Enduring Understandings
Characters
Rivka Galchen has a tendency to almost always incorporate a female protagonist and/or narrator; most of these women are in their 30’s with a husband and children. The significance of this is that it reflects her own life and outlook on the world and most importantly, feminism and anxiety.
In Galchen’s collection of short fiction American Innovations (Galchen, 2014), she embodies the use of a female narrator in place of a male one in which the story was inspired by. This approach on 9 out of 10 of the stories demonstrates how each would be different had they been written and/or narrated by women rather than men. According to Carolyn Kellogg, “That literary wit and incisiveness is accompanied by something else: a genuine admiration for the original work, despite the implicit feminist critique.” This indicates that Galchen can see past her own feminist perspective and can admire and appreciate something that might not fall in line with it. This aspect of Galchen can also be seen in her many female protagonists. Along with being married and having children, the characters have even more in common. They all seem to have similar mannerisms and logic to those of Rivka Galchen herself.
To add on to the idea that the characters mock Galchen’s self, another big characteristic all protagonists seem to struggle with is anxiety. In an interview conducted by Maris Kreizman, Rivka discusses her own personal struggle with anxiety and how writing her most recent novel, Everybody Knows Your Mother is a Witch (Galchen 2021), helped her to self medicate. Within this book, the main character, Katharina Kepler, struggles with cultural anxieties as she is being accused of being a witch, which at the time (1615) was one of the worst things you could possibly be accused of. Furthermore, in her book Little Labors (Galchen 2016), the main character (herself) writes about all of the struggles and anxieties that come with being a new mother. In an article, Lee Matalone of Electric Lit describes the book as, “a crystallization of maternal anxieties” that in 130 pages “packages together the obsessions, paranoias, desires, etc. of a new mother”.
Closely related to anxiety, Galchen’s characters, especially in American Innovations (Galchen, 2014), seem to struggle with disorientation, or a mental state of confusion. While conducting an interview with Galchen for The Chicago Tribune, Kevin Nance asks if Galchen’s religion, Judaism, has anything to do with this pattern of disorientation in herself and her characters. In short, it does because as a Jewish child in a community of non-Jewish people you have to be two different people at home and at school and this can cause a person to start disassociating with their actual self.
In conclusion, Rivka Galchen creates a pattern in her writing that connects all of her protagonists to herself. Almost all protagonists/narrators are women who are married with children, struggle with anxiety and disorientation, and are feminists.
Enduring Understandings
Setting
Rivka Galchen doesn’t seem to have a pattern in regards to her settings. In fact, they are all extremely different from one another.
In her first ever children’s book, Rat Rule 79 (Galchen 2019), Galchen introduces the readers to a fantastical world, The Land of Impossibilities. According to Restless Books, an international publisher for a world in motion, this world is a “loopily illogical place where time is outlawed, words carry dire consequences, and her unlikely allies are a depressed white elephant and a pugnacious mongoose mother of seventeen.”
As described by Eve Glasberg of Columbia News, the book tells the story of Fred, a young girl about to turn 13, and her math teacher mother, who are seemingly always on the move. Fred is on the cusp of becoming a teenager and is in a new place without friends. Fred witnesses her mother, who is dressed as if getting ready to attend a party, standing in front of an “enormous paper lantern - into which she steps and disappears.”
The setting for this story allows Galchen, and her readers, to open their minds and experience a unique and highly spirited atmosphere as they follow Fred on her quest to find her mother, braving dungeons, Insult Fish, Fearsome Ferlings, and a mad Rat Queen.
Of this book, Galchen says “one thing that I noticed about the way kids experience stories is that they bring more magic to the page than grown-ups do; what's interesting is already inside their own mind, so a kids' book is more like setting up a playground,” as noted by Eve Glasberg. The setting for a children’s book can allow for more flexibility to introduce fantasy and magical components into the story.
In her novel, Everyone Knows Your Mother is a Witch (Galchen 2021), Galchen introduces the reader to the German duchy of Wurttemberg in the early 1600’s where fear and suspicion abound, and a plague is raging. The book follows astronomer Johannes Kepler and his elderly mother, who is accused of witchcraft. According to Galchen, she started “emotionally writing” the book in 2016 and completed it during modern-day plague times, which, along with political instability, made the story relevant to today’s times. “So that was kind of basically the way that the political hostility and fear and anxiety of that time processed through me.” Galchen stated in an interview with Maris Kreizman of Literary Hub.
Galchen’s novels have widely varying settings, from the surreal Land of Impossibilities to the historical yet real Wurttemberg to even more variety in her collection of short stories in American Innovations (Galchen, 2014). Despite the variety of settings, Galchen does seem to stick with a main theme of telling the stories of women.
Enduring Understandings
Plot/Structure
Rivka Galchen’s stories all tend to have some things in common: a skewed, sometimes nonexistent and highly considered structure. Whilst using this technique, she never seems to fuse the stories into a composed speculation. However, there is one outlier from this structure, and that is one that ties in psychology with structure.
To begin, in the article Rivka Galchen’s Unsettling Powers written by Hillary Kelly, the author states, “You know a Galchen story when you spot one: Her structures are asymmetrical and ruminative, her prose cool. Her sentences all have excellent posture. Meanwhile, her narratives thrive on unreliability.” From this, an audience can infer that Galchen’s writing is somewhat all over the place, but at the same time perfectly in place. The process in which this structure is crafted consists of putting her thoughts and feelings through a “sufficiently profound process of estrangement so that whatever is most important is also secret from [me].” By using this technique to generate a structure, Galchen always leaves an element of surprise.
On the contrary, in her book American Innovations (Galchen, 2014), Galchen ties 10 entire stories together using their protagonists' psychological processes. Cited from The Literary Hub, Adam Kirsch states, “they are united in a profound way by their protagonists, who are recognizably versions of the same person.” Additionally, as stated by myself in a literary criticism, “without having stitches between stories, Galchen psychologically unites her main characters by displaying them as a variety of the same or similar characters.” From these two sources it can be seen from Galchen’s works and from this conclusion that she does have a sense of formal structure in this book compared to her others.
Back to Galchen’s skewed and unorganized structure of writing, in her novel Everybody Knows Your Mother is a Witch (Galchen 2021), this technique gives a surprisingly engaging factor to the story. In the article, Careful Liberties: On Rivka Galchen’s Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch by Eric Farwell, the author states, “Galchen launches into a choral narrative, blending different voices, perspectives, and forms. This approach highlights the contradictory testimonies…” In addition to this technique the way she structures the story as a whole keeps readers engaged. She does this by alternating chapters about “interior observation” and “ townsfolk’s testimony” with the aim of “keeping an otherwise straightforward story engaging.”
In conclusion, Rivka Galchen tends to write her stories in a relatively unorganized fashion which in turn keeps her readers entertained and engaged. However, there is the exception of American Innovations (Galchen, 2014) where she employs a psychological approach to connect all of her stories.
Enduring Understandings
Speaker
In many of Rivka Galchen’s works she chooses to employ a first-person narrator in order to develop an intimate and connected relationship between the narrator and the reader. By doing so, the audience is given a much more enhanced understanding as to what is happening with the narrator psychologically than they would if the book were in third-person, ultimately allowing a deeper perception of the story. However, depending on the narrator, the reader can be deceived and led to believe something that is not true.
To begin, in Galchen’s novel Atmospheric Disturbances (Galchen, 2008), the narrator is Dr. Leo Liebenstein, a psychiatrist who suffers from his own paranoid delusions. When his wife, Rema, suddenly and mysteriously disappears, one thing is left behind: a woman who behaves exactly like his wife down to the mannerisms. At first his reaction to this is what is expected of someone who suddenly lost a loved one. However, as time goes on the reader can slowly realize that Liebenstein is insane. He thinks, “The room was too much there. I could feel the color of the wallpaper – burgundy – invading.” Because people can’t usually feel the color of the walls around them it is not so slightly hinted at that Liebenstein isn’t in his right mind. This quote demonstrates how this first-person use can reveal thoughts and feelings of the narrator that would otherwise not be mentioned, making it much more difficult to tell what is going on in their mind.
A reader’s opinion can be heavily influenced by what they learn from the first-person point of view of a given text. For example, in this book it’s undeniably going to become difficult to believe what the narrator is saying because what he thinks is not something a neurotypical person might think. Instead, Liebenstein’s thoughts are influenced by his delusion and paranoia which stem from his missing wife. So in this story instead of a deeper comprehension from the first-person point of view, a less developed understanding results.
Consequently, in Galchen’s novel Everybody Knows Your Mother is a Witch (Galchen, 2021) the use of first-person point of view helps to understand the story. Following the thoughts of Katharina Kepler, her neighbor, Simon, and testimony letters from accusers or advocates of Katharina. By reading each person’s thoughts, the reader is offered an exclusive look into each version of the story, which helps to reach a conclusion on whether or not Katharina is really a witch.
In closing, the use of first-person point of view can affect the comprehension of a story both positively and negatively. This aspect of writing can present the audience with a greater grasp of the thought behind the actions at hand. Nevertheless, if the narrator is not in their right mind, the reader’s perception can become just as blurred as theirs.
