The Whether Report

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Leo Liebenstein is a brilliant Psychiatrist. He has a patient named Harvey. Harvey is obsessed with meteorology: he believes that he is part of a secret interdimensional war between rival groups who can control the weather. ("I handle mostly mesoscale events," Harvey says modestly. "I specialize mostly in local wind patterns.") One day, out of the blue, Leo realizes that his beautiful, much younger wife Rema has been replaced by a simulacrum, a stranger who looks almost exactly like her. Who could have switched them? And why? Then Leo starts getting interested in meteorology ...

The sick, cerebral thrill of ATMOSPHERIC DISTURBANCES (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 241 pages), a dense, fractally complex first novel by the conspicuously talented Rivka Galchen, lies in watching a shrink, one of the trusted guardians of consensus reality, drift out of his lane and into oncoming traffic. Over and over again, Leo's finely calibrated mind analyzes the available data and arrives by the most rigorously logical methods at a series of increasingly demented conclusions. Which makes you realize, queasily, how worthless those methods were in the first place.