American Innovations

Rivka Galchen, American Innovations ( Farrar, Straus and Giroux). "Now Galchen has returned with her second book—a collection of stories titled American Innovations—and it appears that she has taken up Roth’s challenge, and met it triumphantly. Instead of neurology, the stories in this short, vital, intelligent collection return to psychology—the old-fashioned kind of motives that need no clinical diagnosis to be understood. These 10 stories are not linked—they don’t take up a single plot or fictional world—yet they are united in a profound way by their protagonists, who are recognizably versions of the same person. They are all adult women, roughly in their thirties, sometimes married and with children; but almost always the most important emotional relationships in their lives are with their parents". Adam Kirsch, tablet.