2008 Summer Arts Preview

By Rivka Galchen
May 27

Meet Leo. He's a brilliant psychiatrist married to a beautiful, much-younger woman named Rema. Leo's patient, Harvey, is obsessed with meteorology — Harvey believes he is involved in a secret war being fought over multiple alternate earths by people who can control the weather. One day, out of the blue, Leo realizes that his wife Rema has been replaced by a stranger who looks almost exactly like Rema. Who could have done it, and why? It's the central question of this cerebral debut novel, which winds in and in on itself like a nautilus shell. Leo's razor-sharp mind obsessively analyzes the available data, arriving by strenuous intellectual methods at increasingly demented conclusions. And then Leo starts getting interested in meteorology...