So begins the short-story-seamstress Rivka Galchen’s debut novel. “Atmospheric Disturbances” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008) tells the story of Dr. Leo Liebenstein, a New York psychiatrist whose wife has disappeared and been replaced by a double, sending him on a quest to find her and a missing patient, Harvey, who believes himself to be a secret agent working for the Royal Academy of Meteorology. Galchen lets her protagonist create an imposter wife, a simulacrum, for it is through this absurd filter that he can analyze his marriage. The minute to omniscient emotional intricacies of a lengthy relationship are investigated through such an original perspective and by such a strong talent that the novel has been called everything from “witty and tender” to “erudite and chock-full of heartache.”As the writer-daughter of one meteorologist and one computer programmer, Galchen succeeds in her personal quest to unite the oft considered separate disciplines of the sciences and the humanities. This book looks at love (and weather) from a very human perspective. Local psychological movements propel the narrative, but the book works as a microcosm because of the presence of weather (and love), two universal elements.
At the novel’s open, the reader watches the initial meeting between Leo and the woman he’s convinced is a double sent home in place of his wife. He senses the switch immediately—the simulacrum brought home a dog, something the real Rema would never do— and passively rejects her. He recognizes his wife’s cornsilk blonde hair, her baby blue coat with jumbo charcoal buttons, even the way in which she unzips her boots, but he’s sure this isn’t his wife. “It was just a feeling, that’s how I knew. Like the moment near the end of a dream when I am sometimes able to whisper to myself, ‘I am dreaming,’” he explains. It is evident, though, that his rejection stems from adoration, from a loyalty to his wife. In moments of weakness he even lays kisses on the simulcrum’s wrists and feet, remnants of the woman he loves. Professionally, Dr. Liebenstein is occupied by Harvey. Harvey suffers from, among other things, a heightened sense of relevancy. He is convinced of his ability to control weather phenomena and that the Royal Academy of Meteorology is sending him secret messages through page six of the New York Post. These messages often contain orders which send Harvey throughout the country on various meteorological missions, resulting in a high frequency of disappearance. Searching for a treatment instead of a cure, Leo succumbs to the simularcum’s tremendously unethical suggestion that he pretend to also be an agent for the Academy. This practice isn’t unheard of. In fact, it wasn’t always considered unethical. Psychiatrists of the 1960s and 70s would commonly engage in a patient’s delusional reality in order to make some sort of alliance. Perhaps fittingly, there was also once shared a belief that all of those who care for the mentally ill become so themselves.
Leo is a character of droll tragedy. Having lost, over time, the strongest love his has known, he seems caught in the eye of heartache, searching and grasping through a wayward fog of delusion. The winds of confused longing carry Leo out of office and across the South American continent in search of Rema. Just like Esther Greenwood’s descent into mental illness, Leo’s slide is convincing. But it is also unique, this because Galchen tricks us. Good readers will pick up on hints intimating Leo’s psychological deterioration (in case a transcontinental search for his real wife isn’t proof enough) and may even pat themselves on the back; but we’re hesitant to come to any conclusion regarding Leo’s sanity because he uses the techniques of his profession to not only identify the very same traits we’ve come to notice, but also justify his insane logic. A second reading gives seemingly mundane character observations new life. Early in the novel, when discussing Rema, Leo says that “she’d been inflicted by a very American idea of identity, to think that who you were mostly consisted of what you did to get paid — that seemed silly to me.” He - a psychiatrist losing his mind.
This relationship between writing the human character and professional study is a practice championed by Galchen, whom, like Chekhov and William Carlos Williams, attended medical school, taking all of her electives in psychiatry. The work of her late father, Tzvi, a professor of mesoscale meteorology, is directly quoted throughout the work. She quiet brilliantly captures the hidden poetry in scientific language, which is haunted by history and incidental allusions. In a recent interview with The New Yorker, Galchen said, “I wanted the narrator of my novel to co-opt the rhythm, the cadence, the vocabulary of science, even as he so obviously misappropriates them to whatever purpose suits his emotional needs.” Fans of language in general will find delicious bits of humor throughout (in one such instance she introduces the term ‘dopplerganger effect,’ a pitch-perfect play on doppler radar).
Leo’s investigation leads him to the enigmatic guidance of the meteorologist Dr. Tzvi Gal-Chen, the secret workings of the Royal Academy of Meteorology and their cosmic conflict with the 49 Quantum Fathers—a rouge agency with the worst intentions—and the, ahem, heightened sense of relevancy which leads him to consider the possibility that he, or Rema, or Harvey might lie at the center of all of this.
Part of the reason this novel works so well is that balance Leo maintains, walking the border between logical and mindless. There’s a quote from Aristotle often mistranslated to mean “Philosophy begins in wonder,” but a better translation reads as, “Philosophy begins in the uncanny.” This suggests that philosophy begins at the moment when what you think you know as truth becomes a little less stable. Is Leo crazy, or is he just married? Because that’s what this novel really is, behind all of the science and unfathomables, it’s a novel about the nature of marriage. It’s about how people change over time, about how the participants in a long relationship can lose track of the sense that they're both dynamic and slowly chip away at themselves, hoping for a lasting, comfortable fit. And this is what makes meteorology an ideal metaphor for love; it is unpredictable and, essentially, unreadable. If we can’t read the weather, in all of its blunt honesty, how can we continue to feed the delusion that we could ever completely know another person? Like a surrealist painter, Rivka Galchen’s work seems absurd until you recognize that it takes root in something very concrete. This book will influence, whether you realize it or not. It’s the sort of story which you’ll come to realize reads you even more than you read it. This is the perfect book for hurricane season.
P.S. Hey, lazy writers, just because the 49 Quantum Fathers sort of reminds you of Pynchon’s “The Crying of Lot 49", the comparison isn’t necessary. In fact, the group was almost the 39 Quantum Fathers, originally a reference to Hitchcock’s “The 39 steps.”
P.P.S. If this read like a love letter, well, I mean, seriously:
1 comment:
looks like alanis morisette to me.
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