The Entire Northern Side Was Covered With Fire, Rivka Galchen

Back when the Three Guys was just that, we toyed with Ms. Galchen’s first novel Atmospheric Disturbances, we had it in line to dicuss, and then something happened. Regardless, this fine young writer is part of the coveted 20 under 40 that The New Yorker just released on the rest of us.

“A silence ate at the air in the room. Sublime. I thought of it as a flavor. Maybe related to Key lime.” This sliver of genius arrives somewhere in the middle of Ms. Galchen’s story that is published in this weeks double fiction issue, or the 20 under 40 manifesto as I like to call it. Some how Trish, our smarter than usual writer/wife has been living in a scorched earth marriage, (hence the title) and didn’t know the man she met, and married after three weeks, was writing a blog about how much he hated her. She’s come home to find this man gone from her life, he left his winter coat, took a ton of shit, even the Parmesan cheese grater. For a while Trish looks for a replacement, the grater, and starts to discover that her brother and her friends never liked her newly vacated ex, and suspected he was “a little off”. Trish’s first novel is a love story between a whale and a bird, and it’s about to be made into a movie, so she’s got that going for her, and she seems shy to tell anyone, but since we’re hearing all of this from her, and she’s so matter of fact about it, almost intentionally segregated from her emotions, it becomes like watching a master carpenter build a house, or a great pool player run rack after rack, it looks easy, and never appears like it’s writing. Ms. Galchen has Trish discuss some of her fan letters with a friend of hers, who was one of the first people to tell her that the decision to get married after three weeks, might need to be rethought. Trish is stumbling at certain points of the story, she’s focused in on the fan letters from prisoner’s who have read her book, she adores these letters. Trish is finding a home in world that she’s been left in, by a man who took his cheese grater and left her with a baby growing in her stomach. Oh, I forgot to tell you, she’s pregnant on top of it all. Read this story, right now.

-JR