Lot's Daughter

By ADAM WILSON

ATMOSPHERIC DISTRUBANCES
By Rivka Galchen
256 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $24.

From the get-go, Rivka Galchen’s small masterpiece of a debut novel, Atmospheric Disturbances, invites comparison with Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49—the cover of Galchen’s book prominently features the number 49, encircled in its top right-hand corner. On the surface, at least, the novels do have a lot in common; Galchen is not afraid to wear her influences on her sleeve (or jacket). Both novels track narrators who are on futile journeys to unlock the secrets of what they believe to be worldwide conspiracies. Subsequently, both novels are concerned with questions about the nature of reality. They are also funny, and fiercely intellectual. But though Galchen is indebted to Pynchon, her book is resistant to the type of criticism garnered by works like Pynchon’s—accusations of emotional vacancy and robotic characters. Atmospheric Disturbances is certainly cerebral, but at its core it is a novel about feelings: loss, and love. In this sense, the work is as much a challenge to Pynchon’s aesthetic as it is influenced by it.

The novel begins on a “temperate and stormy night”—immediately we are asked to question the reliability of description: How can it be both temperate and stormy?—when Leo returns home to find that the woman before him, who looks, smells, and speaks just like his wife Rema, is not actually his wife Rema. He believes, instead, that she is a simulacrum of Rema. “It was just a feeling, that’s how I knew. Like the moment at the end of the dream when I am sometimes able to whisper to myself, ‘I am dreaming.’” Though Leo, a psychiatrist, has the capacity to explain that these kinds of feelings are, “limbic system instinctual responses—the most superficial and anachronistic of all, like the feeling a baby duck must have when it responds more strongly to a stick painted red than to the beak of its own mother,” he cannot apply this logic in order to understand the flaws in his own reasoning. Instead he embarks on a tragi-comic quest to find the real Rema, a journey which takes him from New York’s Upper West Side as far as Argentina and Patagonia. Mentally he travels even farther, outside of the celestial plane; he corresponds by email with Dr. Tzvi Gal-Chen (also the name of Galchen’s own deceased father), a dead meteorological researcher associated with the Royal Academy of Meteorology.

Leo becomes obsessed with Gal-Chen’s work, particularly his idea that weather is difficult to predict because we can’t objectively say what the weather is at present. For Galchen, this true-to-life weather problem becomes a metaphor for the subjective nature of reality. Leo’s delusional patient, Harvey, believes himself to be a secret agent for the Royal Academy of Meteorology, whose job it is to alter the weather (mentally) and so prevent natural disasters caused by the 49 Quantum Fathers. Early in the novel Leo explains Harvey’s problem as a conflict between his version of reality and,  “the consensus view of reality.” As Leo comes not only to accept Harvey’s imagined reality as truth—as the novel progresses he too believes himself to be an agent for the Royal Academy—but to ignore all signs of his own psychosis (he attempts to act as his own shrink, and finds nothing wrong with himself), including his continuing belief that the woman who looks like, smells like, and claims to be his wife, is not actually his wife, we understand that Leo’s reality, like his patient’s, has seriously diverged from the consensus view of reality.

This is where Galchen too begins to diverge from Pynchon, or more contemporary postmodernists like David Foster Wallace. Whereas most postmodern works seem interested in the larger philosophical questions engendered by this type of story—What does it mean that reality is subjective? If the same weather is experienced differently by two different people is there any way to accurately describe the weather? Is there such a thing as objectivity? If a man believes that a woman is not his wife does that make her (legally?) not his wife? If time has changed the structure and chemistry of our brains, than aren’t we different people than we were when we got married?—Galchen is primarily interested in the emotional repercussions of these issues. In both a literal and figurative sense, this is a book about love lost, regardless of whether that loss has been caused by interplanetary conspiracy or simply by the brutality of time: the loss of connection, the fading of physical perfection, and the waning of libidinous urges. Though we are frustrated by Leo’s inability to realize that the woman claiming to be his wife is actually his wife, we understand his problem as tragedy, and he retains our sympathies; the comedy of his refusal to engage sexually with the simulacrum out of loyalty to his real wife is heartbreaking. Thus, Galchen aligns us with Leo. Every time we feel that we are on the verge of losing him to hallucination and vain scientific inquiry, Leo pulls us back with poetic lamentations over the disappearance of his one true love, “In the silence that followed I could feel the powdery softness of my button-up shirt, and the fullness of the veins of my feet, and the absence of Rema’s hand on my forehead just where she likes to place it when she stands behind me while I’m seated in a chair complaining of a headache, and I heard—maybe it was that accordioned tea bag label—a heated kettle, empty of water, not whistling.”

In one of the novel’s most elegant passages, Leo describes a research trip to the New York public library “Maybe—but really the meekest of maybes—I was pursuing the sense I used to have as a child, when I’d see the illuminated dusk shimmering and winking and—this was back when the library was always warm—I’d feel myself safe in the belly of an enormous and unknowable beast.” This is an apt, perhaps universal, metaphor for the loss of love, and the futile search for, as Galchen/Leo puts it towards the novels end, “the illusion of the recovery of that love.”