Atmospheric Disturbances: A Novel

This was a random selection from the library shelves & I hit a winner. The cool, clinical tone was perfect for the story of mental derailment from reality. The story brought up some provoking thoughts about reality (what it is vs. what we perceive), how we rationalize things, how we engage or detach from the world around us, how we cope. I'd recommend it to some, but I realize it is not a book that will appeal to others.

A post-modern psychological novel, not quite exciting enough to call a thriller, but a worthy read nonetheless. One day a clinical psychiatrist wakes up to discover his wife has been replaced with a doppelganger (or has she?) and he ends up on a hemisphere-crossing journey in the hopes of figuring out a mystery.

Thematically built around the loss of parents (Rema, the doppelganger wife) lost her father in her youth, according to her he walked out on her and her mother, whilst her mother claims he is a Desaparecido, the book never stating which is true. Leo, the husband and psychiatrist, lost a father at some point in his youth (or maybe never had one, I do not remember exactly) and the book makes it clear his analytic mind has made an show more effort not to confront these emotions. And hanging over the entire book is the Author's own father, Tzvi Gal-chen, who is a character in the story, and also a loved one that Rivka lost in her childhood. (The book includes several, presumably real, pictures of their family)

The journey taken on the book begins in New York City, before traveling to Buenos Aires and later the extreme southern end of Argentina, as it builds towards not necessarily a climax, but certainly an ending. But most of the journey is spent in the mind of Leo, a scientific man to the extreme, who never doubts his own sanity, even as he begins to believe in an elaborate conspiracy of weather systems and doppelgangers, one that he may have invented entirely on his own. Or maybe not. show less

Well that was quite odd. The basic premise of the book was well-done: a psychiatrist's descent into psychosis. Here Dr. Galchen's medical background really shines from the accuracy with which she portrays her protagonist's failed reality checking and lack of insight, to the subtle historic clues that suggest a schizophreniform personality (excessive paranoia, overvalued ideas), Galchen parades nearly every possible positive psychotic symptom. Leo experiences thought insertion, overvalued ideas, pressure speech with train of thought patterns, hallucinosis, and delusions of every flavor. It's all done organically, realistically and from a first person perspective. While unique and originally fun as a concept, once Leo finishes his descent show more into psychosis, the plot doesn't really go anywhere, and I found the last 25% or so of the book dragged.

What really struck me though, almost immediately, was the inclusion of Tzvi Gal-Chen as a character. "How odd, Gal-Chen, that sounds familiar," I thought, then remembered that the book was by Rivka Galchen. I then checked the acknowledgements, yup, she includes Tzvi in there. A quick google search revealed that Tzvi Gal-Chen is Rivka's (deceased) father (But no information about the surname spelling discrepancy). The pictures of him in the book, citations of his research and figures from his papers are all real, as is the description of him and his computer programmer wife living in Oklahoma with their two kids (Google has no opinion as to whether Rivka and her brother were indeed spoiled, bad at soccer, and good at math). In an interview, Rivka mentioned that readers rarely notice but for her the inclusion of her father is the largest part of the book. Well, I noticed and for me, it loomed large, as you can tell by the amount of googling it provoked. It's just such a strange decision: why include one's dead father in an otherwise non-autobiographical novel, as the hallucination of the psychotic protagonist? To make the reader feel like they're going crazy and overvaluing ideas? To invoke a Freudian feel wherein the reader sits around asking "but what does she mean by her dead father?" It's so very weird and it completely broke my ability to otherwise concentrate on the novel at all.

What I did appreciate even more knowing that Rivka grew up with a meteorologist for a father was her obvious love of language. It was clear that she had been rolling around words and turns of phrase in her head for a long time, taking them in and out of context, so when she got the chance to explore every possible meaning of every phrase, she really made the technical language sing. show less

While browsing the "New Books" shelf at my library, I picked up this book, which begins: "Last December a woman entered my apartment who looked exactly like my wife." Intrigued, I stood and read the first couple of pages and thought, "I must read this". Sadly, I have to report that the book does not live up to its promise.

When the protagonist, New York psychiatrist Leo Liebenstein, arrives at this conclusion, he is also dealing with a patient, Harvey, who believes that he is receiving secret orders from the Royal Academy of Meteorology in controlling the world's weather. Leo's "false" wife, Rema, whom he refers to as "the simulacrum", suggests that he pretend to be an agent of the RAM as well, transmitting directions from a show more meteorologist named Tsvi Gal-Chen. The relationship between this therapeutic fraud and Leo's search for the real Rema are the crux of Galchen's book.

Now, am I right? Those plots, and their intertwining, ought to make for good reading. But Galchen's prose is so dense and convoluted that it was hard to get through the book, much less enjoy it. I don't mind that it's never clear whether Liebenstein is himself suffering from mental illness (some reviews firmly state that he is suffering from Capgras Syndrome, though Galchen is never definite) or whether Rema really has been replaced by a fake. Nor do I mind that it's unclear whether the RAM really is trying to stop a cabal of errant meteorologists. What I do mind is that Galchen never makes me care about the outcome or her characters, so at the end (which is very unsatisfying, by the way) I just felt as though my struggle to finish had been a waste of time.

The fact that Galchen uses her own surname, names a person called "Tsvi" in the acknowledgements, and, as one discovers with a bit of research, has used parts of her father's work and history in her book, could have given the novel extra depth, but in Galchen's hands seems merely self-indulgent. show less

The strange tale of Dr. Leo Liebenstein, his missing wife, Rema, and his psychiatric patient Harvey. Leo's wife returns one day with a dog and Leo senses right away that she is a forgery, a simulacrum. With the help of Harvey, who believes himself to be a secret agent capable of contoling the elements, Leo journeys throughout the world in search of his real true love. But is she really missing or is Leo simply going mad? Can overanalysis actually drive you nuts? Read the following excerpt and you decide:

"I saw the blond woman's face in the mirror, and if she appeared to be looking at the same point in the mirror that I was looking at, then actually she was looking at my face in the mirror while I was looking at her face in the mirror, show more that our faces could be in the same places (in the mirror) depending on just where one was looking from. So she wasn't thinking of, looking at, only herself. Nor was I thinking of just myself. That's just what it seemed like if one didn't account for anticipatable perceptive distortions."

Hmmm....On the other hand. There are little gems sprinkled throughout: "His response was neither random nor spontaneous; it was predetermined by his previous ideas about me; habits of thought are death to truth; I was outside of my habits; and he -- he was wrong." I kinda like that one.

Reminiscent of Kafka's explorations, but not nearly as deftly crafted. A bizarre little book. Strangely memorable. show less

I picked up "Atmospheric Disturbances" after reading a piece that Rivka Galchen wrote for Harper's. She argued that Daedalus, who built Icarus's wings and successfully escaped from the maze, might be a better metaphor for science's work than his son, Icarus, who is remembered mostly for his hubris and tragic demise. I thought that this was a pretty striking idea, so I'm sorry to say that I felt a bit let down by Galchen's debut novel. Like her essay, it's inspired by science – Galchen introduces her meteorologist father as a character and has a good ear for the accidental poetry of scientific terminology. Her writing's her own, too; it's quirky and occasionally very funny. Still, this novel proves what anyone who's already sat through show more "The Butcher Boy" or read Bessie Head's "A Question of Power" already knows – novels told from the perspective of the disturbed tend to be pretty disturbing, and, in the end, sort of tedious. The metaphor that Galchen's unhinged narrator uses to describe his unraveling relationship to reality is, appropriately enough, inspired by science and, again, very clever, but I'm not sure it makes her novel any easier to read. I also might have been put off by the fact that "Atmospheric Disturbances" treads the same territory as Richard Powers's "The Echo Maker," another novel that I found interesting but also sort of dry. While I admire both Galchen and Powers's willingness to write novels that engage with current scientific theory, it's possible that I'm just too much of a Modernist to enjoy them. I still think that there's a lot left to say about the things that don't show up too easily on a CAT scan: memory, consciousness, and, as Faulkner put it, "the conflicts of the human heart." show less

I found this book somewhat slow going at first, but finished it quite rapidly when I picked it up again after a longish hiatus. Fair warning: If you prefer straightforward narratives (not to mention a narrator whose grasp of reality is not in question), the off-kilter beauty and complexity of Rivka Galchen's first novel will not appeal to you. What would you miss? Some very lovely writing and some darkly humorous insights into the hall of mirrors that presents itself to us when we take a closer look at our relationships with people around us (even, perhaps especially, those relationships we presume to be our most intimate).