Book Title:  Atmospheric Disturbances
Author: Rivka Galchen
Publishing Company:  HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.
Year:  2008
# of Pages: 243
ISBN-13:  978-1-55468-054-2

Reviewed By:  Deborah Ground Buckner (Kansas City Correspondent - USA)

I kept reading Atmospheric Disturbances hoping it would get better, but it didn't.  The concept of the book is intriguing:  A man is convinced he is living with his wife's doppelganger, or simulacrum, as he calls her.  The opening sentence sums this up nicely "Last December a woman entered my apartment who looked exactly like my wife." 

The protagonist and narrator, Dr. Leo Liebenstein, is a psychiatrist who acknowledges that "[t]here was a time when the belief was prevalent that all those who cared for the mentally ill became mentally ill," and perhaps that theory is the key to the rambling, disjointed narrative Liebenstein spews.  Treating a patient named Harvey, Leo learns Harvey believes himself to be a secret agent for the Royal Academy of Meteorology.  Leo tells his wife, Rema (when she was still his wife and not the doppelganger) of this, which certainly should be a breach of professional ethics.  Rema suggests a course of treatment in which Leo will also claim to be with the Academy, receiving orders from renowned meteorologist Tzi Gal-Chen.  Leo begins this subterfuge, and, in the process, becomes obsessed with Gal-Chen and his theories, even putting a picture of the scientist and his family on the refrigerator door.

His belief that Rema has been replaced by a doppelganger leads Leo on a jaunt to Argentina to discover Rema's home and visit with her estranged mother.  His wanderings and stream of consciousness observations continue throughout the book to the point of becoming tiresome.  Though the book is billed as "exhilarating," it is tedious and offers little insight into Leo's nature or any real characterization of Rema, her mother, Harvey, or anyone else.

Leo begins weaving Gal-Chen's theories of weather into his life, which certainly does become a pattern of "atmospheric disturbances."  Perhaps through this and his constant suspicions of his wife, we are to detect the downward spiral of a mind.  But there is never a clear enough understanding of what Leo was before his descent.  There is also too little revealed of the "real" Rema and Leo's relationship with her to enable the reader to understand Leo's insistence that she has been replaced.  There is nothing for the reader to care about, and although this is a fairly short novel, a book of any length is far too long if it fails to engage. 

This is a first novel for Rivka Galchen who is well credentialed to tell this story with an MD in psychiatry from Mount Sinai School Medicine in New York and a master of fine arts from Columbia University.  I wish this creative story idea could have been coupled with rich character development and a less tired literary style.