I’ll be honest — a big part of my reason for buying Rivka Galchen’s “Atmospheric Disturbances” was its cover. The British “sustainable reading” edition is a paperback with a slip sleeve. On the first layer, purple etchings of various locations and characters from the novel are thrown onto a white background. Underneath the sleeve is a red cover, outlined in white and littered with quotations from other authors and the press. The contrast between haunting visages and blank, bloody space was weird enough to evoke a wild, vivid world in my mind.
Although the plot appears to mimic the shape-shifting world-view of Pynchon or Vonnegut, the novel derives much of its style from more recent fiction. Galchen, for instance, inserts pictures and diagrams into the text, a gimmicky practice that has become all too common over the last 10 years. Ultimately, the novelist’s job is to fill his or her canvas with as precise a portrait as possible, yet Galchen demonstrates an inability to do so on multiple occasions, relying upon action rather than description to flesh out her characters.
Galchen, a former MD, brings the precise distance of clinical medicine to her storytelling. Her choice of detail is scientific though metaphorically intertwined with her characters’ experiences. This emotional distance salvages some of the more ridiculous moments in the novel, rendering the unrealistic believable.
Leo Liebenstein, a 51-year-old psychiatrist and the novel’s protagonist, convinces himself that his Argentinean wife, Rema, is a “doppelganger,” a noticeably worse copy of herself. He does not accuse her of this without addressing noticeable similarities between the two women: dyed-blonde hair, worn boots, a blue coat and a thick accent. Intimate moments reveal that she feels closer to him than he to her; soon, the purity of Leo’s love for Rema turns him against the “doppelganger.” Yet rather than showing her characters moving gradually away from one another, Galchen emphasizes the distance between the couple even upon their first meeting in New York’s Hungarian Pastry Shop. Neither character is Hungarian, but both revel in the foreignness of these delicacies until they speak to one another.
Many years later, Rema encourages Leo to create a meteorologist persona, Tzvi Gal-Chen, who dictates orders to a patient who imagines he is battling New York’s inclement weather patterns. When Leo begins to receive e-mails from the Royal Academy of Meteorology, Gal-Chen’s organization, this ploy turns against itself. The existence of a third party, a trespasser into the intimate on goings between patient and doctor as well as husband and wife, becomes increasingly unlikely. By all accounts, Gal-Chen is dead. Nonetheless, Leo follows these e-mails to Argentina as his mental stability and marriage unravel.
First novels rarely take off quite like Galchen’s quirky love story. Her use of intellectual mystery stimulates the reader in unexpected ways, coming at emotions from new directions that are not always successful. There are holes that the author never addresses, such as why Rema originally chose Leo or what sustains their relationship. The mystery surrounding Rema and Gal-Chen’s disappearances, however, moves the story along at such a pace that it is easy to forget that the anatomy of their love has yet to be explained.
The narrator’s explication of Leo’s psychology encapsulates the first part of the novel, in which Leo defines his interior life in relation to others. By falsely projecting himself onto his wife and his patients, Leo develops a false definition of reality, the balance of which is soon unsettled by his imagination. The second half of the novel deals with Argentina as a site for memory restoration, a recurring motif in literary romance as well as in the work of Argentine writer Jean Luis Borges. The repetitious discussion of meteorological systems underlines the shift that has occurred in Leo’s view of the world. He no longer seeks a simple conclusion about himself or his relationships. Rather, he continues to search for the place where he was once complacent.
The removal of characters from the secondary red cover explains one of the novel’s central mysteries; Galchen and Gal-Chen are separated by a hyphen and capitalization. This doubling repeats itself throughout the novel: its division into two parts; Rema’s two selves; the movement between two hemispheres; and other stylistic devices and plot details accumulate to accentuate duplicity. For Galchen, love is a coin that is maybe endlessly tossed into the air. One moment love may exist, until the onslaught of fate flips it to indifference, confusion or hate. As a result, Galchen’s hand visibly acts within her narrative in order to send characters along their intended paths. Unfortunately, such mechanistic characterization strips the novel of its authenticity and turns it into a meta-narrative.
Although this cover fails Galchen’s sense of secrecy, it provides many descriptions she did not. To call this novel a failure would be to miss the point. Hailing it as an experiment, a musing on everything its author has learned in school, or even an admirable attempt to coalesce fiction, philosophy and science would also be slightly off base. “Atmospheric Disturbances” is at once obtuse and derivative. It marks the emergence of a voice, but not without reservations concerning that voice’s development.
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