The title of Rivka Galchen’s short story collection American Innovations is significant. Most, if not all, of the ten stories are takes on classics: James Thurber’s “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty”, Borges’ “The Aleph”, Gogol’s “The Nose”, etc. Ergo innovations. These are updates, American-set riffs and reboots of canonical stories.
All of the stories are idiosyncratic and convey distinctly feminine perspectives (all of the protagonists in the collection are women or girls). The narrative voice is consistently eccentric, even loopy. Each protagonist seems inescapably entangled within her own off-kilter perspective. Each is an oddball. A few of the stories are brilliant and memorable.
In the collection’s first story, “The Lost Order”, a woman answers the phone only to be berated by a man complaining about a delayed Chinese food delivery order. This seemingly innocuous case of mistaken identity precipitates a loss of faith and wave of anxiety as the woman hits the inert doldrums of unemployment. On the surface, the time off is meant to serve as a period of self-improvement. But her sabbatical is quickly revealed to be an illusion. She is, we understand, put upon and harassed not just by the accidental stranger on the phone but by her own self-imposed diet regimen, persistent doubts regarding her appearance, her clothes, various inchoate obligations, and by the absent mindedness and carelessness of her husband. She is, or was until recently, “a fairly busy environmental lawyer, an accidental expert of sorts in toxic mold litigation . . . The job was more satisfying than it sounds, I can tell you. To have any variety of expertise, and to deploy it, can feel like a happy dream.”
(Galchen, who went to medical school, brings the unique vantage of the specialist or expert to just about all of the stories. Most of her protagonists are experts at something: the law, library or information sciences, writing. Their expertise is understated, a thing mentioned in passing but which informs the protagonists’ participation in and perspective on events that unfold.)
Although the expertise of the narrator of “The Lost Order” is, or was, empowering, mold works as an elegant metaphor for her own toxic and overwhelming self-doubt and self-denial. She can’t seem to catch a break, to find the psychological space or freedom that underpins empowerment.
“This is not my kind of daydream, I think. This is not my sort of reverie. It is someone else’s. Maybe that’s fine. I was never a Walter Mitty myself. Though I consistently fell in love with and envied that type. But a Walter Mitty can’t be married to a Walter Mitty. It doesn’t work. There is a maximum allowance of one Walter Mitty per household. That’s just how it goes.”
When, at the end of the story, her husband uncovers the truth behind the charade she’s been playing for weeks, she’s relieved. She feels that she has it last accomplished an act of genuine self absorption, a truly selfish act.
“All my vague and shifting self-loathings are streamlining into brightly delineated wrongs. This particular trial—it feels so angular and specific. So lovable. At least lovable by me. Maybe I am the dreamer in the relationship after all. Maybe I’m the man.”
Another story, “The Region of Unlikeness”, is a masterful delight. Inspired by Borges’ head-spinning short story, “The Aleph”, it tells of the fleeting but intense relationship between a young woman and the two strange men, Ilan and Jacob, who befriend her. The duo may be academics or they may simply be eccentric dilettantes; she’s never quite sure. After a period, the two men inexplicably cut her out of their lives. Soon after, she bumps into Jacob, who tells her that Ilan has died. Incredulous, she suspects that Jacob is lying, but soon after receives a package in the mail from Ilan bearing mysterious equations and diagrams. She starts to suspect that the notes outline a solution to the grandfather paradox, an obstacle to time travel. A standoff begins (it turns out that she and Jacob never really liked each other much; Ilan was the glue that held the relationship together.)
At the story’s conclusion the narrator and Jacob meet for a pivotal confrontation. Their mutual dislike has twisted into something complicated and unexpected, powered by the love they both feel for Ilan. Jacob explains what he knows and we are left with a Terminator-esque paradox: the possibility that the narrator is or was or will be the mother of the genius who discovers the key to time travel. Like the story that inspires it, the “Region of Unlikeness” is a sly, urbane and ingenious work of science fiction.
Body consciousness is also a strong theme throughout American Innovations. One finds in just about all of the stories comments on diet plans, foods and meals avoided, clothing choices regretted, and assessments of the attractiveness of women on a scale from “hot” to “ugly”.
Nowhere is this more so in evidence than the title story, “American Innovations”. A young woman, a student of library and information sciences, visits her “thin, tan” and entrepreneurially successful aunt, who lives in Singapore. During the visit her aunt tells her about her “September 11”, the day on which she suffered a health scare – a lump in her side – caused by a damaged silicon breast implant. Later her aunt says “the best outfit is a good figure”, which sets the story off on its hallucinatory and decidedly (one could say obsessively) body-conscious path.
A year later the narrator discovers, “an anatomically anomalous and yet familiar-seeming lump” on the side of her lower back.
“I lifted my shirt I would say what I saw was a wow. Even though it was modest, maybe a B cup in size. It didn’t need support. It manifested all the expected anatomy, the detailing of which I feel is private.”
Three stories immediately come to mind: Gogol’s “The Nose”, Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis” (in Galchen’s story, the narrator says, “I woke from not particularly uneasy dreams”, echoing Kafka’s famous opening line), and Philip Roth’s novella The Breast, itself a riff on both “The Nose” and “The Metamorphosis”.
Yet in American Innovations Galchen brings a fresh interpretation to the theme of sudden, inexplicable change. She runs with the idea that grotesque transformations are all fun and games until, potentially, someone’s life and self esteem are in danger. Galchen takes a well-cadenced, first-person approach that’s both humorous and harrowing.
Somewhat in denial, the narrator goes about her business. But the new breast cannot be concealed. A teenaged girl in an after-school program the narrator volunteers for notices: “You look sideways pregnant”. This ignites a debate among the girls in the program about whether the breast is evidence that she’s “a bulimia” and whether the mysterious growth might in fact be “hot”.
The doctor she eventually consults (whom she trusts in large part “because she was very pretty”, which grants her an undeniable authority) advises her against acting too hastily to remove the new breast.
“Just take some time and think about it. Do you really want to change yourself just to suit fashion when you don’t even know what fashion will bring next? That may not be the person you want to be.”
Later still the narrator discovers that one of the girls in the volunteer program has posted photos of her online, which have caused a stir. Some viewers consider her “an ugly”, while others express sympathy. Everyone weighs in on a debate regarding her intentions and choices. After requesting that her photo be removed from certain sites she gets invited to participate in an interview show on YouTube titled American Innovations, which explores the themes of “freedoms from and freedoms to”.
What pops most are Galchen’s vivid characterizations. The stories that give us access to characters and perspectives outside of the narrators’ insular perspectives or obsessive preoccupations are the most engaging. The characters of “The Region of Unlikeness” and “American Innovations”, the mysteriously recurrent and elusive author, Manuel Macheko, in the story “Dean of Letters”, and the stepmother Q. in “The Late Novels of Gene Hackman”, are all vividly wrought. Conversely, the story “Once Upon an Empire”, about a woman whose furniture flees her apartment, falls flat. The furniture evinces no character and the narrator’s perspective is claustrophobic. The story succumbs both to its insularity and to the befuddling dissonance that magical realism often suffers from when applied to an American context. It’s no fun to listen to people recount their dreams.
Overall the collection has the consistency of a good album. Three or four of the stories – “The Region of Unlikeness”, “American Innovations”, “Dean of the Arts”, and “The Late Novels of Gene Hackman” – are highly recommended standouts. The rest, while well crafted, lack that element that pops or echoes.
Galchen’s style is charming and wry (“I was at home, not making spaghetti,” says the narrator of “The Lost Order”; “The fluorescent lighting glanced off the steel refrigerator in a way that was like not being in Kansas anymore,” says the narrator of “American Innovations”), but the style isn’t notably innovative. Despite a range of different settings, themes and characters, her stylistic devices and flourishes don’t vary much over the sequence of stories. When read one after the other (admittedly, not always the best way to read a story collection) the style wears thin, and the exercise of innovation focuses solely on theme. Given the exceptional talent on display in this collection, one wonders why Galchen would invoke innovation but decline to apply it to her style or form?