Notes on Atmospheric Disturbances

Almost through Ms. Galchen's book. A few thoughts --

1) Leo, the protagonist, as the novel begins, thinks of his wife Rema as a `simulacrum', someone other than his `true' wife. What begins as an apparent mystery quickly resolves into the irresolution of Leo's thoughts; we learn not to trust him or the events that occur around him (as he reports them). The `truth' as seen through the filter of Leo's mind is fractured, and we as readers are not afforded the simple refuge of the `actual' truth. What is implicit is that Leo's narration is in fact the truth because it is his truth -- this is the world he sees, and we as readers can only see `the' world through the stained window of his perception. This seems to me a concept rich with possibility, in the sense that it provides the writer with the stylistic freedom necessary to populate the character's quiddities. Consider a passage from early in the novel. Leo is about to lie to his patient, Harvey (Leo is a psychotherapist) so that he can cure Harvey of his itinerant ways (Harvey wanders about the country convinced he works for the atmospheric branch of a multidimensional entity known as the 49 Quantum Fathers):

You really look closely at a person before lying, or confessing love, or doing anything momentous. It is above all Harvey's outfit from that day I remember well: navy blue suspenders hooked onto gray trousers (lightly pilling), a thin-striped button-up shirt (cuffs unbuttoned) with a dark ink stain like Argentina at the left floating rib and with sleeves too short and a collar strangely starched and flipped and seeming poised for flight.

The lack of commas in the last sentence is of course intentional, but in this case authorial intent translates into narratorial peculiarity and the establishment of a voice. We are more convinced of the narrator's sincerity because he does not seem to be writing for us - indeed is completely unaware of the act of writing -- because the way he speaks seems 'natural'. Leo's unconsciousness allows us as readers to unquestioningly sink deeper into his scarred reality, and in so doing inherit his conceptions of it. The same sentence, however, if written in third person, would have come across as being somewhat self-consciously literary and would have been less effective at communicating the somewhat tempestuous intent beneath its writer's thoughts; our readerly attention would then turn to the prose instead of its subject, and whereas some of us would perhaps think of the sentence as being a `great' piece of writing, the more experienced would indict the writer for displaying a brand of gauche self-indulgence that is (for good reason) considered a hallmark of a novice.

2) The book is full of synonyms of the word 'imitation'. In particular, the word 'simulacrum' is repeated several times, to the extent that its presence in any given paragraph becomes almost implicit, almost prepositional.

3) A literary register that nevertheless possesses its share of incongruities. In particular, the narrator seems not to know how to string long sentences together without stuttering into commas, and streams of consciousness seem almost list-like, almost like rote recitation. The semi-colon is shunned.

4) The narrator hears things. Consider a beautiful example midway through the book. Leo is in Buenos Aires visiting Rema's mother Magda. Leo dials a number, and here is the first thing he hears:

[Person on the other end of the line]: Are you calling about the marital tension?

We can qualify Leo's imaginings with our own staid experiences of the everyday; it seems unlikely that a stranger who one is speaking to for the first time will so accurately echo the state of one's personal life. But what does it mean to say that `no one would ever say that'? Did the phone call even occur? It did in Leo's head, that's all should matter to us.

5) At the same time, it is clear -- from say the hyphenations, the satisfactory ends to chapters, the happy novelistic structure -- that it has been written. Not only that, but from the tense of the verbs we are aware that what has happened is past, and that the narrator is presenting his past to us. If he did so, then would he not be conscious of the act of writing itself, so much so that he would become doubly unreliable, that is to say, unreliable about his unreliability? Would he not be anxious to frame himself in at least a not-unfavorable light? Would he not question his unreliabilities? If on the other hand the work is not written, then why does it possess the degree of structure that it displays to us? Why is it not content to degenerate into a Joycean flouting of all that is literally literary? What appears at first almost vulgarly postmodern (and fatally self-conscious) is in fact the beginning of the end of all affirmations of social bondage and the joyful liberation that is inevitably the ultimate of all forms of expression.

6) A more general thought: it is only in a voyeuristic third-person world that there is a consensus viewpoint on character. The first-person, being unaware of who he is, is most likely to be comical in defiance of his own self, is most likely to be internally stochastic. People may not think of me today as being a person that frequents nightclubs, but tomorrow I may visit ten such in a row and claim that I actually enjoyed myself. A character's tastes to me seem by this token fundamentally meaningless (which is to say they don't reflect anything worth speaking about), because they are either intangible (of the "I hate eggplant" category) or social, that is, brought about by persons and situations that are extraneous to the individual. There is of course a third category of tastes that perhaps reflect the individual, but these remain wedged within the specific to a degree that no suitable metaphor can extract. It is then up to the author to become as specific as he can about the specific, in the hope that the reader sees his own individuality reflected within the work that he is reading. The latter seems an impossible task.