Over the weekend I finished reading Atmospheric Disturbances by Rivka Galchen. Galchen was named a “20 writers under 40” person by The New Yorker. The cover was absolutely beautiful. The aesthetics in general were really great in this book, the inserts, type, everything.
Galchen writes well, if a bit disjointedly. Throughout this novel, which requires a sort of suspension of disblief, then a questioning of that suspension, I wasn’t sure what she was aiming for. At first I thought it was a Pynchon-esque adventure drama. The tone, plot, and main character supported this idea throughout the book, but the supporting characters and the point of view ended up throwing doubt on this idea.
The main character, a psychiatrist, claims his wife has been abducted and replaced with a near look-alike only he can spot. He goes off on these attempts at adventure to find his real wife, even following the path of one of his patients. Galchen is either cleverly covering her main characters psychotic break, tricking the reader into thinking he isn’t insane, or she has written a dull thriller. I think if I knew which book she was writing, I would have liked it a lot more.
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