Rivka Galchen is a doctor as well as a teacher at Columbia and a writer of fiction and nonfiction, which has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, and the Believer. Her first novel, Atmospheric Disturbances, was published by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux this summer and it is funny and unputdownable and also deeply sad.

Photo by Aaron Harnly

On endings…

Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes and the gospels according to Mark and Matthew—I’m not sure what makes a good ending, but it does seem that weddings and death just don’t swing it the way they used to 400 years ago. I’ve noticed that lots of great books don’t have great endings, not this century anyway. Even In Search of Lost Time seems not to have found its period, and of course Kafka claimed none of his books were finished. So maybe it’s an epidemic of the now: that endings are maybe harder than they used to be, and, who knows, maybe beginnings are somehow easier? But probably one of the best endings out there—something worth trying to steal from if possible—is the end of the Gospel of Mark. Jesus has been crucified, then he rises from the dead, and his followers, seeing their resurrected Lord, run away in terror. And in the gospels of Mark and Matthew both, when Jesus is on the cross, he himself seems to lose faith, calling out: “My God, why have you forsaken me?” That’s a pretty fierce way to close. It’s like the end of Don Quixote, when Quixote forsakes his life of delusional chivalry; in both cases, the hero (or antihero, however you like it) loses his faith, but he loses it too late, when the reader is already firmly converted. I think that’s a beautiful way for something to end, in a paradox like that.

On dialogue…

Two Serious Ladies by Jane Bowles—Here are characters who never say quite what I think they’re going to say, and as soon as they say it, it seems obvious that was the only thing that a particular character would say. This is some of my favorite dialogue, maybe alongside that other uptight oddity, Muriel Spark. This is a great study in how people don’t necessarily mean what they say, and spend most of their time talking at a delusional idea of who the other person is, rather than who they really are, and a delusional idea of how they’re perceived, rather than how they’re actually perceived.

On voice…

Collected shorts of Robert Walser—Robert Walser, a turn-of-the-century Swiss German, had extremely tiny handwriting and spent the last decades of his life in an asylum, reportedly saying, when asked about further work, “I’m not here to write; I’m here to be mad.” These shorts, not unreminiscent of the best of Pessoa, recount the small, the humble, the exuberantly unimportant, the pleasure of pants, and the sound of growing strange to this world. More prose poems than stories, the works in this collection show how immensely beautiful a project can be when completed with a tiny, soft voice and virtually no plot.

On irony…

The Horned Man by James Lasdun—A brilliant study of irony, the dramatic version, the one where so much of the pleasure comes from the gap between what the character seems to believe is true and what the reader suspects is true. The narrator here makes one bad decision after another, each based on a series of faulty deductions and misperceptions, which leads to a lot of old-fashioned comedy but also elicits that ancient and ever-effective emotion of: “No, Oedipus, don’t do it, it’s your mom!”

On digression and the illusion of plot…

Moby-Dick by Herman Melville—Maybe the best example I can think of for the argument that digression is everything, is where the novel happens… and that the illusion of plot—a high-seas adventure plot even—helps you “get away” with the digression. The finest moments in this story (supposedly told by Ishmael, though he seems to have vanished by the latter half of the book) involve no harpoons or storms or great white anythings, but instead come in a lengthy meditation on the white in a painting hung in an old inn, in an examination of property law as it relates to whaling, in a wry taxonomy of whales, in a short, strange play... After Melville finished this novel—which was trashed by the critics—he said he’d let the evil out of him, and that he felt “clean.” Maybe not a bad guiding creative principle?

On the ethics of aesthetics, if there is one…

The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño—For a simultaneously thorough and madcap examination of the question of whether aesthetics translates into ethics. Imagine a Mexico City daily newspaper with François Rabelais and César Vallejo working as beat reporters, and you’ll have some sense of the Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño’s 1998 (but only translated into English in 2006) novel, The Savage Detectives. The novel is oddly moral, political, and hilarious and makes you think that impoverished failed poets just might save us. But. Even if the prophet here will inevitably be a poet, the novel profanes the religion of poetry as much as it proselytizes it. In a passage describing a gathering of Chileans on the anniversary of Pinochet’s violent military coup, a narrator remarks, “Suddenly someone, I don’t know who, started to talk about evil, about the crime that had spread its enormous black wing over us. Please! Its enormous black wing! It’s clear we Chileans will never learn.”


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