“Last December a woman entered my apartment who looked exactly like my wife.” So starts Rivka Galchen’s first novel, Atmospheric Disturbances, plunging the reader headlong into the unstable world of New York psychiatrist Leo Liebenstein, the narrator of this incredible and convoluted tale. Liebenstein is convinced that his wife Rema has been replaced by an imposter. This other woman (referred to from here on in the novel as “the impostress,” the simulacrum, the dog lover, and a host of other monikers) looks and acts a lot like the “real” Rema, but for Liebenstein there are countless small and essential ways in which the two women differ.
The story leads us on a protracted journey to find Liebenstein’s real wife, involving a trip to Argentina, a scientific institution known as the Royal Academy of Meteorology, and conversations with a dead meteorologist, Tzvi Gal-Chen. (The latter, according to a review in the New Yorker, is a tribute to the author’s father, a meteorologist who died in 1994.) Further complicating Rema’s disappearance is the story of Harvey, one of Liebenstein’s schizophrenic patients, who is also missing. It is through Harvey that we are first introduced to the Royal Academy, and to the mysterious and evil 49 Quantum Fathers, an underground group that runs “self-interested meteorological experiments.” Galchen does not explain the premise or let us in on what is behind Liebenstein’s apparent delusion. Instead, the reader is left to try and read between the lines, to guess at what the narrator does not want to or cannot tell us.
In Atmospheric Disturbances Galchen has created an elaborate and playful world that is alternately humorous and disturbing. As the story continues, Liebenstein becomes convinced that he will find Rema through the works of Tzvi Gal-Chen and the Royal Academy for Meteorology: “I decided to look again more closely at Tzvi’s research paper, ‘A Theory for Retrievals,’ a work that claimed to be retrieving ‘thermodynamic variables from within deep convective clouds,’ but that I suspected—or hoped—might be about quite a bit more.” The more involved Liebenstein becomes in his search, the further removed he seems from reality.
Underneath Galchen’s playfulness and Liebenstein’s clinical language is a story of love and of loss. Liebenstein can no longer see his wife as the woman he once adored: “The real Rema wouldn’t have put her hair in a bun. She wouldn’t have held my wrist so tightly. … She would have commented, in at least some small way, on my as yet unshaved morning handsomeness.” That his delusional state is not a response to a sudden betrayal or rupture, but rather to small actions and trivial details, highlights the profound sense of alienation that can grow between two people.
Although the emotion of the story is occasionally lost at the expense of cleverness, Galchen leaves Liebenstein and the reader in a state of uncertainty about our ability to know ourselves and recognize the ones we love. Liebenstein is not an easy character to sympathise with, but it is this seed of doubt that eventually endears us to him and makes us feel for his wife. Atmospheric Disturbances is an uneven book, but one that in the end may win your heart.
Maria Schamis Turner is the editor of carte blanche (www.carte-blanche.org).
