Pocket Review: Atmospheric Disturbances by Rivka Galchen

Atmospheric Disturbances
Rivka Galchen
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2008

This first novel starts out irresistibly:

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.