to read on – especially with the fabulous combination of her dad’s qualities given in the last line.
All the stories have a dream-like feel to them, which, once again, I like very much. For me, the tone and style worked seamlessly with the content – Galchen is attempting to convey the inherent instability of everything we take for granted – jobs, husbands, parents, furniture, the space-time continuum and our ideas about our own identity. She had me hooked from the opening line. - Tania Hershman
Is it true that everyone remembers the day death was first explained to them? I was seven and a hamster had died. The hamster had been given to me, perhaps, so that it could die and facilitate the conversation I then had with my mother. I remember not wanting to pay too close attention to what my mother was defining for me, so I listened instead to the faint sound I heard coming from downstairs. It was my father playing a record. I strained to make out the lyrics of the song and realized that, by doing so, I could somewhat ignore the words my mother spoke. This was the first moment of what would become a most useful skill—the ability to divert focus from what is the front-facing reality: that my life, all life, is meaninglessly short.
Rivka Galchen's approach to life and death is an epistemological one. Central to American Innovations, Galchen's new collection, is this question: How might we keep ourselves from knowing the only thing we could know—that life is unavoidably marked by losses big and small until all is lost, completely and totally? Dead fathers, distant mothers, truant husbands, and disappearing friends populate the backgrounds of Galchen's stories. These abandonments are met not with the protagonists' contemplation, but with their dogged avoidance.
Accordingly, "The Lost Order" begins by telling us what is not happening. "I was at home, not making spaghetti," the narrator explains. She glosses over the fact that she's left her job, and only hints that her husband is being unfaithful: He's misplaced his wedding ring; he is urgently telling her he loves her on the phone. The points are quickly dodged and, instead, we receive the inner ramblings of the newly stay-at-home wife, interrupted by an odd call from a man who has mistaken her phone number for that of a Chinese take-out restaurant. Her failure to fulfill his request for the speedy delivery of garlic chicken is something she allows herself to feel guilty about, while weightier problems lurk at the periphery. Similarly, in "The Entire Northern Side Was Covered with Fire," a novelist avoids learning why her husband has abruptly left her and their unborn child, though the answers may be readily available in the husband's secret blog, "I-Can't-Stand-My-Wife-Dot-Blogspot-Dot-Com." When a friend urges her to read the husband's posts and share her feelings, she changes the subject.
Galchen is skilled at obscuring the tension of a story. With humor and linguistic sleight of hand, Galchen, like life, dazzles us into forgetting certain inevitabilities. Galchen's finest writing occurs when her characters dangerously dip below their own surfaces and finally acknowledge something. In one striking passage, the unnamed narrator of "The Lost Order" elegizes her now-gone job: "I handled quite a large number of mold cases. I filled out the quiet fields of forms. I dispatched environmental testers. The job was more satisfying than it sounds, I can tell you. To have any variety of expertise, and to deploy it, can feel like a happy dream."
Many of these stories feature a type of avoidance that often takes the pattern of a male character asking a direct question and a female narrator responding as if she hasn't heard or doesn't understand the question. In "Dean of the Arts," our narrator flees to Mexico City to vaguely escape a vague problem: "I was going through an intense bout of fearfulness that is too irrational and stupid and elusive to explain," then encounters an odd mystery (there are two men who may or may not be named Macheko. Are they, in fact, one and the same Macheko? Our protagonist investigates). The husband wants to address the danger at home, but his wife swats it away: Yes, but what about this Macheko mystery? This pattern of deflection can feel repetitive, as the "real danger" posed to characters is brought to the reader's attention in the same way over and over: through scenes of two people speaking meaninglessly to one another.
This is not to say that the depiction of two people speaking meaninglessly to each other isn't an artful device. Readers of Galchen's widely appreciated debut novel, Atmospheric Disturbances, will be familiar with her unique ability to make (mis)communication at once funny and painful. What this device points to, if a bit too finely in this collection, are the other questions asked by the book. When loss occurs, why does it leave in its wake so much that is unknowable? How is it that people we love can become strangers to us, or disappear without explanation? Even the small details circle the theme of inexplicable absence. In "The Late Novels of Gene Hackman," the narrator has, for a trip to Key West, packed a book about Ettore Majorana, the famous particle physicist who vanished in 1938. In the final story, "Once an Empire," the narrator watches helplessly from the street as every object she owns escapes unaided out her apartment window, down her fire escape, and off into the night. The most interesting conversations occur metatextually. "The Lost Order" ends with line-by-line similarities to "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty"; Gogol's the "The Nose" and Borges's "The Aleph" are reimagined in Galchen's "American Innovations" and "The Region of Unlikeness." Why the story-to-story ekphrasis? The most thematically fitting reason would be a tender attempt to keep a beloved story alive, to extend its life by entwining it with the DNA strands of a new story.
There are many mysteries and few discoveries in this collection. Each story reiterates what is, perhaps, the only plausible reality: In the end, we are alone with no answers. Still, Galchen's characters do their best to deny this. One says to another: "Maybe I'm not in pain." The other responds: "I'd put my money on pain. It's the Kantian sublime, what you're experiencing. There's your life, and then you get a glimpse of the vastness of the unknown all around that little itty-bitty island of the known." American Innovations ultimately points us toward the preferably ignored truth of the vast unknown, the fact that—as one narrator says while considering various paradoxes—"At the heart of it is the inescapability of our fate." - Chloé Cooper Jones
American Innovations has a literary genealogy traceable from U.S. short-story doyenne Ann Beattie through Lorrie Moore to Rebecca Lee (another ex-pat and heir-apparent to Moore in light of her terrific 2012 collection Bobcat and Other Stories), with traces of Aimee Bender’s dark fairy dust and Julie Hecht’s delightfully tangential and neurotic anti-heroine. Add a splash of David Foster Wallace, shake well (don’t stir), and you have a thoroughly Galchean concoction – funny, intellectual, and playfully dark.
I know, because the book jacket tells me so, that some of these stories are responses to classic works by the likes of Thurber, Borges and Gogol. In all honesty, I wouldn’t have noticed. These are narrative similarities, rather than those of style and voice, and it is style and voice that elevate these remarkably vibrant stories into something transcendent.
Stuff happens, yes: a woman’s furniture leaves her, another grows an extra breast, and a wrong-number take-out-orderer harasses yet another unravelling 21st-century gal. Stories take place in Manhattan, Key West, and Oklahoma; wedding rings are lost, science-fiction-author conferences attended, and recovering heroin addicts crushed on.
But it’s in putting words to feelings, in capturing the often unsayable, that Galchen hits it out of the park again and again. “We hadn’t always conversed in a way that sounded like advanced ESL students trying to share emotions, but recently that was happening to us.” “I felt that my love for Roy shamed my people, whoever my people were, whoever I was queen of, people I had never met, nervous people and sad people and dead people, all clambering for air and space inside me.” A lawyer specializing in toxic-mold litigation wakes up one day and thinks, “I am a fork being used to eat cereal. I am not a spoon. I am a fork. And I can’t help people eat cereal any longer.”
And here’s a woman looking back on the height of childhood queasiness during a weekly McDonald’s ritual: “Though the surface of the milk often remained pristine, I could feel the cookie’s presence down below, lurking. Like some ancient bottom-dwelling fish with both eyes on one side of its head.”
The stories can be rambling, yet profound. A number of them appear constructed of unrelated elements, but attain a feeling of complete convergence. In Dean of the Arts, set in Galchen’s childhood home of Norman, Oklahoma, the disparate elements are the discovery of a self-published book called The Collected Correspondence of Manuel Macheko, a fired professor (the purported author of said book), a high-school debating tournament and, years later, a trip to Mexico City and a close encounter with Ralph Ellison. The way Galchen delivers a scene, jumps in time, and then allows all the seemingly disparate parts to rub up against each other until a staticky resonance is achieved, is reminiscent of Alice Munro’s sleight of hand.
As in Atmospheric Disturbances, Galchen’s acclaimed debut novel, there are communications with the dead, and the possibility of other, slightly off-kilter, universes where things like time travel are scientifically possible. Or are they? In my favourite story, The Region of Unlikeness, Galchen combines an unwieldy love triangle with the speculative, resulting in a kind of mash-up of Back to the Future and Truffaut’s Jules et Jim, although rather than Jeanne Moreau’s free-spirited Catherine, the woman here is a lonely and insecure graduate student in civil engineering. The happiest days of her life begin when she meets Ilan and Jacob by chance in a Moroccan coffee shop on Upper West Side. “They were discussing Wuthering Heights too loudly, having the kind of reference-laden conversation that unfortunately never fails to attract me,” revealing everything we need to know about her and the men.
These stories made me feel alive and alert in the same way that “the girl” in The Region of Unlikeness felt so briefly with her mysterious new friends. But unlike Ilan and Jacob, the stories remain true on this and other planes of existence. - Zsuzsi Gartner
The other week at the Cork World Book Festival, I heard the London-based Spanish writer Susana Medina discuss her story “Oestrogen” from this year’s Best European Fiction collection and her relationship to objects. She pointed out every object is the result of a thought. Rivka Galchen’s first short story collection, American Innovations, humorously explores the après-thoughts and relationships to objects (and situations) that follow rather than pre-empt their creation. Likewise, the collection is a multilayered exercise in response since many of these stories respond to earlier works by Gogol, Borges, Keats, Wallace Stevens and James Thurber.
American Innovations follows her much-heralded, distinctive debut novel Atmospheric Disturbances. Galchen remains as funny, warm and unpredictable in the short story form as the novel.
Much of this collection offers portraits of lives or moments in lives, abrupt pauses, interruptions, where contradiction, contrast and loss are the reigning components. Characters’ dilemmas hinge on misunderstanding, secrecy and the general perplexity and mortification of being a human.
Galchen explores and thwarts contradiction to comic effect. (“I bought the book, but in some small attempt at dignity I didn’t read it.”) She’s also hewing possession, fetishization of “things” and specifically the emotional register of the loss of “things.” In two stories, “Once An Empire” and “The Entire Northern Side Was Covered With Fire,” for example, the loss of a fork (“Oh fork, how does it feel to be a bat?”) and a Parmesan cheese grater feature prominently. (“We had a particularly nice Parmesan grater and he had taken that. But he had left behind his winter coat. Also a child.”) It’s hard not to salute any writer who could execute an entire text so amply around a woman’s attachment to her white fork!
In “The Lost Order” a woman who is “not making spaghetti” receives a telephone call from a Chinese takeout customer. Rather than tell the misdialing man she is not the Chinese takeout, she becomes embroiled in the man’s order, then subsequently conflicted over failing to tell him that she is not, in fact, the Chinese takeout. Meanwhile, on the other line, her husband has lost his wedding ring and asks her to go in search of it, but, again, in the moment of arrival at the spot he may have lost it, she finds herself muted and unable to ask the security guard about it. Instead she resolves her multiple dilemmas by overhearing two delivery people discussing their working experiences. Thus, her lack of transparency with the misdirected takeout customer and aversion to vocalizing on the lost ring, ultimately, lead her to contemplate the actual working lives of people who bring items to other people. It’s an unexpected, circuitous route to understanding, but the unexpected is precisely what Galchen thrives on.
The strongest summoning of the unusual is found in the final story “Once An Empire,” where “a pretty normal young woman, maybe an extremely normal one” witnesses her furniture climbing out a window. Sound incredible? Up on planet Galchen there exists no such thing. It’s ultimately a compact story about a woman’s relationship with a single and particular fork, while living in an apartment whose “window looks out on to the Jehovah Witness Watchtower building whose enormous light bulb billboard broadcasts the temperature in Fahrenheit, the time, then the temperature in Celsius, then the time again, then the updated temperature in Fahrenheit, and so on, unto eternity.”
The deadpan delivery throughout this collection manifests much chortle. In “The Late Novels of Gene Hackman,” a story set at a seminar in Florida, Q remarks to her stepdaughter J, about their Hidden Paradise accommodation:
“I mean it’s nice. But it’s very American.”
“Well, we are in America,” J said. “Sort of.”
A paragraph later, J offers Q a point of clarification on the term “dog cleaning”: “With animals it’s called grooming, not cleaning. Cleaning is for carpets.”
These are the deceptively bland snips that speckle Galchen’s prose and tickle your ear. Q, we learn, married J’s father two years after J’s mother died. They end at a birthday party for seniors roiling in an hypochondriacal wrestle match about people they do not seem to know. The whole tale is a delightful mash-up on intergenerational neurosis and presumptions and dead-dull seminars.
These stories afford us a way inside generational dilemmas (first jobs, taxes, property ownership and lack of, on all fronts) without resorting to the vacuous ambling that infects many of the alternative offerings in this realm. The only minor stylistic tics that wobble the work are an occasional clunky transition, excessive qualifying tags in sentences, over explaining/narrating through dialogue and too many references to being a writer, the whorls of publishing, inter-scribe-tribe jealousy and disappointments. Meta-fictional pokes, sure, but overly obvious choices for a writer with imaginative access to so very much more. “Wild Berry Blue” is a much better marker, the voice and thoughts of a crushing teenager, so carefully laid down it would give you brain freeze.
There’s only one story where the region of unlikeliness starts to feel like a joint that has lost its cartilage and is grinding. In “The Region of Unlikeness” an unnamed woman befriends two males, Jacob and Ilan, in a café and becomes happily mottled between the two of them. One dies and the other is difficult. The difficult one continues to be difficult and asks her to murder him because the dead male friend was a time traveller, mix in some gabble about the grandfather paradox in science fiction and rather like the protagonist’s conclusion on the difficult male friend, it renders us unto avoidance. Galchen lost me at a character lobbing St. Augustine natter in this one. Ideas that felt taped on top of the prose rather than farmed from within. The Tardis levitating above the sidewalk needed to touch down.
Readers have an additional layer should they wish it, as they can seek out the stories that Galchen responded to and determine their influence. I chose not to explore them at this time, preferring to determine whether the collection could hold its own. I determined this partly by reading it aloud to someone driving a car in another time zone (I was sitting in the car, not time travelling) and reading the stories up a mountain with altitude sickness. It can, it does and they do. There’s a wonderful warmth and inventiveness to American Innovations, Rivka Galchen’s stories compound the peculiar with joyful wit. - Anakana Schofield
ypically it takes bribery to get me to read straight through a short story collection. It happened last year with George Saunders’s masterful, much-feted Tenth of December, but the last (and only) time before that may have been college, when a knowing instructor passed me Haruki Murakami’s The Elephant Vanishes. Reading short story collections—no matter how cohesive, how gracefully threaded together, how substantive—has always left me feeling like I recently housed some Chinese food: disgustingly overwhelmed for a short time, and then starved for more nutrients.
Rivka Galchen’s debut collection (which follows her critically lauded novel, Atmospheric Disturbances) is like a multivitamin. Everything one could possibly need is dispensed via dense, tiny, mysterious pellets. Each story offers a fortified shot of literary enrichment, a dose of characters and genres and settings we didn’t even know we needed, but that now feels vital and enlivening. It’s a master class in cohesion—and restraint.
Galchen reimagines classic short stories (Gogol’s “The Nose,” Borges’s “The Aleph”) and reorients the narrative perspective: each is now first-person and from a woman’s point of view. The opening story takes one of Murakami’s bumbling middle-aged male protagonists (in this case, Toru of “The Wind-up Bird and Tuesday’s Women,” which is also the first chapter of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle) and turns him into a freshly-stuck-at-home housewife. She’s searching for her husband’s wedding ring instead of a cat, interrupted by a stranger on the phone who wants her to cook him some chicken, not one who wants to talk philosophy. Somehow, Galchen comments on Murakami’s utter masculinity while at the same time respecting it. She carefully skips along the line that separates homage from worship.
Much like Kovalyov’s nose, Galchen’s characters often get away from her. They seem to act without her consent, or even their own. They end up in strange places, leave otherwise happy lives. They interrupt their self-narration with doubt about their own actions (“Or something like that …” “I think, but I’m not sure …”). But that isn’t a fault in her prose. It’s the special nourishment she feeds to the mis-understood. - ypically it takes bribery to get me to read straight through a short story collection. It happened last year with George Saunders’s masterful, much-feted Tenth of December, but the last (and only) time before that may have been college, when a knowing instructor passed me Haruki Murakami’s The Elephant Vanishes. Reading short story collections—no matter how cohesive, how gracefully threaded together, how substantive—has always left me feeling like I recently housed some Chinese food: disgustingly overwhelmed for a short time, and then starved for more nutrients.
Rivka Galchen’s debut collection (which follows her critically lauded novel, Atmospheric Disturbances) is like a multivitamin. Everything one could possibly need is dispensed via dense, tiny, mysterious pellets. Each story offers a fortified shot of literary enrichment, a dose of characters and genres and settings we didn’t even know we needed, but that now feels vital and enlivening. It’s a master class in cohesion—and restraint.
Galchen reimagines classic short stories (Gogol’s “The Nose,” Borges’s “The Aleph”) and reorients the narrative perspective: each is now first-person and from a woman’s point of view. The opening story takes one of Murakami’s bumbling middle-aged male protagonists (in this case, Toru of “The Wind-up Bird and Tuesday’s Women,” which is also the first chapter of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle) and turns him into a freshly-stuck-at-home housewife. She’s searching for her husband’s wedding ring instead of a cat, interrupted by a stranger on the phone who wants her to cook him some chicken, not one who wants to talk philosophy. Somehow, Galchen comments on Murakami’s utter masculinity while at the same time respecting it. She carefully skips along the line that separates homage from worship.
Much like Kovalyov’s nose, Galchen’s characters often get away from her. They seem to act without her consent, or even their own. They end up in strange places, leave otherwise happy lives. They interrupt their self-narration with doubt about their own actions (“Or something like that …” “I think, but I’m not sure …”). But that isn’t a fault in her prose. It’s the special nourishment she feeds to the mis-understood.ypically it takes bribery to get me to read straight through a short story collection. It happened last year with George Saunders’s masterful, much-feted Tenth of December, but the last (and only) time before that may have been college, when a knowing instructor passed me Haruki Murakami’s The Elephant Vanishes. Reading short story collections—no matter how cohesive, how gracefully threaded together, how substantive—has always left me feeling like I recently housed some Chinese food: disgustingly overwhelmed for a short time, and then starved for more nutrients.
Rivka Galchen’s debut collection (which follows her critically lauded novel, Atmospheric Disturbances) is like a multivitamin. Everything one could possibly need is dispensed via dense, tiny, mysterious pellets. Each story offers a fortified shot of literary enrichment, a dose of characters and genres and settings we didn’t even know we needed, but that now feels vital and enlivening. It’s a master class in cohesion—and restraint.
Galchen reimagines classic short stories (Gogol’s “The Nose,” Borges’s “The Aleph”) and reorients the narrative perspective: each is now first-person and from a woman’s point of view. The opening story takes one of Murakami’s bumbling middle-aged male protagonists (in this case, Toru of “The Wind-up Bird and Tuesday’s Women,” which is also the first chapter of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle) and turns him into a freshly-stuck-at-home housewife. She’s searching for her husband’s wedding ring instead of a cat, interrupted by a stranger on the phone who wants her to cook him some chicken, not one who wants to talk philosophy. Somehow, Galchen comments on Murakami’s utter masculinity while at the same time respecting it. She carefully skips along the line that separates homage from worship.
Much like Kovalyov’s nose, Galchen’s characters often get away from her. They seem to act without her consent, or even their own. They end up in strange places, leave otherwise happy lives. They interrupt their self-narration with doubt about their own actions (“Or something like that …” “I think, but I’m not sure …”). But that isn’t a fault in her prose. It’s the special nourishment she feeds to the mis-understood. - Hillary Kelly
TALENT IS A PRECARIOUS THING. It’s even more precarious when paired with youth, and then widely-broadcast; few are the writers who establish long, stable careers and remain — for any amount of time — deservedly in the center of an intellectual culture. Though we can think immediately of the people whose first novels were wake up calls to the human psyche: Philip Roth, Donna Tartt, E.L. Doctorow, Margaret Atwood, Haruki Murakami, Toni Morrison — and who went on to become living literary giants — the fact is that the large majority of writers struggle to publish even one widely-praised book.
And yet — youth always sells — and so various magazines and institutions can often be found celebrating, with gusto, a new group of literary youngsters. Under-40 Writers are tapped for inclusion in prestigious cliques — there is the National Book Foundation’s “5 Under 35,” the New York Public Library’s “Young Lions Award,” The New Yorker’s “20 Under 40” list, and even Narrative Magazine’s well-publicized “30 Below” category. The result? As they age, these writers’ successes — and failures — are played out on the biggest available stages; much bigger, or at least louder, now than they were in the days of Roth and Morrison.
Witness the career of Alix Ohlin: a debut novel, The Missing Person,lauded by seemingly everyone. Then, inclusion in The New Yorker’slist. Then, in 2012, a second novel, savaged by William Giraldi in The New York Times in a brutal review that used the adjectives, “cliché-strangled,” “appalling,” “leaden,” and “insufferable.” Not surprisingly, Giraldi’s assessment spread through Twitter feeds and Facebook status updates like a digital brush fire. So, this is what young, talented writers are dealing with today: on top of the normal anxieties of writing (“I dreamed my mother was telling me I should submit more to The New Yorker”), they must negotiate a public evernow that’s alwayson — and hungry to judge and buy (the twin preoccupations of the Internet).
For Rivka Galchen, a young Canadian-American novelist, this harrowing drama may be played out at any minute. Her inventive first novel, Atmospheric Disturbances, was published in 2008, translated into over 20 languages, and awarded the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing. Its premise was risk itself: it featured a character with her father's name, Tzvi Gal-Chen, who believes his wife has been replaced by a clone. The New York Times approved, comparing Galchen to Jonathan Lethem, Franz Kafka, Primo Levi, Thomas Pynchon, and Jorge Luis Borges.
For this reason, Galchen’s collection of stories, American Innovations, would seem to be doomed. It’s a hopeless enterprise — to enter a room while others proclaim your greatness. Galchen is now attempting to perform the literary equivalent of Evel Knievel hurtling over 13 double-decker buses in Wembley Stadium: the leap to repeat critical success is a daunting, and seemingly unlikely, endeavor. And if she fails, people will watch it live, and share it with their friends.
The marvel here is that she succeeds as often as she does — with a text that is full of innovation, grace, cold-minded intensity, and humor. The collection is a strong one, with its roots in a handful of literary antecedents — writers with whom Galchen wishes to have a conversation. Billed as “updates” or “riffs” on canonical works by Borges, Thurber, and Gogol, Galchen’s stories nonetheless have their own lives, rooted primarily in 20th and 21st century North America. These are pieces about brainy, careful characters; characters who are — by and large — struggling with the anxieties of this particular moment in time.
“Gross income for the daughter in 2007 was $18,150,” begins the collection’s third story, “Sticker Shock” (which appeared in The New Yorker in 2012as“Appreciation”). “Gross income for the mother in 2007 was $68,742. Gross income for the daughter in 2008 was $23,450; in 2009, it was $232,476; in 2010, $140,702; and in 2011, $37,853.” This story works, in part because of its clinical beginning; when it opens out into lyrical softness in a few pages, you feel relief. And the basic human dilemma the story seeks to portray — the inability of a mother and a daughter to get along — is sharpened by its linguistic ingenuity. “Sticker Shock” also contains the best three-page paragraph I’ve read this side of David Foster Wallace, which, in turn, contains the best summation of the absurdity of consumer culture since YDAU, The Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment:
But, as the mother explained to her daughter, the Jenny Consultant said that, while it was true that Jenny Craig did sell the armband on-site at the Centre, and that the consultant and the program did both believe that the armband could be a positive friend in any weight loss or weight maintenance regimen, still, the armband was not a Jenny Craig armband per se, and the Jenny Craig Centre did not represent the armband, or the armband makers, nor did the armband or its makers represent the Jenny Craig Centre, and the Jenny Craig Centre did not even formally endorse the armband’s makers, or vice versa — there was no real relation — and so the mother needed to address her inquiries or complaints not to the Jenny Craig Centre but to the armband company directly.
Comparisons to George Saunders’s In Persuasion Nation are inevitable.
Which is to say, this is a story collection that’s as much about language as anything else, about the many ways in which a story can be told. Its best moments are either surprising and beautiful (“The tea tasted like damp cotton.”), or funny (“Who was talking about not liking you? You’re just in pain.” “Maybe I’m not in pain.” “I’d put my money on pain. It’s the Kantian sublime, what you’re experiencing.”). But what I thought of most, reading these stories, wasn’t Kant’s formulation of awe (“The starry heavens above me, and the moral law within me”), but rather Longinus — who wrote that a literary work can be sublime if, in its transgressions, it is “bold, lawless, and original.”
Some stories are stronger than others. Particularly good is “Wild Berry Blue,” which is narrated in the first-person by a precocious young girl, who falls briefly, and incandescently, in love with a one-toothed, recovering heroin addict at a McDonalds in Oklahoma. She is in the restaurant with her father, the town’s psychiatrist. Galchen portrays the father with tenderness and affection: “This is a story about my love for Roy, though first I have to say a few words about my dad, who was there with me at the McDonalds every Saturday, letting his little girl, I was maybe nine, swig extra half-and-halfs, stack the shells into messy towers.” It’s a passage that conjures a specific material object — the fragile, corrugated creamers that are, for many 30- and-40-year old Americans, the equivalent of Proust’s madeleine. Though sentimentalism often feels like the great flaw of American popular culture — and this is one of the few stories that does in fact stray into a sentimentalist mood — Ms. Galchen handles the premise with enough grittiness to make it work.
Both “Real Estate,” and the title story, however, fall flat. “Real Estate” is too slight to amount to much, and “American Innovations” never overcomes the oddness of its central conceit (a woman grows a “dorsal breast”) — whether or not it is in conversation with Gogol’s “The Nose.” Yet it is a testament to Galchen’s skill as a writer that when she goes astray she doesn’t stray far. The collection’s essential life remains intact. When a character says, in “Real Estate,” that another character is, “carrying Being and Time, which didn’t immediately make me dislike him, maybe because I liked his hair and maybe because he carried it like it was a car repair manual,” you’re reminded of the author’s wit and intellect. What kind of car would you use Heidegger to fix? If only I was a certain kind of comedian — then this space would have a certain kind of joke in it.
“Once an Empire,” originally published in Harper’s in 2010, is the plainest story in the collection. It is also mysterious and affecting. Its premise is the stuff of magical realism: a woman returns from dinner to find all of her possessions leaving her apartment — via a darkened window and the fire escape. They are not being stolen, necessarily. They are just leaving of their own accord. The protagonist, dazed and lost, has a series of decentered conversations about this circumstance. “But when love is real, there’s no such thing as Time. I wasn’t the criminal, was I? I wasn’t Wanted. Mistakes could be made, though. Misidentifications.” It’s tempting to see this as Galchen arguing on her own behalf, in the writing world — where she must relinquish all of her possessions, for better or worse.
An archival obsessive could spend hours thinking about the ways Galchen chose to edit some of the stories — particularly “The Late Novels of Gene Hackman”— even after they appeared in magazines. “Gene Hackman,” has some quizzical alterations — for example, Galchen switches the “name” of the protagonist from “J” to “B.” She also adds a single-sentence, stand-alone paragraph to its start: “The outcome could have been known from the beginning.”
This sentiment is actually quite poignant when read in the context of the book’s appearance in our contemporary North American agora— our literary gathering place. I often think of the writers of the past, who didn’t live in the age of Pinterest or online, affinity-driven message boards, or even (surely impossible!) Goodreads. Take Melville (“Though I wrote the Gospels in this century, I shall die in the gutter”) or Emily Dickinson, or Kafka as examples. They were not ordained as anything but failures — as outcasts, as men and women who fell outside the boundaries of the societies in which they lived. In some ways, this fueled their greatest work. Being embraced is a particular kind of danger for an artist. American Innovations isn’t perfect, but it is a resounding success, and signals Rivka Galchen’s intention to occupy significant space, to endure. - Pauls Toutonghi
Though I think the title ought to be American Eccentric: Galchen's voice appears to be an odd fusion of insight and inner speech that practically defines the notion of eccentricity. She writes about slightly off-center marriages or love affairs, about the thin boundaries in childhood between wonder and perversion, about real estate and, of all things, existential loneliness. Sometimes she employs passages that sound — and I know this sounds a little crazy, but she herself mentions the names on the same page — like an amalgam of Heidegger and Will Ferrell. But however off center things may seem, she nearly always hits the mark.
Here's a taste of it: In the title story, a salute to and reworking of the spirit of Kafka's "Metamorphosis" — or is it Gogol's "The Nose," or Philip Roth's The Breast, or all of them — the narrator tells of waking up on a North Carolina morning. "I washed my face," she says, "with peach scrub and took care, as I generally do, not to look into the mirror too gesamtkunstwerk-ily. Instead, only in close patches."
"Gesamtkunstwerk-ily!"
A German philosophical term about the total nature of the work of art, first introduced by a mid-nineteenth century German aesthetician named Trahndorff — also by the composer Richard Wagner — and appearing here in Galchen's story as part of the question of how the narrator feels about seeing her early morning face in thein the bathroom mirror? What other story writer, old or new, has converted such a term into an adverb and gotten away with it?
The narrator then looks at herself in a hall mirror, which shows her back, and discovers that a mass has appeared, a mass that turns out to be something quite unexpected. "I would say," she tells us, "what I saw was a wow. Even though it was modest, maybe a B cup in size. It didn't need support." And here come these odd rhythms and singular diction again: "It manifested all the expected anatomy, the detailing of which I feel is private."
Because she slants in at a subject or situation at such odd angles, Galchen's sentences catch your attention, and hold it with a tight fist. In the story called "Wild Berry Blue" — which appears to be Galchen's homage to Joyce's masterpiece "Araby" — a prepubescent girl in Oklahoma fixates on an ordinary guy who works in a fast food restaurant. His name is Roy. "I felt so unsettled," says, Galchen's young heroine, "Roy's fingers on my palm as I thrummed my hand along a low wooden fence. I had so little of Roy and yet he had all of me and the feeling ran deep to the most ancient parts of me."
However bold and distinctive, statements like these don't overshadow the story line and characters. They become the essence, the particular curious nature of story and character. The characters are wildly divergent, from that young Oklahoma girl to New York coffee house philosophers, science-fiction writes in Key West, a molecular biologist in Mexico City, and a novelist who's written "a love story between a bird and a whale." So that even though in these pieces, Galchen tries to give the impression of writing her versions of Borges or Gogol, she can't help being anyone but herself; someone for whom the existential confusions of everyday life are a rich field of material for fiction.
In the opening story called "The Lost Order," her narrator can't even answer a telephone without plucking at the very thread of what holds the universe together.
This Unavailable is still waiting for his order, and we have all of these delicious stories. Galchen delivers! - Alan CheuseMy phone was ringing.
The caller ID read "Unavailable."
I tend not to answer calls identified as Unavailable, But sometimes Unavailable shows up because someone is calling from, say, the hospital.
"One garlic chicken," a man's voice is saying. "One side of salad, with the ginger-miso dressing. Also one white rice..."
He starts dictating his address. I have no pencil in hand...
"How long?" he asks.
"Thirty minutes."
He hangs up.
Ack. Why couldn't I admit that I wasn't going to be bringing him any chicken at all? Now I'm wronging a hungry man. One tries not to do too many wrong things in life. But I can't call him back: he's Unavailable!
Few new writers can boast the kind of résumé that Rivka Galchen has assembled in the past several years. Born in Toronto but raised in the United States, she first came to the attention of a wide swathe of Canadian readers when her 2009 debut novel, Atmospheric Disturbances, was named a finalist for both the Governor General’s Literary Award and the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize.
By then, she’d already garnered the support of The New Yorker, whose main literary critic, James Wood, was an early champion of the debut novel. The magazine would go on to name Galchen to their prestigious list of top 20 American writers under the age of 40 and publish four of the short stories that appear in her new collection American Innovations.
Like last year’s Booker Prize winner, New Zealand’s Eleanor Catton, Galchen’s Canadian connection is tenuous: her family had emigrated to Toronto from Israel before she was born and left Canada for Oklahoma when she was still an infant. Regardless what your thoughts are on whether such circumstances make a writer sufficiently “Canadian” to lay claim to this country’s prizes and generous funding — and there is wide-ranging disagreement on this matter — it’s the similarities in their novelistic temperaments that ultimately carries more weight.
Both Catton and Galchen are deeply intellectual young female writers publishing complex and resolutely unsentimental works, at a time when more and more young women are adventurously testing the fiction’s formal potentials, using generous dollops of philosophy, literary theory, science, politics, and history. In that light, Galchen’s promise attaches her to an exceptional lineage that stretches from Cynthia Ozick to Siri Hustvedt to Jennifer Egan.
Whether Galchen’s promise has yet to be truly fulfilled, however, is a question that will bedevil readers of American Innovations, which offers a mixed bag of stories that court different priorities and attain varying level of success. The most publicized aspects of the collection thus far are the selections that demonstrate Galchen’s willingness to appropriate with the canonical stories of male writers in a broad experiment of gender roles. In the opener “The Lost Order”, the author redresses James Thurber’s “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty”. “The Region of Unlikeness”, meanwhile, supposedly offers a modern-day spin on Jorge Luis Borges’ “The Aleph”. Title story “American Innovations” updates Nikolai Gogol’s “The Nose”.
In all three cases, Galchen’s inversion of the protagonist’s gender sets the narrative on a different course, one that suits life in contemporary New York. But while the construct is compelling enough, it’s execution can leave readers wondering if the results yield anything more than just a clever ploy. Galchen’s sentences can be pithy and self-deprecating, often more concerned with their embedded punch lines than they are with building the reality of a story. Whereas the originating stories are unusual and marked with thematic purpose, Galchen’s are merely unusual. If there is a deeper commentary being made beyond the surface of inter-textuality, it doesn’t rise naturally from the contours of the experiment.
Galchen’s stories fare better when she doesn’t commit herself to the pretense of interacting with other works. In “Sticker Shock”, one of the collections strongest pieces, the troubled communications of a mother and daughter are delivered in terms of their financial dealings, an altogether effective comment on the pervasiveness of capitalism on familial relations. Still others skip the formal pretensions altogether. “Wild Berry Blue”, for example, is a semi-autobiographical, coming-of-age story that reflects on the author’s youth in Oklahoma.
Throughout American Innovations, what impresses most is Galchen’s willingness to thwart conventions. Whether it’s interacting with the literary past or her own past, the author blurs lines, leaving the reader with a slight sense of vertigo. We question our place. That’s good. But there are also plenty of distractions along the way, and a suspicious sense that the advertised depth behind the façade might in fact be hollow. The trickery involved here has more than a touch of postmodernism implied in it. Whether it succeeds in satisfying the reader’s expectations and not just the author’s zest to circumvent the natural balance of a story’s features will most likely differ from one reader to the next.- Dimitri Nasrallah
Field Geology: An Interview with Rivka Galchen
Rivka Galchen on American Innovations: Stories
Rivka Galchen, Author of 'American Innovations,' on Writing and Uncertainty
Rivka Galchen talks about putting a female twist on iconic stories
Rivka Galchen' texts in The New Yorker
Rivka Galchen, Atmospheric Disturbances: A Novel, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008.
excerpt
When Dr. Leo Liebenstein’s wife disappears, she leaves behind a single, confounding clue: a woman who looks, talks, and behaves exactly like her—or almost exactly like her—and even audaciously claims to be her. While everyone else is fooled by this imposter, Leo knows better than to trust his senses in matters of the heart. Certain that the original Rema is alive and in hiding, Leo embarks on a quixotic journey to reclaim his lost love.
With the help of his psychiatric patient Harvey—who believes himself to be a secret agent who can control the weather—Leo attempts to unravel the mystery of the spousal switch. His investigation leads him to the enigmatic guidance of the meteorologist Dr. Tzvi Gal-Chen, the secret workings of the Royal Academy of Meteorology in their cosmic conflict with the 49 Quantum Fathers, and the unwelcome conviction that somehow he—or maybe his wife, or maybe even Harvey—lies at the center of all these unfathomables. From the streets of New York to the southernmost reaches of Patagonia, Leo’s erratic quest becomes a test of how far he is willing to take his struggle against the seemingly uncontestable truth he knows in his heart to be false.
Atmospheric Disturbances is at once a moving love story, a dark comedy, a psychological thriller, and a deeply disturbing portrait of a fracturing mind. With tremendous compassion and dazzling literary sophistication, Rivka Galchen investigates the moment of crisis when you suddenly realize that the reality you insist upon is no longer one you can accept, and the person you love has become merely the person you live with. This highly inventive debut explores the mysterious nature of human relationships, and how we spend our lives trying to weather the storms of our own making.
Imagine what it might be like to realize that the person you love is, in fact, not the person you love but a doppelgänger: or, what Leo Liebenstein coolly terms a "simulacrum" of his wife Rema at the outset of Atmospheric Disturbances. David Byrne's infamous cry that "this is not my beautiful wife" seems the most likely response, but Leo's reaction to this sea change takes unpredictable and dazzlingly plotted turns in the story that follows. Leo's journey to recover the "real" Rema is nothing short of byzantine; among its many mysteries is the delightfully inscrutable Dr. Tzvi Gal-Chen, a master meteorologist who in cleverly constructed flashback sequences takes up residence in the daily rhythms of Leo and Rema's marriage and becomes as much a focus of Leo's obsession as his wife's whereabouts. (Think Vertigo but directed by Charlie Kaufman.) Make no mistake: this is dizzying debut fiction, bursting at the spine with beautifully articulated ideas about love, yes, but also--and with maddening resonance--about the private wars love forces us to wage with ourselves. Be sure to keep a pen or pencil handy: it's impossible to resist underlining prose this good. - Anne Bartholomew
In this enthralling debut, psychiatrist Dr. Leo Liebenstein sets off to find his wife, Rema, who he believes has been replaced by a simulacrum. Also missing is one of Leo's patients, Harvey, who is convinced he receives coded messages (via Page Six in the New York Post) from the Royal Academy of Meteorology to control the weather. At Rema's urging, Leo pretends during his sessions with Harvey to be a Royal Academy agent (she thinks the fib could help break through to Harvey), and once Re- ma and Leo disappear, Leo turns to actual Royal Academy member Tzvi Gal-Chen's meteorological work to guide him in his search for his wife. Leo's quest takes him through Buenos Aires and Patagonia, and as he becomes increasingly delusional and erratic, Galchen adeptly reveals the actual situation to readers, including Rema's anguish and anger at her husband. Leo's devotion to the real Rema is heartbreaking and maddening; he cannot see that the woman he seeks has been with him all along. Don't be surprised if this gives you a Crying of Lot 49 nostalgia hit. - Publishers Weekly
An unprovable theory: Before everything, before finishing her first book, even, a writer makes a certain, unique sound. Perhaps this means that the writer hears a certain sound or is tuned to a certain pitch. That sound can’t be faked or changed; it may be that the difference between writers who fulfill their promise and writers who don’t is that, no matter what they do, those who do just can’t help themselves—they make the sound they make and no other. In her first novel, Atmospheric Disturbances, Rivka Galchen is clearly tuned, preternaturally, to the key of Auster, Borges, and perhaps Sebald. Multiple alternate worlds whistle between these lines; characters are loose in their signifiers; things—people, places, identities—appear and disappear in a sort of weird, really smart, obsessive way that is by turns rueful, paranoid, melancholy, clever, and anxious. Indeed, the sentences and situations are endlessly variable, like a Rubik’s cube. If they seem, sometimes, to be turning slightly more from a love of perpetual motion than from any sort of urgency, that may be in Galchen’s favor. This is her sound; this is her way of moving—the girl can’t help it.
The uncanny reigns supreme here. The events in the novel cluster around the (very) strange disappearance of Dr. Leo Liebenstein’s wife, Rema. It is a disappearance, however, that is visible only to him, because Rema’s double, along with a peculiar russet puppy that she carries in her purse, has taken up residence in Liebenstein’s apartment. She looks just like the missing Rema, but she isn’t, Liebenstein is sure, actually her. She is a “simulacrum,” an “impostress,” an interloper who makes tiny but telling mistakes in her imitation of the real Rema. She lies; she drinks her tea the wrong way; her face isn’t quite right. She says telltale impostressish things like “The real is good for deception.” A lover knows, despite any and all appearances to the contrary, and Liebenstein is sure he knows. And since he is a psychiatrist to boot, he feels uniquely qualified to find his way out of this psychotic hall of mirrors called his life. To this end, Liebenstein begins to search, of course, but before the search can even properly get off the ground, Harvey, one of his psychotic patients, also disappears, and a psychotic patient who isn’t Harvey appears, insisting that someone has stolen his leg. Liebenstein perseveres, finding clues in any and all absurd occurrences and coincidences, tracking his missing wife through New York’s Hungarian Pastry Shop, Buenos Aires, Patagonia, and his dreams. Wound through his search is a critical subplot involving the Royal Academy of Meteorology, a meteorologist named Dr. Tzvi Gal-Chen, and Doppler radar, which can apparently aid in understanding the appearance of doppelgängers, such as the false Rema. Also, the Royal Academy of Meteorology, which is real in the book (not in the real world, though in the real world, there is actually a Royal Meteorological Society), plays a key role in a highly paranoid fantasy of Harvey’s. Just so we’re clear.
To attempt to follow the clues in this novel is to engage in a fruitless exercise, like trying to climb the stairs in an Escher woodcut. She’s not there, and you can’t find her that way, anyway. As Liebenstein tacks back and forth in increasingly paranoid circuits through his inner and outer worlds—there are diagrams in this novel, found photographs, and a drawing of the Doppler effect—a weight, beautifully, accumulates in the white space. Liebenstein’s profound loneliness is in that unseen weight. The shape that he’s drawing with increasing franticness on the page doesn’t really matter, we begin to see; the tension of the novel derives from everything he has no word or diagram for: his heart, mysteriously forlorn. It is to Galchen’s credit that she never explains what the source of Liebenstein’s melancholy is. Instead, it is as if she sees the universe as divided into frenzied verbal clusters of overdetermined, semidelusional scribbles that are never what they say they are versus a vast, silent expanse of inchoate grief.
It’s a very charming vision, and her clusters are meticulously drawn. But Liebenstein is most heartbreaking not in his ceaseless, involuted motion, but in the small, still moment when, on eating too many butter cookies, he looks at the kitchen ceiling and notices, uncomfortably, that “the shapes that normally morph and merge out upon the random pattern of such a ceiling did not morph and merge for me as I sat there, though I waited for them to do so, even just playfully, but they didn’t, which made it seem as if I’d become the worst kind of literalist . . . as if I really believed in a world . . . where people, oddly enough, meant just what they said.” How Liebenstein eventually makes his way to something like that literalism, or at least a pretty good imitation of it, is the actual trajectory of this existential fairy tale, even as he continues to insist on his version of the really real reality he knows is there, if only he could graph it. This trajectory is quite charming as well, though by the end of the book, I sometimes wished for at least a hint of more random weather, emotional and otherwise, the spontaneous movement of a cloud or burst of sunlight that wasn’t part of some crowded mind’s more or less paranoid system. But overthinking should be the worst thing that happens to a first novelist. Galchen’s idiosyncratic, echo-filled sound comes through loud and clear anyway. - Stacey D’Erasmo
In 1835, Georg Büchner, a young sometime medical student, began to write “Lenz,” a story that inhabits the schizophrenic breakdown of the eighteenth-century poet Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz. It opens simply, like a Romantic stroll: “The 20th, Lenz walked through the mountains.” There is snow on the peaks and fog in the valleys. And then, seven sentences into it, something strange happens: “He felt no fatigue, except sometimes it annoyed him that he could not walk on his head.” Like Lenz, we have suddenly entered an upside-down world. Lenz imagines that someone is communicating to him in hieroglyphics; he runs around manically, in the middle of the night; he thinks himself possessed of miraculous powers; he tries to bring a dead girl back to life. “When he was alone or reading, things got even worse, at times all his mental activity would fix upon a single idea; if he thought about another person, or vividly pictured them, it was as if he became that person, he grew completely confused, and yet at the same time he felt the constant urge to deliberately manipulate everything around him in his mind.”
Büchner’s writing (in Richard Sieburth’s recent translation) so devotedly follows Lenz’s stochastic thinking that it almost disappears as stable third-person narration. We are forced by the writing to share Lenz’s instability. “Lenz” is often called a harbinger of European modernism, and one way in which later fiction of mental extremity develops is by replacing even that unstable third-person narrator with a highly unreliable first-person narrator, intensifying the reader’s disorientation. So Dostoyevsky’s underground man, in “Notes from Underground,” seems to speak to us directly, while foaming with obscurities; the insane narrator of Knut Hamsun’s “Hunger” roams the city streets telling awful lies; the narrator of Italo Svevo’s “Confessions of Zeno” thinks he is curing himself by telling his analyst about his experiences, though all he is doing is presenting a detailed record of his insanity; in “Pale Fire,” Charles Kinbote purports to offer a commentary on John Shade’s poem while filling his “notes” with his own fantastical digressions; and in the book most obviously indebted to “Lenz,” Thomas Bernhard’s devastating novel “The Loser,” the narrator labors to convince us that his friend, Wertheimer, is the real “loser,” while the reader can see that the poor narrator himself hardly escapes that terrible designation.
Rivka Galchen’s first novel, “Atmospheric Disturbances” (Farrar, Straus; $24), is being praised as Borgesian and Pynchonian, and certainly clutches at the frills of that lineage. (It is set partly in Argentina and makes reference to something called “the 49 Quantum,” or just “the 49.”) But it is more naturally seen as a contribution to the Hamsun-Bernhard tradition of tragicomic first-person unreliability. Like “Lenz,” the story opens simply and then, superbly, flakes. “Last December a woman entered my apartment who looked exactly like my wife” is how Dr. Leo Liebenstein begins his story. His wife, Rema, has apparently gone missing, and this substitute has taken her place. But when the woman evinces no intention of leaving, while her putative husband begins to refer to her as an “impostress,” a “simulacrum,” and “the ersatz Rema,” we suspect that it is Leo’s rationality that has gone missing, not his wife. The rest of the novel, despite various perky plot turns, is a relentless exploration of how a man could fail to see clearly the woman he loves.
We are all afflicted at times with the cataracts of the quotidian, where routine clouds our ability to notice what we once loved about the person we live with—this is the novel’s universal appeal. But it is a measure of Galchen’s courage as a novelist that she insists on leading the reader to the universal only through the singular. Liebenstein is a New York psychiatrist, who, naturally, thinks that psychoanalysts are all mad: “I could never be an analyst, those people are too unpleasant, too passive-aggressively authoritarian, and yes, all crazy and out of fashion to boot.” Like Svevo’s narrator, who insists that the surest proof he never suffered from the Oedipus complex is that he was never cured of it, Leo has a great deal invested in his intricate forms of denial. He goes on a quest for the missing Rema, a quest that takes him to Patagonia. (Or so he tells us.) A patient of his named Harvey has also gone missing. Harvey believes that he can control the weather, and that he is a secret agent for the Royal Academy of Meteorology. According to Leo, Rema once suggested that, as part of Harvey’s treatment, Leo should pretend to be an agent of the Royal Academy, too, but one of superior rank. (It would be a way of reining in Harvey’s fantasies.) Leo is at first hesitant, then avidly adopts the plan. So the doctor has crossed over to the patient’s side of the desk, and partakes of his insanity, while proclaiming his ability to tell the difference.
Most first-person unreliability in fiction is reliably unreliable; rather mechanically, it teaches us how to read it, how to plug its holes. Double unreliability—or unreliable unreliability—is rarer, and more interesting, because it asks much more of the reader. Galchen, a playful writer, delights in having Leo tell us, for instance, that, while Harvey is clearly delusional, the Royal Academy of Meteorology is “an institute whose existence a consensus view of reality actually would (and this surprised me at the time) affirm.” In reality—that is, in our world—there is no academy by that name. But the novel wants to disturb any sense of what might constitute “a consensus view of reality,” the better to depict the instabilities of a perforated mind. Leo has, perhaps, a version of Capgras syndrome, whose victims come to think that an impostor has replaced a family member or friend. But whereas, say, Richard Powers’s most recent novel, “The Echo Maker,” is explicitly about the phenomenology of this delusion, complete with a barrage of neurological facts, Galchen’s novel more boldly denies us the comfort of a conclusive explanation. “Atmospheric Disturbances” is a novel of consciousness, not a novel about consciousness.
“It’s you. It’s you who’s not yourself!” the “simulacrum” wife cries to Leo, and from time to time we glimpse the possible sources of his perturbation and grief. An outburst about his father suggests that Leo may never have recovered from paternal abandonment: “A foolish friend once said to me, You could place an ad in the paper, looking for your father. One of the ugliest, stupidest things I’d ever heard anyone say. I wasn’t looking for my father. I had no need to see him or speak to him or know where he was or what he was or wasn’t wearing. Really, I barely remembered him, and I had no reason to believe that he was a particularly interesting or intelligent or good-looking man.” A more conventional writer would let us use the flare of anger to get our bearings on Leo. But Leo is too far gone for that, and we must follow him deep into his errancy. Galchen has a knack for taking a thread and fraying it, so that a sentence never quite ends up where you expect. Here Leo is talking about his desperation, as the husband of a woman who has been “replaced.” We begin the sentence thinking that it might throw some light on his mind, but end it in darkened counsel:
That was the stage of loss I was in then I suppose, like the first days after someone dies, when you bend down to pick up every piece of lint, and you wonder what the dead person, when you meet her next, might have to say about her death (or about lint), and you worry, a little bit, about how that is going to be a very awkward conversation, the conversation with the recently dead.
Galchen can take the slightest observation of Leo’s and warp it, to reveal lunatic undulations: “I don’t know if Harvey actually had one arm notably longer than the other, but he gave off that impression.” His language is strange, pungent, dangerously ripe: “As the simulacrum sleep sighed, her whole thorax centimetered out against me—then receded.” Walking into a pastry shop, Leo takes a quick, fantastical inventory of the people in it, and then:
“What did you say?” someone said maybe to me.
“Nothing,” I said to almost no one.
Leo becomes interested in the work of a member of the Royal Academy of Meteorology named Tzvi Gal-Chen, who has done research on the difficulties of translating Doppler radar data. The arcana of meteorology allow Galchen, who has an M.D. from the Mt. Sinai School of Medicine, to explore some neat scientific metaphors. She plays on the Doppler effect (just as the Doppler effect is a change in the observed frequency of a sound or electromagnetic wave, so Leo’s “observation” of his wife has been subject to a kind of analogous redshift) and coins, for Leo’s haunting by his wife’s double, the phrase “Dopplerganger effect.” But this postmodern jauntiness too legibly packages her themes, and undermines her novelistic commitment to the mysteriousness of Leo’s despair. What is strongest in the novel is the delicacy with which Galchen evokes the bewildering randomness of Leo’s visionary insanity; Leo is at his most moving not when he conveniently pleases the reader with explication but when he turns away from the reader, to wash in his own opacity.
If the Dopplerganger effect is too cute, the selection of the author’s father’s name as a character in the novel is awfully risky. The Sebald-like reproduction of a photograph of what must be the Galchen family is a mistake—it comes off as both whimsical and coercive—but, for all that, Galchen manages to make her novel a kind of tribute to her father, an academic meteorologist who died in 1994, in his fifties. She does so by blending Leo’s fiercely denied grief for his lost father with her own, more recessed mourning. Thus, in the passage where Leo denies that he was looking for his father, the book is enacting not a double but a triple unreliability, since the author herself has joined the resistant chorus. (What, me? Looking for my father?) Galchen uses the presence of her family name in the novel paradoxically: on the one hand, it anchors the narrative by pointing us outside of it, to the writer; on the other, it reminds us that the book is an authorial concoction. “Gal-Chen therapy language made its way into our apartment, first teasingly, but after a while who could say?” Leo recalls, of his and his wife’s growing interest in Tzvi Gal-Chen. “When Rema and I disagreed, I’d invoke our meteorologist: ‘Dr. Gal-Chen prefers the green wool,’ ‘Dr. Gal-Chen says no to imitation Nilla Wafers.’ ” Dr. Gal-Chen is also, of course, Rivka Galchen, M.D., the Dr. Galchen who pulls the real—or “real”—strings here.
“Lenz” and “Hunger” and “The Loser” are short works, in part because first-person lunacy is a stretch. “Atmospheric Disturbances” is too long by forty or fifty pages. But Galchen has written an original and sometimes affecting novel, one that knows how to move from the comic to the painful, as the antic twilight of Leo’s insanity gives way to the darkest night. Perhaps the novel’s most annihilating sentence is this one: “So I hung up the telephone, not listening to whatever it was the double was saying to me, probably just listing more memories.” Recited memories are what a marriage has, and behind the flippant cruelty of Leo’s madness we can hear a wife trying to coax a husband back to shared normality, back to a marriage that once was, back to “a consensus view of reality.” - James Wood
In one of his best-known jokes (anti-joke is closer to it), the unsmiling comedian Steven Wright says, in a monotone: “I woke up one day and everything in the apartment had been stolen and replaced with an exact replica. I said to my roommate, ‘Can you believe this? Everything in the apartment has been stolen and replaced with an exact replica.’ He said, ‘Do I know you?’ ” This existential conundrum — the question of what makes an original different from a copy (and how anyone can prove that he is who he thinks he is once the matter is called into doubt) — is both the springboard and the ensuing spring of “Atmospheric Disturbances,” a brainy, whimsical, emotionally contained first novel by Rivka Galchen, a young M.D. turned M.F.A.
Galchen’s narrator, a fussy 51-year-old psychiatrist named Leo Liebenstein, believes that his beautiful, much-younger Argentine wife, Rema, has been replaced by a “doppelgänger,” a “simulacrum,” an “impostress,” an “ersatz” spouse. “Last December,” Leo explains, “a woman entered my apartment who looked exactly like my wife.” Like his wife, the newcomer has the same “wrinkly boots,” the same Argentine accent with “the halos around the vowels,” the “same baby blue coat with jumbo charcoal buttons, same tucking behind ears of dyed corn silk blond hair. Same bangs cut straight across like on those dolls done up in native costumes that live their whole lives in plastic cases held up by a metal wire around the waist.” The idea that this cockatiel of a woman could not be the Rema in question is absurd, but the evidence of Leo’s eyes and ears doesn’t persuade him. “Same everything, but it wasn’t Rema,” he maintains. “It was just a feeling, that’s how I knew.” So far, this could be farce, trompe l’oeil, Ionesco, Magritte. But the story quickly changes course. Seeking a logical explanation for the presence of the interloper (it can’t be a case of “Rema-based psychosis,” he conveniently concludes), Leo delves into the research of a quasi-paranormal scientific association called the Royal Academy of Meteorology, in particular the publications of a man named Tzvi Gal-Chen, whose work on Doppler radar, “initial value problems” and “atmospheric modeling” may contain the key to the “real” Rema’s disappearance. Tzvi Gal-Chen has his drawbacks: for one thing, he appears to be dead; for another, the “fake” Rema may be impersonating him; but at least he’s accessible by e-mail. Also, Gal-Chen once presented a scientific paper in Buenos Aires, and Rema was born there. Could these two random occurrences be related? Leo hops a plane to Argentina to find out, using Gal-Chen’s research on retrieving “thermodynamic variables from within deep convective clouds” to guide his own blundering “attempts at retrieval” of the “real” Rema. No, this is not chick lit.
It’s unusual — in fact (why be coy?), it’s extremely rare — to come across a first novel by a woman writer that concerns itself with such quirky, philosophical, didactic explorations; a novel in which the heart and the brain vie for the role of protagonist, and the brain wins. While the voice and mood of the novel are masculine, clinical and objective (Leo registers Rema’s distress with detachment, recording it but not feeling it), the book’s descriptions of colors, smells, clothing and bodies show feminine perception: Rema’s hair has the “smell of grass”; a woman has “wet cement eyes”; a ’70s shirt with a butterfly collar has “pearline” fasteners. This attention to detail doesn’t pass without comment. Rema teases Leo for the attention he pays to clothes, while Leo mocks his mother’s “excessive aesthetic sensitivity” even as he tries to dictate the color, fabric and buttons of a new coat for a Rema clone in Patagonia.
Galchen’s inventive narrative strategies call to mind the playful techniques of Jonathan Lethem, Franz Kafka, Primo Levi and Thomas Pynchon. But she also, quite deliberately, echoes the Argentine giant Jorge Luis Borges. Like Borges, she sabotages concepts of identity, reality and place, fraying her protagonist’s ties to all three. Like Borges, she makes Argentina her favored locale for memory retrieval. And, as Borges often did, she gives her own name to a character. But there’s a still more obvious link: in his short story “Borges and I,” Borges complains of an identity crisis akin to Leo’s — albeit a crisis over his own identity, not someone else’s. There are two different Borgeses, he explains: the other Borges shares his tastes, “but in a vain sort of way that turns them into the accoutrements of an actor.” In “Atmospheric Disturbances,” Leo’s deprecating attitude toward the Rema imitator resembles Borges’s attitude toward his double. Galchen operates on Borges’s conceit, adapting it, expanding on it, giving it a new face.
If this were a different kind of novel, the central mystery wouldn’t revolve around puzzles of identity, subjectivity and objectivity. It would concern itself with the question of how an unpleasant, middle-aged, Aspergic loner like Leo Liebenstein ever managed to bag a dishy wife like Rema, with her warmth, her youth, her enticing rhythmic gait, her way of giving people “the impression that she loves them in a very personal and significant way.” In fairness, this thought had occurred to Leo. The first time the two met was at the Hungarian Pastry Shop in Manhattan. After speaking to her, ascertaining her nationality and noticing that she wasn’t edging away from him, Leo courted her by shrewdly avoiding the mention of Borges, so as not to “appear showy.” Because of this reticence, because of a mille-feuille sugar high, or for some other unknown reason, Rema succumbed to his suit. And yet, years into the marriage, Leo remains on perpetual alert, unsure of true possession, his antennae quivering to pick up any signal that Rema has discovered she’s out of his league and acted on this knowledge. He pretends he isn’t jealous. “I didn’t necessarily know at every moment exactly where she was or what, precisely, in Spanish, she said over the phone to people who might very well have been perfect strangers to me,” he admits. But that alone doesn’t mean that she “was, or is, in love with some, or many, other people.”
How reassuring. And yet, like the tormented narrator of Ford Madox Ford’s novel “The Good Soldier” — who longed to believe that his marriage was sound and that his wife was “a goodly apple,” and who began to regard other people as “incalculable simulacra amidst smoke wreaths” — after learning of her infidelity, Leo is haunted by doubts. The difference here is that Leo has betrayed himself, pre-emptively robbing himself of the possession he most values to protect himself against its loss. “Who can ever really know about anyone’s happiness, even one’s own?” he rationalizes. A true scientist, he argues, must be willing to accept “unwelcome and confounding data,” to “make discoveries that shatter one’s most deeply held beliefs.” Maybe, he adds, “we discover that a man is not an expert on himself.” Whether or not this is true, it’s certain that a hologram can’t cheat on you.
In a different kind of novel, we would sit back and watch Leo gaslight himself into wrecking his marriage, from time to time stealing glimpses through a peephole at Rema’s secret activities, if any. But Galchen and her narrator prefer radar to romance. Leo likes to picture Rema’s duplicates as figures on a Doppler weather radar pattern. “Let us imagine a source from which a Rema look-alike emerges every second,” he posits. If he “begins walking toward the source of Remas, then a Rema will pass by me more frequently than every second, even though Remas are still exiting the source at the precise rate of one per second.” He calls this the Dopplerganger effect. Immersed in one of these experiences, Leo scrutinizes the Rema mimic, noticing “fine lines of age on her face. Tiny crow’s-feet, and not just when she smiled. ... This look-alike Rema, I began to realize, was not such a perfect look-alike; it would seem Rema was being played by someone older. ... Someone pretty, but not as pretty.” Rema may not have taken a lover, but she has been manhandled by time.
You don’t have to be a weatherman to see that Galchen’s brainteasing book, whatever its pretexts, is an exploration of the mutability of romantic love. Although she has intellectualized and mystified her subject, intentionally obscuring it in a dry-ice fog of pseudoscience, the emotional peaks beneath her cloud retain their definition. The reader senses Rema’s anguish, whether or not Leo has empathy for it. Captive to his soothing psychosis, Leo can’t see his wife as anything but an impersonator, her voice “less sharp, less fiercely lovable, less accented than Rema’s,” her grip too firm, her hair incorrectly styled. He tells her, “I’ve met complete strangers who remind me more of Rema than you do,” but he’s the stranger. “It’s you,” Rema sobs, “It’s you who’s not yourself.” Anyone who has suffered the everyday calamity of the lessening of love, the infinitesimal diminutions of regard that drain a relationship of its power, knows what a relief it would be to blame science fiction. This cerebral, demanding, original new writer helps make the charges stick. - Liesl Schillinger
The usual thing to do, when a loved one goes missing, is to contact the police. But when Leo Liebenstein's young wife, Rema, seems to vanish, the New York psychiatrist looks to meteorology. His wife's disappearance is unorthodox. 'Last December a woman entered my apartment who looked exactly like my wife,' Leo tells us. The woman is carrying a small dog - and it is this that prompts him to doubt her identity. 'Same everything,' he notes, 'but it wasn't Rema.'
The 'simulacrum', as Leo calls her, settles into Rema's life as if it had always been hers; the 'real' Rema does not reappear. Rather than addressing the situation directly, Leo contacts one of his patients, Harvey, a man who belives he has 'special skills for controlling weather phenomena'. Harvey thinks he is an agent working for the Royal Academy of Meteorology and Leo believes this institution can help him find his missing wife.Giving voice to a character as weird as Leo is quite a tightrope act but Galchen, in this excellent first novel, confidently pulls it off. The twitchy, digressive prose and idiosyncratic phrasing (tourists in a Patagonian town are described as 'the local culture of nonlocal pleasure seekers') are counterbalanced by Leo's analytical cast of mind and hypersensitivity. He knows his actions make him seem irrational and he is constantly accounting for this. When evidence weighing against his quest threatens to overwhelm it, Galchen wrongfoots us with a twist that suggests he might have been on the right track all along.
The novel is also very funny. The sheer oddness of Leo's thoughts, and the inadvertently comical way in which he articulates them, break the tide of analytical information and make the story race along. Galchen owes debts to Thomas Pynchon: her sinister meteorological collective, the 49 Quantum Fathers, is surely a reference to Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, a book similarly preoccupied with cults.
Meteorology, in Galchen's hands, becomes a fertile field, yielding insights into emotion and, in particular, the anxiety caused by knowing that we can never truly fathom the person we love. - Killian Fox
In Atmospheric Disturbances, Rivka Galchen's debut novel, psychiatrist Dr. Leo Liebenstein is firmly under the suspicion that his young Argentinian wife Rema has disappeared and been replaced by a sumulacrum, a copy that looks and sounds like Rema but in vaguely distinguishable aspects is certainly not her.
What's more, Harvey, a patient of Leo's who believes that he is able to control the weather and has in fact been employed as a secret agent for the Royal Academy of Meteorology to do so, has gone missing. All of this and more (including the Royal Academy's evil counter-society, the 49 Quantum Fathers) in the first 20 pages, drawing the reader relentlessly forward into Galchen's irresistible tale about perception, relationships, and meteorology.
Leo descends further into his own delusions, pursuing them into South America while he, in turn is pursued by Rema, or Rema's doppleganger, and we are thrust into a maelstrom of deceit, double agents, and intrigue that at times touches on some heady meteorological concepts such as wind retrieval and single Doppler radar.
Atmospheric Disturbances” by Rivka Galchen is like a large white onion, many-layered and sharp, and makes one blink the eye rapidly—in wonderment, of course. Very simplistically, it is the story of a search for a missing person. Or, if one looked at it upside down, it could be about atmospheric changes that are orchestrated.
Leo Liebenstein, a middle-aged psychiatrist, wakes up one night to find his wife gone. The void is quickly filled by a simulacrum, by a woman who looks, walks, and talks exactly like her—but is not her.
Barely a few days prior to her disappearance, a delusional patient goes off the radar as well. Convinced that he has been recruited as a secret agent by the elusive Royal Academy of Meteorology, he goes off on a clandestine mission to rescue the planet from a metrological sabotage.
A mysterious mafia outfit called “49 Quantum Fathers” has a vested interest in tampering with the formation of clouds, the scale of precipitation, the frequency of snowfall, the strength of sunlight.
As an attempt at curing—and on the insistence of his (doppelganger) spouse—the good doctor goes into a role-playing model, donning the cloak of a higher-ranking operative. He reports to a don in the field of meteorology, a scientist by the name of Tzvi Gal-Chen, he tells him.
The entry of this character makes the book the literary equivalent of a photorealistic art, where reality intrudes into fiction. Tzvi Gal-Chen is the author’s real-life father. From here onward, the unseen man appears to guide every movement of Liebenstein, or so he believes. A vital clue, embedded in a ground-breaking paper, read by the scientist in Buenos Aires, decides for him the place to begin his quest. However, the quixotic voyage from New York City to the Argentinean capital does not retrieve her.
A delicious off-beat yarn, for sure. But, it gets better, geekier, and more thought-provoking.
Its true hero, one realizes, in a flashbulb moment, is not the shrink, but the invisible Gal-Chen. Seemingly an invisible player, making only a handful of appearances in the pages, through e-mails from the “other world,” his presence pervades the entire novel, from start to finish. He is the center of gravity, the fulcrum, from whom all others radiate out and cycle back to.
Galchen, the author, pumps in some metaphysics here. Communication from the deceased Gal-Chen begs one to ponder a question like, “Can the dead send us an e-mail?”
By the time one puts the book down, one is left puzzling over what really went on with Liebenstein. One of three possibilities is on array: (1) Unable to come to terms with the loss of his wife, it was he, who created the “simulacrum” in his head, or (2) His loss of mental equilibrium sent him on an imaginary journey to find her, when, in reality, she had never left his side, or (3) People in two parallel universes are accidentally transposed. The Liebenstein in “Universe A” gets accidentally linked with his wife in “Universe B.”
It is a wonderful, idea-driven book. But, the style, in the last 60-odd pages, gets a bit soporific, with labyrinthine sentences, some eight lines long that defy deciphering. The chapter titles, equally lengthy, are not just inspired by the scholarly work of her father, but are that, in toto. Go figure this one out: “A Method For Calculating Temperature, Pressure And Vertical Velocities From Doppler Radar Observations.” Far from giving the reader a hint of what is to follow, they perplex. Maybe, that is the writer’s way of messing with the reader’s head.
If you are a sci-fi nerd, then, this is certainly your book. If not, then, this is still worth reading. - Ally Mookerjee
The man who mistook his wife for a simulacrum
“I did tell Rema that her response was ludicrously out of proportion. She must actually be worried about something else, I said. She had an endogenous mésalliance, I concluded. She said she didn’t know what a mésalliance was, or what endogenous was, and that I was arrogant, awful, a few other things as well. I liked those accusations and found them flattering and thought she was right.”What does it mean when you say that you “know” someone?
—Dr. Leo Liebenstein in Atmospheric Disturbances
The answer to this question will inevitably go beyond a mere list of facts. Our knowledge of another person can’t be reduced to a combination of characteristics—there’s also an intuition or instinct we have about them. This sense of “knowing” is unpredictable and hard to explain, mostly because it’s somehow internal to us.
As such, it can easily be disturbed, especially when someone acts contrary to your expectations. “I don’t even know you anymore,” we exclaim. But is it the other person who has changed? Or is it just that the person in our head was never entirely real?
These are not small questions, but they’re explored with a lot of insight in Rivka Galchen’s complex and impressive debut novel, Atmospheric Disturbances.
At the simplest level, Atmospheric Disturbances is about a psychiatrist, Dr Leo Liebenstein, who becomes convinced one day that his wife has been replaced by another woman. He’s not especially perturbed by this state of affairs, nor does he really question why or how this was achieved. He does, however, decide that his real wife has been “taken”, somehow, somewhere, and he is determined to find her.
Leo Liebenstein is utterly unshakeable in his certainty that the woman living in his apartment is not actually Rema, his younger Argentinean wife. She “feels” wrong, an intuition that Liebenstein tries to ascribe to any number of perceived differences. She is too emotional; and sometimes not emotional enough. She loves dogs, where the real Rema (we are told) did not. Her movements are different, although sometimes eerily similar. Even when she is exactly like Rema, Liebenstein attributes this to clever mimicry.
To put it crudely, Liebenstein is crazy. As a psychiatrist, he is constantly on the lookout for signs of psychosis or dysfunction in himself, yet there are gigantic blind-spots in his self-perception. Even as he relentlessly assesses his own thought processes, he apparently finds nothing odd in his conviction that Rema has been replaced by an almost identical woman for no conceivable reason. Further, he feels that his approach to finding Rema, including using the technical papers of an eminent meteorologist, is, if not rational, then at least reasonable. Leo does not even question his subsequent receipt of communications and advice from a long-dead man. These are the sorts of things that happen every day in Leo’s world, it seems.
For a man who frequently contrasts his patients’ delusions with the “consensus view of reality”, he is remarkably unconcerned that no one else shares his view of things. In fact, the only person who sees nothing odd in Dr Liebenstein’s absurd quest for Rema is Harvey, a patient who believes that he is a secret agent for the Royal Academy of Meteorology and receives instructions through the New York Post. Even this is probably because Leo’s quest is mostly inspired by Harvey’s fantastic world.
The problem with Liebenstein (or merely one of the problems) is his ability to rationalise almost anything with a veneer of pseudo-science. He twists his own psychiatric analysis to justify his own muddled thinking. He gains strange meanings and significance from meteorological papers that were never intended and which he barely understands himself. For Liebenstein, it’s a case of science, not actually as it is, but as it feels.
Liebenstein’s quixotic quest and the bizarre circumstances he encounters bring to mind Haruki Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, another story of a man searching vainly for his missing wife. The key difference has to be that where Murakami’s narrative is deliberately counter-realist, it quickly becomes apparent to the reader that Atmospheric Disturbances is operating in a largely rational universe. Any strangeness is predominantly in the mind of the narrator.
While we can sympathise with a sane narrator being confused by an insane world (as in Murakami), Dr Liebenstein is a more troubling protagonist. In particular, we can only imagine the impact on the “ersatz Rema” of Leo’s behaviour, especially when we have no reason to suppose she is actually a replacement beyond our unreliable narrator’s suspicions. It reminds the reader too clearly of the pain inflicted on loved ones by dementia or serious mental illness.
From a more selfish angle, sometimes following Leo on his odyssey just gets tiring. His mental “connections” and leaps can leave the reader feeling as if they must have missed a vital link three chapters back. Galchen keeps things sufficiently interesting and the prose is always engaging; it’s just that one chapter of crazy thinking starts to look a lot like the others.
Even so, while there might not be much method in Dr Liebenstein’s madness, there is in Galchen’s approach. By looking at a disordered mind and a truly dysfunctional relationship, she manages to draw out many of the complexities of much more conventional lives.
Even without the complicating factor of Leo’s psychosis, the Rema-Leo pairing is a difficult one. The age and cultural gaps are significant and their personalities are less complementary than flat-out opposing. Rema is emotional and spontaneous—unfortunately an overused personality type for the Latin woman character—whereas Leo is literal and rather humourless. Unfortunately for marital happiness everywhere, mismatches like these are not uncommon.
Tension in this kind of relationship is inevitable. Leo clearly so little understands his wife or her motivations that it’s laughable that he regards himself as able to identify an imposter. He loves her, yet he’s not exactly clear on who it is that he loves. He’s a hopeless romantic in one sense and yet his romantic feelings are so poorly directed—especially once he abandons the woman living with him to go in search of her “true” doppelganger.
The power of Atmospheric Disturbances is not in its depiction of psychosis, although that’s impressive enough—it’s in how effectively it symbolises this kind of romantic confusion. So often people “fall in love” with little mutual knowledge and understanding—and are so shocked when the other is thought to have “changed”. If not everyone processes this by deciding that their partner is a stand-in, well, the metaphor is no less true.
It’s a deeply sad novel in that it shows how misguided and self-deluding we can be. Yet it also shows the extraordinary self-sacrifice and love that people are capable of. In the messiness and drama, Atmospheric Disturbances pretty much encapsulates the sheer chaos and beauty of human relationships better. - David Pullar
Last December a woman entered my apartment who looked exactly like my wife. This woman casually closed the door behind her. In an oversized pale blue purse—Rema’s purse—she was carrying a russet puppy. I did not know the puppy. And the real Rema, she doesn’t greet dogs on the sidewalk, she doesn’t like dogs at all. The hayfeverishly fresh scent of Rema’s shampoo was filling the air and through that brashness I squinted at this woman, and at that small dog, acknowledging to myself only that something was extraordinarily wrong.Oh, what delights the first paragraph promises! One might as well read that the main character has awakened to find that he has become a giant cockroach overnight.
Leo Liebenstein, Rema’s husband and the narrator of the novel, doesn’t hesitate to tell the simulacrum that he doesn’t believe she is Rema. The woman laughs at her 51-year-old psychiatrist husband, attributing his odd statement to a migraine headache. All the while, he is totting up the odd ways in which she is just like his wife: the same Argentine accent, the same walk, the same hair, but somehow not the same Rema.
It seems like a clue that one of his patients, the meteorologically-obsessed Harvey, disappeared only two days before the real Rema did. Harvey had a habit of disappearing, but Rema and Leo had cooked up a scheme to keep Harvey close to home: the creation of Tzvi Gal-Chen, a fellow with the Royal Academy of Meteorology, who instructs Harvey to monitor the weather in New York City, his home town. Reality overlaps into the novel here, so far as the reader can tell: Gal-Chen is Galchen, apparently the author’s real-life father, apparently actually a member of the Royal Academy of Meteorology; the pictures that appear in the book appear to really be pictures of Tzvi Galchen and his family, including the author. But where does reality begin and where does it end?
That, dear reader, is the question the whole book asks—and never answers. Indeed, perhaps that is a question that cannot be answered, not by this book, and not by anyone.
Leo mounts a search for the real Rema, thinking to find guidance somehow in the meteorological writings of Tzvi Gal-Chen. He travels to Argentina and meets with Rema’s mother, Magda, whom he has never met before. The mystery deepens when Magda asks him whether he has ever met Rema’s husband, stating that she doesn’t much like the husband. Leo has no idea how to search for Rema, especially because he doesn’t trust Magda sufficiently to advise her of the problem or even of his own identity as her real husband. Then he finds Harvey, who is also in Argentina on a meteorological mission, apparently on orders of Gal-Chen. Leo starts communicating with Tzvi Gal-Chen himself, via Blackberry; he soon finds out that Gal-Chen is dead but still communicating with him. Before long, Leo has given up the idea of practicing psychiatry and has taken a meteorological job in Patagonia, posing as a 27-year-old Bowdoin College ice climber.
Is Leo insane? Who has been posing as Gal-Chen and answering his emails? Who is Rema? What does Harvey really have to do with anything? How did Leo get that job in Patagonia? Did Rema have a different husband at some point in time? Was Gal-Chen really a meteorologist in real life? (That appears to be the case, according to Wikipedia, but we all know how unreliable Wikipedia can be; the author of this novel could have written the entry as an extended part of her novel, for all we know.) On the other hand, you can buy a book called Mesoscale Meteorology—Theories, Observations and Models (NATO Science Series C: (closed)), edited by D.K. Lilly and Tzvi Gal-Chen, from Amazon, so perhaps … well. The nature of reality is definitely questionable, as this novel makes us appreciate.
Atmospheric Disturbances can give you a migraine as severe as the ones from which Leo suffers if you try too hard to follow his various speculations, but it is worth just about every throb of the temples. Few novels are so strange, and so thoroughly, thematically, consistently strange, never once falling into the understandable or the sensible.
Unfortunately, Galchen’s novel is perhaps 50 pages too long. As an author, she seems to get stuck in her own spirals, mazes and conundrums, and to be unable to get her characters out and into a resolution, or to find a way to simply abandon them in absurdities. A sort of tedium sets in toward the end of the book, as oddities pile up higher and higher; frankly, were I Rema, I would have had Leo involuntarily committed for his own safety at about page 150 (if not before). But perhaps that is my own unreasonable penchant for underlying realism asserting itself into a scenario in which it doesn’t belong. Still, Atmospheric Disturbances is a promising start on a career of a talented absurdist or fabulist; you choose the label. This is simply the sort of weird, off-center, strange story that I love to read. - Terry Weyna
Atmospheric Disturbances, Rivka Galchen's debut novel, begins with a bold statement: "Last December a woman entered my apartment who looked exactly like my wife" (p. 3). It's a perfect hook into the paranoid world of the novel's narrator and protagonist, fifty-one-year-old New York psychiatrist Leo Liebenstein, as he recalls the loss of his original wife, Rema. My interpretation of this mystery was contextualised by the two epigraphs preceding it: the first being a quotation from the meteorologist Tzvi Gal-Chen stressing that the difficulty of predicting the weather at the human scale is due to our inability to understand the weather as experienced moment to moment; the second taken from Gilles Deleuze's Proust and Signs (original publication 1964), stressing the centrality of silent interpretation throughout the process of being in love. Together, they signpost the centrality of interpretation within the text, ensuring my scrutiny of Leo's tale of swapped wives and sinister plots.
Leo's disowning of the "impostress" has no immediate perceptual basis, as he concedes that she was identical to the original: "Same everything, but it wasn't Rema. It was just a feeling, that's how I knew" (p. 3). Indeed, Leo's only real argument against Rema's authenticity is that she occasionally behaves in ways that he would not expect her to; and this could possibly be seen as a reflection of his professional pride, his need to feel that he fully understands the people around him. To Leo, individuals are comprised of a series of traits that they must slavishly adhere to. The main reason for his suspicion, for example, is that the simulacrum has brought home a dog; an action uncharacteristic of the "real" Rema, who has no love of canines.
Leo's reliability is thus a crucial question. He has a tendency towards self examination, which offers some illuminating clues as to his subjective perspective, such as his confession that: "I've sometimes had the feeling that my life was insignificant, and even that my love was nothing more than an accumulation of contingencies—still, all that ran contrary to the enduring phenomenon of my own sense of great importance" (p. 213). He is at once totally convinced of his superiority and yet also deeply insecure about his popularity and the strength of the relationship he has with his young and glamorous wife. The extent of Leo's self absorption is illustrated when he responds to his wife's replacement by feeling like "a cuckolded husband in an old movie" (p. 5), as opposed to worrying about her safety.
I believe that Galchen uses the science fictional device of the simulacrum as a deliberate ploy, recalling Philip K. Dick stories such as "The Father-Thing" (1954) and films including Don Siegel's Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), wherein sinister forces replace people with copies who fool consensus opinion, but whose imperfection is uncovered by those closest to them as they experience a sense of the uncanny. Readers attuned to sf reading practices will thus be directed to at least attempt to give credence to Leo's perspective on events. A number of seemingly corroborative fantastical events are alluded to in quick succession when we meet Harvey, a missing patient of Leo's with a diagnosis of "schitzotypal personality disorder" (p. 11) manifesting in a "conflict with the consensus view of reality" (p. 12). He describes himself as an agent for the Royal Academy of Meteorology, engaged in their battle to prevent the 49 Quantum Fathers from manipulating the weather for financial gain through their access to the events occurring in possible alternate worlds. Through the lens of sf reading practices, I felt cued to question whether Harvey had been misdiagnosed, and was prepared to find that he had access to knowledge beyond that of those who had deemed him to be ill.
Leo's wife had urged him to identify with Harvey by posing as another agent from the Royal Academy, pretending to report to an actual member of the organisation, the epigraph-providing Tzvi Gal-Chen (a fictional representation of the author's father who, despite being dead within the fictional world, appears to communicate with Leo and Harvey later in the text). This pretence spills over into Leo's relationship with Rema; they started to discuss Tzvi as though he were a close friend, indicating that the lines between reality and imagination had already become blurred for the psychiatrist even before Rema's "disappearance." Leo makes a connection between the arrival of the simulacrum and Harvey's disappearance a couple of days earlier, slowly coming to suspect that the 49 and/or the Royal Academy are responsible for both events. The ensuing action sees him scouring familiar haunts around New York before travelling to Buenos Aires and Patagonia, following interpretive readings of Tzvi's meteorological essays and confused telephone conversations with a temporary member of staff at the Royal Academy.
Far from uncovering evidence to support Leo and Harvey's theories, these investigations make it increasingly difficult for a reader to believe in their version of reality. Despite contact with Tzvi via email, Leo witnesses no objectively extraordinary events and the clues he sees as patterning his attempts to track down Rema seem forced and self created, ultimately leading to an anticlimactic meeting with a member of the Royal Academy that ends with their refusal to speak to him. When Leo and Harvey encounter one another in a Patagonian hotel, it seems to suggest more that the two have become enmeshed in one another's delusions (with several clues that Harvey is the person writing the correspondence from Tzvi), rather than offering any hint that the battle with the 49 exists in reality outside of their shared imaginings.
A strong case can be made that Leo's inability to recognise Rema as his wife is a manifestation of Capgras' delusion, described by V.S. Ramachandran as:
one of the rarest and most colourful syndromes in neurology. The patient, who is often mentally quite lucid, comes to regard close acquaintances—usually his parents, children, spouse or siblings—as impostors. (Phantoms in the Brain [1998], p. 161)
In Atmospheric Disturbances this is mentioned during an exchange between Leo and Rema, wherein the psychiatrist is presented with reports on similar syndromes. Leo's pride and professional expertise combine to make his rejection of her suggestions inevitable. He does not allow the evidence that Rema presents to dissuade him from the "truth" that his wife has been replaced, reasoning that:
If a story seems too random, or perhaps too brilliant, for a "madman" to have conceived of it himself, then consider that the "author" might be reality and the "madman" just the reader. After all, only reality can escape the limits of our imagination. (p.160)
The growing battle of wills between husband and wife is without doubt the central theme of the novel, as Rema attempts to persuade him that he needs to seek help and Leo vehemently defends his interpretative faculties. Clues are provided throughout the narrative to support Rema's position, as Leo's self analysis suggests that his breakdown might be the result of a life of anxious doubt:
all my life, so many alarms seem always to be sounding, and so it becomes near impossible ever to say what a particular alarm might be signaling, or what might have set it off, or if it in any way ought to be heeded. (pp. 15-16)
Whatever the true nature of reality within the text, Leo's interpretations are utterly real to him. I found myself questioning his narration throughout, wondering to what extent his subjectivity had distorted the events he relayed.
For example: he repeatedly exhibits aversion to manifestations of emotion, preferring to retain a professional distance even within personal relationships. It is therefore entirely possible that the whole narrative is his fictionalised account of the emotions he cannot face whilst he falls out of love with his wife, as is suggested by an internal voice: "I'd thought you didn't even love her that much anymore, some part of me taunted. Some parts of me are so mean" (p. 57). Leo is both old fashioned and sexist in his views, not understanding why women would feel the need for a career and valuing them in terms of their beauty. Therefore, Rema's aging may have played a part in his rejection of her as an inferior copy, remaining oblivious to the distress his behaviour has caused his wife: "then I noticed that she—the simulacrum—had fine lines of age on her face. [...] Someone pretty, but not as pretty" (p. 36).
Leo's obstinacy—he consistently blames others for his misfortunes—at times makes the text a frustrating read, but I think that this emotion is central to engagement with Atmospheric Disturbances. It is to Galchen's credit that such an unhappy, arrogant protagonist can hold our attention throughout digressions and rambling self justification for the length of the novel. Galchen sparingly deploys a number of devices to maintain this engagement, such as lengthy sentences that start to lose their meaning when clauses cease to refer to one another, reflecting his distracted, confused state of mind. The short, three or four page chapters are reminiscent of journal entries, adding another layer to the text as the reader imagines it to be the private thoughts of this troubled individual; perhaps an exercise in self examination?
Atmospheric Disturbances certainly lends itself to many alternative readings, but for me the novel's main success is in depicting the inexorable dissipation of a relationship between two people. There is no grandiose sf adventure; Leo's inability to interpret the changes time and circumstances have wrought upon Rema is summed up by his tragic observation that: "usually we were tender to each other through moody periods, but sometimes we'd get struck by a dark mood at the same time and then we'd be lost" (p. 199). It seems obvious that Rema is trying to help him navigate through these troubled times, but that he is too far engaged in the logic of his interpretative entanglement to perceive that he will inevitably lose what he has been striving to regain. However, I think familiarity with sf reading practices enhance the narrative, as it makes one reticent to dismiss the possibility of Leo's story being true for quite some time. The gradual shift towards conviction that he is unreliable is sustained through a willingness to accept the possibility of non-consensus versions of reality existing within the fictional world of the novel. It haunts the text throughout, reminding us that we rely upon cues and conventions in our reading practices, linking us to the novel's interpretative project.
At the end of the novel there is no sense of closure, just a temporary respite, as Leo agrees to return home with Rema, despite continuing to see her as a simulacrum. He even acknowledges that he will one day resume his quest to find the real Rema, suggesting that the events in the novel will become a cyclical occurrence, that all he has experienced will happen again. Despite such a seemingly bleak prospect, the final note is oddly optimistic, suggesting that Leo finds some comfort in searching for a lost, perfect love, predicting that at such a time: "I'll at least know the purpose of the rest of my life" (p. 240). - David McWilliam
In Rivka Glachen's debut novel, Atmospheric Disturbances, a psychiatrist discovers that his wife, Rema, has been replaced with an almost perfect double. The appearance of this doppelgänger, imposter, this "Ertaz Rema" -- an incidental pleasure of the book is seeing how many synonyms Galchen can find for "double" -- who claims in fact to be the real Rema, sends the protagonist on a quest that leads him from the Morningside Heights neighborhood of Manhattan to Buenos Aires and Patagonia, hunting for the authentic wife that he has reason to believe has fallen into the clutches of a world-wide, perhaps even multiverse-spanning, weather manipulation syndicate.
Communication with the dead, theories of infinite universes, The Royal Academy of Meteorology, and one Tzvi Gal-Chen are all part of the novel's ingeniously constructed plot. In spite of these wild ingredients, it's a calm, inward work, held together by the even-tempered and relentless intellection of the protagonist. As the book review cliché runs, this is a "remarkably assured debut." More than that, Atmospheric Disturbances is a fiercely inventive meditation on love, a serious page-turner, and a filebin of weird and beautiful sentences.
I sat down with Galchen at the Hungarian Pastry Shop -- one of the novel's Morningside settings -- for coffee and cookies and the following chat.
You wrote for The Believer on the "many worlds Interpretation" of quantum mechanics -- which also plays a role in your book. Where is the scientific consensus on that these days? Are there many universes?
There was recently a 50th anniversary symposium on the subject at Oxford. The BBC made a documentary that seemed to say that there was almost no debate, that everyone takes it as the reality. But it does have pretty big flaws, especially in probability theory. It's an emotionally appealing idea, but it's still open to debate.
If there are infinite universes created by every...
Decision point.
Right, decision point, does that mean that there's a parallel universe where, right now, everything is the same except that half my face is covered in purple polka dots and there's an elephant sitting at the corner table, flapping its wings?
Yeah, I think that is what it means.
Thank you! I've asked scientists about that and they never answer my question.
There are also universes where the laws of our universe don't apply.
But that would mean that there'd have to be one -- or infinite ones -- where the "many worlds interpretation" didn't obtain! Hmmm, suddenly we're sucked into a black hole of interpretive vertigo... in other science news, there's also a lot of meteorology in your book. How much do you actually know about the subject?
I'm interested in it, but I'm more interested in gross misappropriations of the authoritative language of science. It feels rife with clarity, and yet you don't understand what it means. And I think that's beautiful.
Your narrator repeatedly uses the term "initial value problem," which suggests that we can't accurately project the future because we don't know where we are in the present. He applies the term to the world at large, but seems to have a pretty large blank spot when applying it to himself. I reread Dostoevsky's The Double after I read your book and one thing the two books have very much in common is that both your narrator and Golyadkin are continually self-analyzing...
But to no avail.
Right, there are these huge blank spots in their self-analysis.
In my own experience, the one person I feel like I have the least epistemological access to is me. If I hear my voice on an answering machine, I'm shocked, it's awful. My mom, for instance, can perfectly analyze people around her, but it's like she doesn't even know who she is. I see it all the time. I do it all the time, too.
One of my favorite passages in the book has the narrator sitting across from a woman who is crying. We get an extended mental digression from him on how to emotionally distance oneself from crying people. Finally the woman says something, and he looks down, and he realizes that he's been compulsively eating red pistachios, and his fingers are covered in red coloring, and it occurs to him that he must have been making the loudest cracking and sucking noises while she was crying.
That kind of moment holds a lot of interest for me in life in general. I find it seductive when someone is like that. I have a lot of friends who are deeply awkward, and I'm kind of seduced by the things that cripple them. But it's also a little bit cruel, even though it's seductive and interesting.
Speaking of cruelty, you committed something of a capital crime in the novel, referring to what we're drinking here at The Hungarian Pastry Shop as "a terrible coffee that pleases only for bearing the name coffee and being hot."
Sometimes at night I get stressed out about that. I'm afraid I might get called out on that.
Did you give galleys of your book to anyone here?
No, maybe I should have.
There's a real Morningside Heights thing going in the book. Not a neighborhood you see much represented in fiction.
I know, I feel like I'm battling Brooklyn.
Tzvi Gal Chen -- that's your father's name?
Yes.
And he's dead.
Yes, he died in 1994.
So the information in here as pertains to him is...
It's pretty accurate. He used to come here to the Hungarian a lot, which I didn't know. When I was in medical school I used to study here, and one time I told my mom to meet me here, and she said, "Oh, I know this place. Your father was getting fatter and fatter eating the cakes here every day." So it's almost genetic.
It's a really interesting act, creating your father as a character in fiction. How hard was this for you -- say, composing e-mails from Tsvi Gal-Chen.
I knew that if I tried to create a character that was actually my dad and actually shared his qualities, that it would be idealized or false and weird. But [the method I used in the book] has a lot of appeal to me because I sort of made him into a mock hero rather than a hero. Other characters mistake him for being grossly more important than he could possibly have been. They mistake him for having wisdom, for his work being significant beyond its literal significance -- a pointer in the direction of something else. And that was appealing. It gave me permission to play with those emotions. In my life, he's large because he's my dad, and large because he's gone. And also larger because growing up in Oklahoma, I didn't know anyone else even kind of like him -- I didn't have a context for him. If I had grown up somewhere else with more foreigners, or more this or more that, he wouldn't somehow represent "all of interest in Russian literature." But he was that big in my landscape, so it's fun to actually build him up as a possible hero, though he doesn't quite hold together.
He's also a locus for the emotions that are otherwise foreclosed for the narrator. The narrator projects all the family feeling that is absent in his relationship with his wife onto a photo of Tsvi and his family. And later he has a discussion via e-mail about the afterlife with Tsvi, who he's by then realized is dead. It's hard to imagine getting away with this type of potentially-sentimental discussion in a contemporary novel without some ingenious device of this sort.
I feel that the fictional endeavor can be a kind of useful misdirection. Take emotion that might seem sentimental or useless or weird and project it out into some other arena where it takes on its own shape. While the narrator was sending his attention, involvement and emotions to the wrong person -- not his wife -- the opposite was true for me. My emotional energy was distorted in a way that I enjoyed distorting it, just by paying attention to the book, and then the narrator refocuses my energy where it would actually be, on sentimental family feelings.
If you Google your father, the single match that comes up is a reference in the bibliography of someone else's book to a paper he coauthored called "Volcanic eruptions and long-term temperature records: an empirical search for cause and effect" -- a paper which appeared in none other than The Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society. Which is such a fantastic name -- even the narrator himself comments that he can't hardly believe it's for real.
It is a great name. And my father isn't a fellow of the Royal Meteorological Society, he's a fellow of the American Meteorological Society -- but that's not a great name.
The image of weather patterns that is printed in your book, and which purports to be from one of Gal-Chen's papers -- is that really his?
Yes, though it's grossly misused. It's got a Rorschach quality about it that I really liked.
I loved your narrator's quote about it: "That image from the first Gal-Chen paper I'd seen, back in the library: in addition to reminding me of Rema, it also looked to me like a lonely man, in an alien landscape, glancing back over shoulders as if to ask something of someone who he was not sure was there." It's a beautiful line, but it's also very typical of the narrator -- he's always qualifying his statements.
I do sort of like that his problem is that he can't stop amending the things. That's an eerie thing in Dante -- he'll ask people, "what's up with you," and they're like, "this is my story." The narrator here can't do that.
The following appeared on the Galleycat blog when the sale of your book was first announced Publisher's Marketplace: "This is one super-smart young writer and person, and it's both inevitable and sad that Galchen's book will likely garner the same backlash that greeted Marisha Pessl last summer. Because lord help you if you're young, female and want to write a -- gasp! -- novel of ideas that tries to bridge science and literature."
Well, my mom's very upset that my real age is published everywhere -- she thinks I'm not so young. And I guess I'm not so young. I would be honored if someone disliked me. There was always something mild and bland about me. That would be great. That would be exciting.
Right, you could have your own tag on Gawker. You picked a medical degree before you ditched that in favor of writing and an MFA and all that, so I'm curious: which did you like better, Columbia's MFA program or medical school?
I remember in the MFA program I felt a little embarrassed. I think I lacked the proper cynicism. You're supposed to be: "Oh, I'm so disappointed, it's not this, it's not that." And I was like, "Wow, this is amazing."
In a conversation with Nathan Englander that appeared last year on the Bomb website, you said to him: "Often people hypothesize other writers as an author’s main influences, but it’s always struck me that a donut shop or a girl band or a fourth-grade crush might be far more influential; who or what are your real influences? Or what do you wish they were? Or does this whole notion of influence just make you want to vomit?" I liked that; how would you answer it?
I spent a lot of years just copying one person after another. I wouldn't want to humiliate them by saying who they were. I didn't read tons when I was young. My parents were from Israel, we didn't have a lot of English language books. So I reread the same books a lot, and I also watched a painful amount of TV. I'm not answering this very well... someone who's a contemporary writer who I really love -- if I was going to cite one book in the last ten years that's meant the most to me -- it would probably be The Verificationist by Donald Antrim. He's sort of in the Bernhard tradition, but funny in a different way. Part of what I love about his work is that he's so internal, it's almost like a phenomenology: and then I thought this, and then I had that thought, and this thought. It's an interesting subject matter -- it could be not interesting, because who cares? But he's so articulate and so funny. The Verificationist is all inside the narrator's head over a short period of time. It's not the great social novel, it's something else. An internal landscape. He means a lot to me. My agent wouldn't let me, but I wanted to title my novel "Fleas Mutely Festivaling."
Probably just as well you followed his advice.
The actual three words are a little something my narrator says in a moment when he's describing why he can't fall asleep next to the simulacrum. It's a line in my book that kind of articulates the particular phenomenology of my narrator's mind and, by the by, of the mind of the narrator of The Verificationist.
There’s this idea that recurs throughout Proust, that people from our past are literally not the same people as they were before, not only because they’ve changed, but because our own past selves -- the “I” that had known them -- no longer exists.
I’m not that interested in the medical side of the narrator’s condition -- did he get hit on the head with a board? Is it dementia? I’m more concerned with the emotions behind it. One idea that comes up with theories of multiple universes is that if there are all these other versions of ourselves running around, we should somehow care about them. But if we can’t have any contact with them, what does it matter? In a way, it’s the same with our past and future selves. - Interview by Mark Doten
What Are Your "Classics"? A Q&A With Fiction Writer Rivka Galchen
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