Authors@Google: Rivka Galchen & Fiona Maazel June 4, 2009

Favorite:

The Authors@Google program welcomed Rivka Galchen and Fiona Maazel to Google's New York office to speak about writing and their first novels. Their discussion was moderated by their mutual editor David Rogers.

Joshua Henkin on "Last Last Chance" NYTimes

Last Last Chance isnt your average novel, thanks in no small part to Maazels funny, lacerating prose. The book fits squarely in the tradition of novels about the wealthy and dissolute, but ultimately its less John Cheever than Denis Johnson — the Denis Johnson of Jesus Son, with its drug-addled narrators — though Maazels voice is more caffeinated, more fueled by attitude (I dont even know whether they do the Eucharist at a memorial. Do the Eucharist? Is that like do the hustle?) and more prone to hectoring. Theres nothing worse than a drug addict with opinions, Lucy observes.

Maazel is particularly adept at conveying the desperation of the addict, how everything — even a potentially world-ending plague — is eclipsed by the need for a fix. She depicts the mixture of terror and sang-froid as people stay riveted to the TV, watching superplague mark its serpentine course across the map even as they go about their own business. Most of all, she shows what fear does to people: They might say: I am simply protecting my family. Or: I will screw you over a thousand times if it means protecting myself. How long before the prom teens or the family in F-7 disbanded? How long before survival trounced compassion?

James Wood on "Atmospheric Disturbances" (The New Yorker)

We are all afflicted at times with the cataracts of the quotidian, where routine clouds our ability to notice what we once loved about the person we live with—this is the novels universal appeal. But it is a measure of Galchens courage as a novelist that she insists on leading the reader to the universal only through the singular. Liebenstein is a New York psychiatrist, who, naturally, thinks that psychoanalysts are all mad: I could never be an analyst, those people are too unpleasant, too passive-aggressively authoritarian, and yes, all crazy and out of fashion to boot. Like Svevos narrator, who insists that the surest proof he never suffered from the Oedipus complex is that he was never cured of it, Leo has a great deal invested in his intricate forms of denial. He goes on a quest for the missing Rema, a quest that takes him to Patagonia. (Or so he tells us.) A patient of his named Harvey has also gone missing. Harvey believes that he can control the weather, and that he is a secret agent for the Royal Academy of Meteorology. According to Leo, Rema once suggested that, as part of Harveys treatment, Leo should pretend to be an agent of the Royal Academy, too, but one of superior rank. (It would be a way of reining in Harveys fantasies.) Leo is at first hesitant, then avidly adopts the plan. So the doctor has crossed over to the patients side of the desk, and partakes of his insanity, while proclaiming his ability to tell the difference.

Most first-person unreliability in fiction is reliably unreliable; rather mechanically, it teaches us how to read it, how to plug its holes. Double unreliability—or unreliable unreliability—is rarer, and more interesting, because it asks much more of the reader. Galchen, a playful writer, delights in having Leo tell us, for instance, that, while Harvey is clearly delusional, the Royal Academy of Meteorology is an institute whose existence a consensus view of reality actually would (and this surprised me at the time) affirm. In reality—that is, in our world—there is no academy by that name. But the novel wants to disturb any sense of what might constitute a consensus view of reality, the better to depict the instabilities of a perforated mind. Leo has, perhaps, a version of Capgras syndrome, whose victims come to think that an impostor has replaced a family member or friend. But whereas, say, Richard Powerss most recent novel, The Echo Maker, is explicitly about the phenomenology of this delusion, complete with a barrage of neurological facts, Galchens novel more boldly denies us the comfort of a conclusive explanation. Atmospheric Disturbances is a novel of consciousness, not a novel about consciousness.

This event took place on May 1, 2009.