Negative Space: A Novel

by Gillian Linden

Overview

A gem of a debut novel about a young mother navigating the instabilities of teaching, parenting, and marriage in the wake of the pandemic.

With deadpan humor and a keen eye for the strangeness of our days, Negative Space follows a week in the life of an English teacher at a New York private school. At home, her two children, increasingly restless, ask constant questions about mortality and find hidden wisdom in the cartoons they watch on television. Her husband tends to his plants and offers occasional counsel between Zoom calls to Hong Kong and Australia. And at school, as she navigates the currents between wealthy, increasingly disconnected students and bewildered faculty, she accidentally witnesses an ambiguous, possibly inappropriate interaction between a teacher and a student.… She feels compelled to say something, but how can she be sure of what she saw?

Precisely rendered and filled with sly observations about our off-kilter days, Negative Space is a witty and resonant portrait of a woman caught between the pressures of home and work, parenting and teaching, what’s normal and what isn’t. Writing with an acute sense of dread and delight, Gillian Linden has crafted a stunning debut that examines what we owe the people who depend on us in a fractured and indifferent world.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781324065548
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	04/16/2024
Pages:	176
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Gillian Linden is the author of the short story collection Remember How I Told You I Loved You? She holds an MFA from Columbia University, where she won the 2011 Henfield Prize for fiction. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Editorial Reviews

"The prose throughout is lapidary, sharp…Negative Space beautifully executes a good amount of what feels imperative; acutely, assuredly, it mirrors a particular world back to us."— Lynn Steger Strong New York Times Book Review

"Beguiling, vexing, and exhilarating….The feeling is that of the fiction of the New Journalists…like the murmurous specificity of Joan Didion. It also brought to mind the classic of closely observed domestic life in Brooklyn, Paula Fox's Desperate Characters."— Thomas Beller Air Mail

"Subtly written…[I]ts style most resembles the so-called Minimalist writing of Raymond Carver and Ann Beattie."— Sam Sacks Wall Street Journal

"A triumph of voice…[A] bracing reminder of how readily the world has snapped back to the pre-pandemic status quo without fully dealing with the fractures that the pandemic period revaled…[C]ompelling and witty."— John Warner Chicago Tribune

"A subtle and promising debut about the hazy liminality of late pandemic life."— Kirkus Reviews

"Penetrating…An evocative study of the gap between intuition and truth."— Publishers Weekly

"Imagine The Bonfire of the Vanities compressed into a week of pandemic teaching, or Renata Adler casting her gimlet eye on the absurdities of motherhood. This is the best comic novel I’ve read in years."— Ed Park, author of Same Bed Different Dreams

"It’s the good life. Or is it? Gillian Linden’s eminently engaging heroine—loving mother, wife, and teacher in an elite private school—valiantly aims to do the right thing as she navigates the complexities of ironic absurdities and quiet tragedies reflective of our time. Written with a cool eye and a warm heart, this remarkable novel is both wryly comic and profoundly thought-provoking. It’s a stunning achievement worthy of all the praise it will undoubtedly receive."— Binnie Kirshenbaum, author of Rabbits for Food

"Imagine Franz Kafka as a substitute English teacher at a Manhattan school where the tuition exceeds the average American salary and William Shakespeare teeters on the brink of cancellation. With an unerring eye for the arresting detail, Negative Space charts the brisk undercurrents of horror and hilarity beneath the pristine surfaces of life in the metropolitan elite. Gillian Linden’s brilliant debut novel captures the anxiety that pervades even the most affluent and aromatic of American spaces."— Sophie Pinkham, author of Black Square: Adventures in Post-Soviet Ukraine

From the Publisher

2024-01-20
A woman teaching at a Manhattan private school witnesses a suspicious encounter between a faculty member and a student.

Taking place over the course of one week, this debut focuses on the accrual of small cracks in the life of the narrator, a wife and mother of two small children, set against the massive fissure of life during Covid-19. One Monday, after arriving at her part-time job teaching English, she witnesses a senior colleague, Jeremy, alone in a classroom with a ninth grade student, Olivia. Jeremy is the advisor to the school literary magazine, Negative Space, and Olivia is on staff, so this encounter seems normal—except that the classroom door is closed, and the narrator witnesses Jeremy lean in to touch his head to Olivia’s, a gesture she feels compelled to relay to the school administration. As the week unfolds, Linden treats this narrative thread with a weight equal to other events tugging at the woman: an ongoing dental emergency for her anxious daughter; a fainting episode; a husband who spends his time on Zoom calls or spritzing his pandemic-purchase plants; a looming scandal in Olivia’s wealthy family; and, of course, the gradually escalating fallout of the narrator’s decision to report the ambiguous gesture she saw. The decision to balance all these facets equally diffuses some of the potential drama of the novel, and the narrator’s “numbness” and uncertainty, though consistent with her world-weariness, contribute to a restrained style that some might find detached, even dissociated. Ultimately, though, Linden is a miniaturist, and the precision with which she works, whether describing a child’s existential bedtime angst or Zoom audio glitches, can be as satisfying as any more explosive plot.

A subtle and promising debut about the hazy liminality of late pandemic life.

Kirkus Reviews