Atmospheric Disturbances | Galchen, Rivka

Atmospheric Disturbances | Galchen, Rivka | Decent debut, ultimately unsatisfying

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Atmospheric Distur...

	Atmospheric Disturbances Galchen, Rivka Blackstone Audiobooks, Inc., 2008 - 6 pages average customer review:based on 38 reviews view larger image
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When Dr. Leo Liebenstein's wife Rema disappears, she leaves behind a single, confounding clue: a woman who looks, talks and behaves exactly like her. Certain that the original Rema is alive and hiding, Leo embarks on a quixotic journey to reclaim his lost love.

Tzvi is real

Tzvi Gal-Chen, the real one, the infamous University of Oklahoma Professor, and father of the dehyphenated author Rivka Galchen, occupied the office next to mine at OU, in the years preceding his death. The novel cleverly recycles posthumous biographical material about the real Tzvi Gal-Chen into a weird story, which is okay to read from beginning to end. But I got my money's worth from the pair of photos on page 147. What a hoot!

What would Tzvi (the real one) have thought of this story? Aside from the fact that he is in it, his daughter wrote it, and his scientific work serves as a rich source of puns, he would probably be bored with the unheroic schleppers that serve as characters in the novel. Nevertheless, the dialog among the schleppers is really quite witty. Maybe that is true in many modern novels. I wouldn't know.

Into the story, the author interjects commentary about psychiatry, current events, NYC, Argentina, and more. I found these interjections worthy to ponder. Did I mention meteorology?

For those of you suffering from the psychological effects of long-term exposure to meteorological jargon, this book may be for you. Example: doppelganger -> Dopplerganger. But you will need to read the book, and know a little bit about Doppler radar, to appreciate the great humor in that. If you notice me inappropriately grinning and giggling in meteorology seminars, it may be that "retrievals" and "ensembles" now push me over the edge.

The schleppers drink a lot of tea, play with it, wash down cookies and pastries with it. Fifteen years ago, Tzvi handed me a similarly tea-soddened story, "Enroute to Boston, 1969". I recall his daughter had won a prize with it at Norman High School. Oh, maybe it's not the tea that bothers me so much, but the seminar-style junk food that they wash down with it. Why can't these schleppers take better care of themselves? Thus only four stars.

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Decent debut, ultimately unsatisfying

The books starts out very strongly, but drags for the last three quarters. There's a few interesting questions, but they all go unanswered. Looking forward to bigger things in the future.

Disturbances: Inside and Out

Atmospheric Disturbances, a first novel by Rivka Galchen, is filled with fun and promise. Her narrator is a psychiatrist named Leo, who is certain that the woman who came home one day was not his wife but rather a perfect, or near perfect, simulacrum. It's a promising start for readers who enjoy the bizarre. Leo sets out in search of his true wife and of a patient who has also disappeared. The patient had seemed to have delusions about working for the Royal Academy of Meteorology on a secret project with military implications. A rival group known as the 49 is out to foil things. Have they kidnapped his wife?

As he proceeds on his quest, which takes him to Argentina, Leo consistently psychoanalyzes himself and others in an effort to remain convinced of his own sanity, and Galchen seems to have a firm grasp of the shop talk. But is he really mad, or are all the strange happenings not just in his mind? For much of the novel we tend to opt for the former explanation, but then things start to confirm his "delusions."

Of course I won't reveal the ending, but I will offer a reservation. The reader has some work to do to gain a clear picture of how this narrator's mind works and/or how his world turns. At times we wade so far into his brooding that we need hip boots, and we might wonder if it will be worth the effort. And yet, in its best moments, the novel insinuates itself into the tradition of the great writers of distorted realities such Franz Kafak and Thomas Pynchon, and in fact Galchen's 49 is probably an homage to Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49.

If Atmospheric Disturbances sounds like your thing, you might also try The Testing of Luther Albright by MacKensie Bezos. Her protagonist is not as odd as Galchen's, but Luther also has a few screws that need tightening. This is a beautifully crafted psychological study in which everything in the external world correlates with cracks and stresses in Luther's mind. Is the dam he designed defective? Did he err when installing the plumbing in his house? For a controlling person like Luther Albright, these issues are symbolic of flaws in his relationships, or in his perceptions of them. Tension builds slowly, and the inner demons begin to emerge like cracks in a damn, or in the living room plaster.

Both of these are fine first novels.

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