Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Marie Arendt
Categories
Biography, Literature & Literary studies

NEGATIVE SPACE

Gillian Linden

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. 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.

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Book Published 2024-04-16 by W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. - New York (USA)

Comments

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.

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 . Negative Space beautifully executes a good amount of what feels imperative; acutely, assuredly, it mirrors a particular world back to us.

The feeling is that of the fiction of the New Journalists--not the broad satire of Tom Wolfe; more like the murmurous specificity of Joan Didon. The novel takes you to the heart of our moment in time, with its thicket of sensitivities, shibboleths, and bureaucracies.

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.... 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.

Linden grounds her scorching insights on digital rabbit holes and other aspects of modern life in the poignancy of the everyday (while trying to uncover Olivia's story online, the narrator observes, "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"). The result is an evocative study of the gap between intuition and truth.