Atmospheric Disturbances
By Rivka Galchen
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, $24)
Dr. Leo Leibenstein, a well-regarded, oft-published psychotherapist is having troubles of his own. He comes home one day to find that his lovely wife Rema has disappeared — and been replaced with a near-exact replica of herself.
Leo, of course, is beside himself and unable to cope with his situation. He launches a full-scale investigation into what has happened to his real wife while simultaneously doing his best to avoid any contact with the fake one. At the same time, one of Leo’s patients, Harvey, shows up in an emergency room after having once again disappeared for a long stretch of time from his mother’s home.
Harvey’s “conflict with the consensus view of reality” is that he is a secret agent for the Royal Academy of Meteorology, an organization that researches changes in weather patterns. Upon doctor and patient’s reunion, Leo and the fake Rema launch a hoax that hastens Leo’s slow spiral into his own mental illness.
The two research fellows at the academy and come up with one that can act as a secret superior for Harvey. Harvey takes the bait and soon begins communicating with the shadowy Tzvi Gal-Chen, who in truth is of course Leo and the fake Rema.
As the story progresses, Leo escapes his increasingly claustrophobic New York apartment and travels to Argentina to search for Rema. He meets his real wife’s estranged mother — a woman who can’t stand her daughter’s husband as she welcomes in this nice gentleman as a boarder and friend of Rema’s. But is it Leo she doesn’t like or someone else? Since he disguises his own identity, and obviously can’t ask his missing wife, he’s never quite sure.
But more questions arise in Leo’s mind. Who’s the strange neighbor walking the dogs, and why is he so familiar with Rema’s mother? Who was Rema’s father? What have they done with his wife? And then, as Leo strikes up an e-mail conversation with someone he believes is the real Tzvi, he begins to wonder if perhaps Harvey’s dealings with the Royal Academy are not as crazy as they sound.
Throughout the story, Leo self-diagnoses: “I was then a fifty-one-year-old male psychiatrist with no previous hospitalizations and no relevant medical, social, or family history”; “And it strikes me now as worth recording that on account of Harvey’s ramblings — I had been lulled into believing that I was working with a mostly sane man, my norms had redshifted without my noticing — we had lost our bearings.”
The entire story, in fact, is written as a doctor would dictate notes on a patient — in this case, the patient being Leo. It’s a method Galchen (the author) handles well, being an M.D. herself. And as more about Gal-Chen (the meteorologist) comes clear, the more we see that things are not as they seem — but then again, as Leo’s mind deteriorates, his own view of reality is increasingly coming into conflict with “the consensus.”
That that view of reality can continually be maintained throughout Atmospheric Disturbances keeps our suffering hero in check, even as the story teeters on the brink of absurdity, is a testament to Galchen’s grasp of her characters and her ability to keep a flap of a butterfly’s wing from turning the book into a destructive tornado, leaving nothing but a mess in its wake.
The Lazarus Project
By Aleksander Hemon
(Riverhead Books, $24.95)
A century ago, in Chicago’s Gold Coast neighborhood, a young Romanian immigrant named Lazarus Averbuch knocks on the front door of the home of city’s police chief, George Shippy. Fearing for his life, Shippy shoots the unarmed Lazarus, setting off a witch hunt against the communist and anarchist Jews in his adopted hometown.
But it was all a sham. Lazarus had apparently only wanted to deliver a message, but with the word of the police chief against some (now dead) kid with broken English in a time when apathy toward foreigners — particularly Jews from Eastern Europe — easily ignited the embers of hatred, guess whose version of the story would be told?
Chicago Tribune reporter William Miller, who was given the privilege of traveling with the assistant chief of police, objectivity be damned, made Shippy’s side of the story the de facto official version. Miller’s one-sided, inflamed reporting stoked those embers, and justified the subsequent abuse and even occasional murder of the people who had been a part of Lazarus’s life, even tangentially.
Moving forward a century: Brik, a Bosnian immigrant to Chicago, is fascinated with the real-life story of Lazarus and the unwarranted suspicion his death placed on Chicago’s Jewish immigrant population. So he wrangles a grant from a sympathetic socialite, grabs Rora, a fellow Bosnian acquaintance and serial photographer, and heads off to Eastern Europe to learn more about both Lazarus’s history and his own.
These two alternating stories make up Hemon’s The Lazarus Project, in what becomes a story that’s part European road trip novel, part critique on the way anti-immigrant forces (and the people who opposed those forces but wanted to keep things quiet) ruined the lives of hundreds, if not thousands of innocent people who wanted nothing more than to be accepted and make a decent living.
At the same time, it’s a story of Brik’s own descent into what could be considered clinical depression. As an unemployed former graduate student who basically stays home while he continues to not write a comprehensive history of Lazarus, he recalls how he has never felt good enough for his wife, a neurosurgeon, or her all-American family. And as the trip progresses across what was once behind the Iron Curtain, Brik feels more and more detached from the woman he thought he loved — to the point where he thinks he may not even return to Chicago.
With all of that going on, what makes The Lazarus Project so compelling is Hemon’s incredibly visceral, descriptive road trip: Crazy taxi drivers careening across the country (and the center lane divider) in vehicles clearly unfit for travel, and then taking offense when Brik attempts to put on his seatbelt; Rora’s unbelievable stories of the warlord he ran with during the Bosnian war; the duo’s violent reaction to another cab driver’s attempt to engage in sex trafficking; Brik’s infatuation with a young museum docent who may or may not have been related to Lazarus.
Hemon also does a nice job of fleshing out the story of Olga, Lazarus’s despondent sister, who becomes a victim of the Chicago police’s brutal interrogation tactics and inhumane bureaucracy while at the same time being heavily pressured to let sleeping dogs (and her brother, who she wishes to have buried according to Jewish law) lie by the city’s wealthy German Jewish community.
While Hemon attempts to draw parallels between then and today through characters’ names and, on occasion, deeds, that effort largely falls flat to the detail of Brik’s travels and slow mental slide downward, and, eventually, the trip’s shocking conclusion.