In Rivka Galchen's fiction, minds and bodies often come apart. There is a dazed quality to the stories in American Innovations, as the narrators observe themselves from the outside and puzzle over the strange view. "I felt as if the real me were out there somewhere, waiting for my return," says the narrator of "Once an Empire". In a strikingly beautiful image, the narrator of "Wild Berry Blue" imagines "the right side of a person lifting up a velvet rope and leaving the left side behind". Curious things happen in these stories – characters mysteriously disappear, ironing boards become animate and walk out of apartments, a woman wakes up to find a breast has grown on her back – but their main subject seems to be how strange it is to exist at all. "Having a body is problematic no matter what," notes one character, as if there might be some other option.
Galchen's much-praised debut novel, Atmospheric Disturbances, locked the reader inside the mind of its narrator, Dr Leo Liebenstein, a psychiatrist who believes that his wife has vanished and been replaced by a "simulacrum". American Innovations features subtler kinds of unreliable narrators, but the crucial action still takes place inside the mind. Where Leo is scornfully certain that his theories are correct, the narrators in American Innovations – almost all of them are unnamed women in their 20s or 30s – are ambivalent, constantly qualifying their statements with maybes and I thinks. They say things like, "My window [was] dark: probably just the coordinated demise of several bulbs, I told myself. Or something."
The reluctance of Galchen's characters to make firm pronouncements about reality is not surprising given they remain a mystery even to themselves. One character travels to Mexico City where she ends up pretending to be a journalist named Alice. At one point, she wonders, "Whose life was this? Not mine." That question could be an epigraph for American Innovations. (It also recalls another Alice, Lewis Carroll's: "I can't explain myself," she tells the Caterpillar, "because I'm not myself, you see.")
At their best, Galchen's stories are funny and inventive. Many of them slyly translate the concerns of 19th-century fiction – money, property, gender – into the affectless, ironic voice of modern American fiction. Sometimes, however, they are too knowing. The narrator of "The Region of Unlikeness" describes two men indulging in "the kind of reference-laden conversation that unfortunately never fails to attract me". In this, the narrator resembles Galchen herself, who has a weakness for scattering her stories with names such as Heidegger and Kant.
In "Dean of the Arts" the narrator refers to "that scene, which may or may not be in Dante … where the narrator is in some boat, crossing some river into the underworld, maybe the Styx, or Lethe". These hesitations are Galchen's attempt to make such references less showy and more plausible as thoughts that might occur to her characters. The effect is to make them more intrusive.
One of the pleasures of American Innovations is the way the stories quietly echo and seep into one another. But without some kind of payoff, these internal connections risk becoming hermetic and self-indulgent. Galchen withholds so much information about her characters that the stories have little emotional weight, and while the prose is always expertly controlled, there are few memorable sentences. The absence of these pleasures puts more pressure on the stories to deliver intellectually, and too often they are undercooked. American Innovations focuses on people lost in their own minds. By the end, I began to feel that the author had fallen into the same trap as her characters.
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