Reading Gillian Linden’s “Negative Space,” I kept thinking of the Lydia Davis story “Fear.” The story opens with a woman running out of her house, “face white and overcoat flapping wildly.” “Emergency, emergency,” the woman says. In the next sentence, Davis tells us that “nothing has really happened” to this woman, but still the community comes out to comfort her. “Fear,” like Linden’s novel, grapples with an amorphous sense of something coming, threatening; it situates the reader inside a world in which awful things exist but nothing, really, has happened yet. In the meantime, the world around both the woman in Davis’s story and the one in Linden’s novel mostly wants her to be quiet.
“Negative Space” has a straightforward enough shape: We are with our narrator, a wife and mother of two, over the course of a week. At the outset, her daughter has a gum infection. A not-quite emergency — a couple of her baby teeth will have to be extracted; all will almost certainly be fine. Our narrator goes on to work at the Manhattan private school where she teaches English part time. It’s almost June and she’s waiting to hear if she’ll have work in the next school year.
While searching for a class set of Shakespeare plays (Shakespeare can be taught only at the end of the year, because, in the eyes of the private school’s customer-parents, he is problematic, but also perhaps necessary), she sees the head of her department — the man who will decide whether to bring her back on staff — maybe “nuzzling,” maybe “nudging” a troubled student in what looks to the narrator like an overly intimate way.
Insofar as the book has an engine, this is it: Jane, the daughter, with her gum infection, is anxious about the tooth extraction; our narrator attempts to report her boss, to talk through what she saw with various friends and administrators, but it mostly comes to naught. There are faculty meetings, family dinners, a phone call with a friend and another later with our narrator’s mother. Nothing really happens, in other words, but then, as the title tells us, that nothing really is the book’s interest.
The prose throughout is lapidary, sharp. Linden is spare with the metaphors so that when they come, they stick and crystallize affectingly in your brain. “You could discover anything on the phone — reassuring news, more often troubling news,” she writes. “The phone was like the children’s toy baskets, in which I’d find the felt doll Lewis had lost, and also dried-up clementine peels, a toothbrush with darkened bristles, a watch face missing its strap.” She is quick to build a scene and exit it, elegantly depicting the almost constant yearning that lives inside a life that feels both vaguely like one you might like and also like a trap.
It’s the year after the first round of Covid vaccinations. Kids still wear masks in school. It’s unseasonably warm out, as it is almost always now unseasonably warm. Our narrator’s husband, who used to travel for work, has managed to be home over the past year-plus and still stay mostly absent. Negative space, in other words, lack and unknown threat, are everywhere.
Often, lately, I’ve been thinking about what books are supposed to do, what we want or need from them at this, but also any, moment. “Negative Space” beautifully executes a good amount of what feels imperative; acutely, assuredly, it mirrors a particular world back to us. That might sound easy, but it isn’t. Even more so because depicting absence, making it feel concrete and alive, often renders a book hollow and shapeless, and Linden’s has both shape and heft. What I yearned for was a moment, a shift or observation that reflected this experience back at me but also made me ask questions. Something that expanded, complicated or troubled what I thought this world was, or could be.
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