Atmospheric Disturbances.

Galchen, Rivka (author).

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We often use weather to describe ourselves: she has a sunny disposition; he is rather chilly. But for Galchen, meteorological metaphors are veritable wormholes into the unconscious. In her funny, sad, and ingenious first novel, New York psychiatrist Leo keeps his patient, Harvey, who believes that he is a special agent for the Royal Academy of Meteorologists, grounded by claiming that he, too, works for the meteorologists. For verisimilitude’s sake, Leo says his contact is Tzvi Gal-Chen, an actual member of the actual academy. Harvey improves, but Leo becomes increasingly bewildered. It seems that Rema, his enigmatic Argentine wife, has disappeared and a simulacrum has taken her place. Perhaps Gal-Chen’s work with Doppler weather radar can help, or is Leo thinking of the doppelgänger effect? As her unmoored analyst searches for Rema in Argentina, Galchen––a Borgesian writer armed with a medical degree and a Rona Jaffe Foundation Award and intent on a rapprochement between art and science––pays poetic tribute to her late father, the real-life meteorologist Tzvi Gal-Chen, and considers our myriad “errors of interpretation.” Witty, tender, and conceptually dazzling, Galchen’s metaphysical tale of longing, grief, love, and the volatility of the self gracefully charts the tempestuous weather of the human psyche.