American Innovations: Stories
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Rivka Galchen
Charles Bock on Rivka Galchen's American Innovations
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For a number of years now the appearance of new work by Rivka
Galchen in our best magazines is an event in the literary world.
People talk about it on Twitter and share any links to on-line
work. This book shows why and then some. Galchen’s prose is that
rarest of doves, sui generis, product of a unique and feeling and
uncompromising and original mind. The premises for her stories —
for example answering a wrong number where someone has dialed
thinking they’re ordering from a Chinese restaurant, and then
taking the order — are often the kinds that perhaps a handful of
writers might imagine; the stories, however, are emphatically
singular. David Foster Wallace was like this. Helen DeWitt is
like this. Think Murakami. Kafka. Indeed, American Innovations
could not have a better title for Galchen’s new book of short
stories; she truly is one of the high innovators of fiction
working in this country at this historical moment.
Ten stories in this collection: according to the back cover, each
is in conversation with some canonical short story (The Lost
Order, for example, the book’s opening piece, reimagines
Thurber’s The Secret Life of Walter Mitty). All these stories do
it with a female twist, giving us female heroines. My guess is,
if you get the references or meta-conversational part of the
stories, great, an already yummy cake gets a meta-layer of
knowing and delicious icing. However, if, like this reviewer,
you’ve never read The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, nor many of
the original inspirations for these remixes, it matters not a
whit, your enjoyment of the stories on their own merits will be
plenty rich. “The Lost Order,” begins
Charles Bock
I was at home, not making spaghetti. I was trying to eat a
little less often, it’s true. A yogurt in the morning, a yogurt
at lunchtime, ginger candies in between, and a normal dinner. I
don’t think of myself as someone with a “weight issue,” but I had
somehow put on a number of pounds just four months into my
unemployment, and when I realized that this had happened — I
never weigh myself, my brother just said to me in a visit, “I
don’t recognize your legs” — I wasn’t happy about it. Although
maybe I was happy about it. Because at least I had something that
I knew it wouldn’t be a mistake to really dedicate myself to.
That first half of the first paragraph, in a fashion that is
somehow seductive and deft (Galchen’s sentences and paragraphs
invariably end up being carnivals of fun), lays the groundwork to
establish our narrator as maybe the not most reliable egg. Still,
on page one she answers a call to her home, a wrong number from
someone who, yes, thinks they are ordering Chinese take-out. Our
erstwhile heroine takes that call and betrays nothing. Bizarre
and intriguing, surreal, and fun, the piece could easily turn to
slapstick. Instead, we gradually discover that our narrator is
having a bit of a personal crisis, that both her career and
marriage might be at a crossroads, and that she might not know
herself at all. This is writing that is uncompromising in its
intellectual mission, but at the same time, takes pains to keep
its readers invested, caring even.
Another story. “The Region of Unlikeliness. ” A woman meets two
older men at a diner; she falls in love with one, is revolted by
the other; in the course of the story we learn the man she’s in
love with may have travelled through time and be her son; the man
she is revolted by may end up being her future husband, the
beloved son’s her. Heavy mathematical principles and terms get
thrown around. There’s also this dilly of a sentence: “I was
accustomed to using a day planner and eating my lunch alone in
fifteen minutes; I bought my socks at street fairs. ” Like “The
Lost Order,” and a number of the pieces in this collection,
“Region” first appeared in the New Yorker. “Sticker Shock” gives
us a woman argues with mother about money from a sold house;
“Wild Berry Blue” has a woman missing her dead her while
telling the story of her girlhood desires’ awakening, via her
first crush, on a heroin addict of a McDonalds worker; in “Once
an Empire,” a woman comes home from the movies to discover all of
her belongings are heading, of their own accord, down the fire
escape. The magical stories still very much capture a slice of
life, even as they send you beyond the outer regions of
possibility (indeed, some do dance with the infinite). In two
pieces, a mother causes all kinds of neurotic stress. Others have
failing or failed marriages. More than one story mentions a dead
her (as such, when we see a her’s care for his daughter in
“Wild Berry Blues, it informs so much) and more than another one
includes a palpable desire for a baby. Many are shaded with a
sense of mourning, or that something huge and bad has just
happened.
The more of American Innovations you read, the more apparent it
is that these pieces, for all their flashy premises, are very
much about internal lives in chaos, each of the woman in these
stories are in some sort of crisis, less caught in a burning
building than a life that has flamed out of control. They are
going through something, and, it is equally apparent, these
crises are not going to end with the end of the story. The
stories in American Innovations may use irony, they may creep
emotions between lines and paragraphs; but make no mistake are
deeply, emphatically felt. Most of the time they are
breathtaking. Their sum total, indeed, will knock you for a loop.