Rivka Galchen tells stories about characters who obsess over strangers; who cling to things that may not be real; who see patterns where patterns don’t necessarily exist; who invoke science as an almost supernatural force, carrying with it the power to alter lives. Her 2008 debut novel, Atmospheric Disturbances, hit the literary world hard, earning her comparisons to Borges and Pynchon, but the stories in her second book, American Innovations, prove less invested in surrealism and unreliability, veering closer to the sort of “slice-of-life” fiction that The New Yorker occasionally gets teased for favoring. Yet, in their looseness, these stories improve upon her novel, in which Galchen occasionally gave the impression of trying too hard, straining for eccentricity instead of simply opening her eyes and observing life around her. In American Innovations, the eccentricity feels organic.
Many of these ten stories have already appeared in major magazines (half of them were first published in The New Yorker); thus, serious readers may recognize and remember much of the work here. Save for one unfortunate story titled “Sticker Shock,” in which the author does her best David Foster Wallace impression, Galchen’s voice is casual but smart, her narrators (eight of these stories are written in first-person) trying to sort out the oddities of modern life. These stories eschew conventional plot; instead, they favor the gathering of strange details, evoking a general mood of dread and anxiety. “I’m not one of these people who are disheartened that the universe is expanding,” one character tells us. “But as news and data breed and the crowded channels grow ever noisier, I do feel that the space is ever increasing between me and it, whatever it might be.” The uneasiness in these characters’ lives feels (to the characters themselves) very real, even if they cannot usually determine the exact cause.
Galchen’s protagonists struggle with what it means to be normal, even if they find themselves attracted to the wrong people, or getting outdone by their mothers-in-law at parties, or watching all their furniture leave the apartment on its own. Where Lorrie Moore’s new book, Bark, failed, Galchen’s book succeeds—at sketching out how being alive can feel less like a series of choices than like a collection of random events. In Galchen’s world, a person wears one’s own life like a shirt stitched together, patchwork-style, from scraps of fabric found scattered on the sidewalk. In this way, she recalls Moore, although her voice is more rigorous, often tending toward the scientific, as if her narrators are less telling their stories than they are attempting to take objective notes on their own lives.
If anything drives Galchen’s narrators, it’s the desire to solve a (usually unsolvable) mystery. In “The Lost Order,” an unemployed wife tries to figure out what it means that a man keeps calling her by mistake to place a takeout order. In “The Region of Unlikeness” (the story that most recalls Atmospheric Disturbances), a woman does a “little detective work” to figure out the truth behind an old friend’s scientific theories. In “Wild Berry Blue,” a young girl is confused about why she so interests the recovering heroin addict who works at the local McDonald’s—and why she can’t stop thinking about him. In “Dean of the Arts,” a woman visiting Mexico City wonders whether a new acquaintance is Manuel Macheko, a writer with whom she was obsessed as a child. One of the strange quirks of Galchen’s narrators is that they often seem direct, even though the stories themselves seem to reveal so little. Many of the characters are able to admit that they understand their lives only vaguely, but they make such statements within contexts so inscrutable as to render those statements obsolete. After all, we can never quite blame these characters for lacking a grip on their lives; if we lived in a world where furniture can walk out of an apartment on its own, we’d lack a grip on our own lives too.
So what truths do these stories arrive at? Sometimes, I confess, I’m not so sure. Galchen is a rich writer, never dull, but sometimes opaque to the point of meaninglessness. The mood of these stories is consistent, portraying an anxiety that lives under the skin, making everything feel, well, off (don’t forget, her first novel hinges on a man who refuses to believe that his wife is, in fact, his wife, and not a simulacrum of his wife, for reasons he can never explain). But some of these stories feel like unfocused rumination, and Galchen rarely lands the kind of knockout punch that Lorrie Moore lands in her greatest works.
But Galchen is a considerable writer—one whose characters often feel tapped into frequencies that nobody else can hear, looking for solutions to problems that may not exist (neither the solutions nor the problems). So perhaps it’s fitting to not always grasp Galchen’s work. Reading American Innovations, I occasionally felt like a Galchen character myself, looking in vain for answers to questions so grand and ubiquitous they almost vibrate in the air.
