BookBrowse Reviews Atmospheric Disturbances by Rivka Galchen

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At once a moving love story, a dark comedy, a psychological thriller, and a deeply disturbing portrait of a fracturing mind

When Dr. Leo Liebenstein's wife, Rema, comes through the door of their apartment carrying a "russet puppy", he knows instantly that she's an impostor. First of all, Rema doesn't like dogs. And secondly, though this simulacrum has the same "hayfeverishly fresh scent" in her hair, "same tucking behind ears of dyed cornsilk blond", and does a perfect imitation of Rema's Argentine accent with "halos around the vowels", he's certain she's not his Rema. Either Dr. Leo Liebenstein's mind is fracturing or the reality of the book is fractured, and the novel perches on this dangerous ledge, playing with one foot over the precipice, inviting the reader to decide where it will land. Equal parts intellectual exercise and emotional Rorschach, negotiating the web of reality is part of the great delight of reading this gorgeous and brilliantly constructed debut.

No doubt, Atmospheric Disturbances is a very strange book, but it's anchored by the arc of a simple love story (man loses woman, tries to get her back), and Rivka Galchen never confuses complexity with impenetrability. The emotional underpinnings are true and tender -- even achingly familiar -- and ground the reader in a deeper reality even as the plot progresses into more and more surreal territory. As Leo's increasingly crazy search for the missing Rema progresses, the reality of his love for her never falters. In fact, it's strengthened by the careful observations of the minute details that betray the simulacrum. Even as he finds the impostor dazzlingly gorgeous and relentlessly attractive, he has no love for her, only for Rema. As Leo reflects on his first night spent together with the impostor, "I was proud of myself for having the strength of character to leave behind such an attractive woman. I wish Rema could have witnessed that. I just would have liked her to enjoy the spectacle of how obviously and entirely and singularly I loved her." Still, some of Leo's remarks - the impostor has slightly more wrinkles around her eyes than the real Rema, her hair doesn't hold quite the same sheen, she's more annoying or less sincere - signal the possibility that it's his love that has fractured, not his reality. These moments pin the novel to the reader's heart, tugging at ideas about how we sustain love and attempt to repair it when it begins to fade, how we reconcile the person our lover becomes with the person we fell in love with.

Filling her novel with subtle clues and delicate motifs, Galchen is both playful and serious, and has an impressive instinct for how far she can push the boundaries and how much she can ask of her readers. She constructs beautiful sentences, and uncovers humor inherent in language, reveling in mis-hearings, botched translations, and the allure and poetry of scientific writing just outside the layperson's ken. She makes a completely preposterous premise come alive with equal parts fun and heartache, and is generous with her myriad gifts to the very end. Some readers may find the novel's ambiguous reality unmanageable or unsatisfying, but it's exactly what kept me up late to the last page, and what kept me thinking about its strange world long after I closed the cover.

This review was originally published in The BookBrowse Review in July 2008, and has been updated for the May 2009 edition. Click here to go to this issue.