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Leo's delusional patient, Harvey,
believes himself to be a secret agent
for the Royal Academy of Meteorology,
whose job it is to alter the weather
(mentally) and so prevent natural
disasters caused by the 49 Quantum
Fathers.
Early in the novel, Leo explains
Harvey's problem as a conflict
between his version of reality and "the
consensus view of reality!'
As Leo comes not only to accept
Harvey's imagined reality as truth
— as the novel progresses he, too,
believes himself to be an agent for
the Royal Academy — but to ignore
all signs of his own psychosis (he
attempts to act as his own shrink, and
finds nothing wrong with himself),
including his continuing belief that
the woman who looks like, smells like
and claims to be his wife is not actu-
ally his wife, we understand that Leo's
reality, like his patient's, has seriously
diverged from the consensus view of
reality:
This is where Galchen, too, begins
to diverge from Pynchon or more con-
temporary postmodernists like David
Foster Wallace.
Whereas most postmodern works
seem interested in the larger philo-
sophical questions engendered by this
type of story —What does it mean
that reality is subjective?
If the same weather is experienced
differently by two different people, is
there any way to accurately describe
the weather? Is there such a thing as
objectivity? If a man believes that a
woman is not his wife, does that make
her (legally?) not his wife? If time has
changed the structure and chemistry
of our brains, then aren't we differ-
ent people than we were when we got
married?
Galchen, who grew up in Oklahoma
as the daughter of Israeli immigrants,
is primarily interested in the emotion-
al repercussions of these issues.
In both a literal and figurative
sense, this is a book about love lost,
regardless of whether that loss has
been caused by interplanetary con-
spiracy or simply by the brutality
of time: the loss of connection, the
fading of physical perfection and the
waning of libidinous urges.
Though we are frustrated by Leo's
inability to realize that the woman
claiming to be his wife is actually his
wife, we understand his problem as
tragedy, and he retains our sympa-
thies; the comedy of his refusal to
engage sexually with the simulacrum
out of loyalty to his real wife is heart-
breaking.
Thus, Galchen aligns us with Leo.
Every time we feel that we are on the
verge of losing him to hallucination
and vain scientific inquiry, Leo pulls
us back with poetic lamentations
over the disappearance of his one
true love: "In the silence that fol-
lowed I could feel the powdery soft-
ness of my button-up shirt, and the
fullness of the veins of my feet, and
the absence of Rema's hand on my
forehead just where she likes to place
it when she stands behind me while
I'm seated in a chair complaining of
a headache, and I heard — maybe
it was that accordioned tea bag label
— a heated kettle, empty of water,
not whistling!'
In one of the novel's most elegant
passages, Leo describes a research
trip to the New York Public Library.
"Maybe — but really the meekest of
maybes — I was pursuing the sense
I used to have as a child, when I'd
see the illuminated dusk shimmer-
ing and winking and — this was
back when the library was always
warm — I'd feel myself safe in the
belly of an enormous and unknow-
able beast."
This is an apt, perhaps universal,
metaphor for the loss of love, and the
futile search for, as Galchen/Leo puts
it toward the novel's end, "the illusion
of the recovery of that love." ❑
Adam Wilson is a candidate for a Master
of Fine Arts degree in fiction writing at
Columbia University. He lives in Brooklyn.
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248 539.0800
1 •770
October 9 • 2008
B23