Negative Space: A Novel
Description
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.
Praise for Negative Space: A Novel
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 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
