Though Rivka Galchen's Atmospheric Disturbances doesn't appear anywhere in this dream, I promise that's what this dream is about.

{Photo by rocketlass.}

Right before I went to bed last night, I read for a while from Rivka Galchen's impressive and strange new novel Atmospheric Disturbances (2008); as I read, I found myself reminded, more than anything else, of Kazuo Ishiguro's The Unconsoled (1995), a book I read on its publication thirteen years ago and in a certain sense haven't stopped thinking about since. It's a giant mess of a book that partakes of nearly equal parts Kafka and Chaplin, about a pianist who is perpetually finding life interfering with life, small everyday distractions and failures of memory wreaking havoc on his efforts to be a good husband, father, and artist.

Ultimately The Unconsoled is as frustrating as it is memorable; I tend to think of it as a magnificent failure--yet one whose very ambition has shadowed all of Ishiguro's subsequent novels, showing them up for the circumscribed, disappointingly minor works that they are. {Though I should be clear that I'm in a definite minority here, as the consensus view of Never Let Me Go (2006) in particular is that it was brilliant.} I haven't stopped rushing to the bookstore to buy Ishiguro's novels the minute they're available, but so far I'm still waiting for him to write something as impressive as The Unconsoled.

Which brings me to my dream. Along with my parents, brother, sister, and rocketlass, I had decided to swim across Lake Michigan. Though the dream didn't offer an explanation, I had also decided to carry my copy of The Unconsoled with me. So I was more or less swimming one-armed, switching off every once in a while but always keeping one hand above the waves, the book--a 500-plus-page hardcover--clutched tightly. Fortunately, it turns out that not only is Lake Michigan not nearly as wide as one might think when standing on Montrose Beach looking east, but it also features quite a few spots where it's shallow enough that a swimmer can touch down and rest for a moment before plowing on. Carrying my book, and not being a particularly strong swimmer to begin with, I took full advantage of the shallow spots along the way.

When I reached the Michigan shore, I settled down on the beach to read the still-dry book as a sort of reward for my impressive accomplishment. Not wanting to damage the jacket with sand, I pulled it off the book . . . only to discover that back in 1995 when I had last read The Unconsoled, I had for some reason decided to drape a chapati around the cloth binding under the jacket; as you might imagine, after thirteen years, the chapati and the binding both were pretty gross.

And that's my dream about Rivka Galchen's Atmospheric Disturbances. Maybe it makes you want to read it?

"I left a note for the sleeping woman, though I wasn't quite sure to whom I was really addressing it."

{Photo by rocketlass.}

The opening sentence of Rivka Galchen's Atmospheric Disturbances (2008) is extremely promising:

Last December a woman entered my apartment who looked exactly like my wife.

Whether the woman really is an imposter or the narrator is suffering from the terrifying Capgras delusion, who cares at this point? Something is dreadfully yet intriguingly wrong, a great position from which to start a novel.

But it quickly gets better: Galchen peppers the first few pages--all I've read so far of the novel--with several moments of tiny slippage and oddity, designed to signal that there's something going on here. The atmosphere of overall strangeness begins with the simple fact that the narrator's pseudo-wife barely reacts when he directly tells her that he doesn't think she's really his wife; it thickens with the sort of distracting attention to perfectly described details that is common to Nabokov's unreliable narrators--the woman "imitated Rema's Argentine accent perfectly, the halos around the vowels," "the ascending pitches of our teakettle's tremble are so familiar to me"; and it quickly moves into the truly bizarre, like this moment when the narrator, surreptitiously rifling the woman's purse,

noticed what I was doing--unfolding credit card receipts, breathing in the scent of her change purse, licking the powder off a half stick of cinnamon gum.

Though there's always the risk that this sort of accumulation of mysterious, half-freaky details will ultimately add up to little, I will admit to being a sucker for a story that begins with such clear, yet unexpected warnings that all is not as it seems; it's one of the great pleasures offered by some of my favorite authors, including Kazuo Ishiguro and Philip K. Dick.

Yup, Ms. Galchen has hit upon a good way to keep me reading. Back out to the porch with this book!