Gillian Linden’s beguiling, vexing, and exhilarating debut novel, Negative Space, is a spare, almost austere book, whose unnamed narrator is a teacher at a private school in Brooklyn, a place with high expectations and no grades. Her husband, Nicholas, is a nice enough businessman who is doing well, but not so well that they can actually afford to send their own children to the school where she teaches. Instead, they send the younger of their two kids, Lewis, who seems about five years old, to a less expensive private school, and the older, Jane, seven, to public school.
The book takes place over the course of a week in the late-pandemic era, each day its own section, and reads like a series of swift pencil sketches, the sort of drawing that for years hung in my therapist’s office when I was a teenager. There is low-grade marital tension and not-so-low-grade marital tension. Masks are present but often askew. Classes are in-person but some students are on Zoom; the technology is tiring to deal with and no one can hear that well. The narrator’s ninth-graders are reading Kafka.
The paranoia of the period blurs with the eternal paranoia of young parents exhausted by their own vigilance, particularly acute in the mothers’ trying to navigate our toxic modern world. “Even when I was miserable, the organic grocery store filled me with hope,” the narrator says. But even there, she is aware of the microplastics “that would stay in my children’s bloodstream for the rest of their lives.”
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 Didion. It also brought to mind the classic of closely observed domestic life in Brooklyn, Paula Fox’s Desperate Characters. Linden’s novel takes you to the heart of our moment in time, with its thicket of sensitivities, shibboleths, and bureaucracies. In fact, I felt a queasy sense of recognition as I read this book, having myself graduated from a private school in Brooklyn with many of the same attributes as the one in the novel.
By situating her narrator on both sides of the parent-teacher conference, Linden is able to ask what we want from our parents, our teachers, our children. That Negative Space is able to touch these culture-war third rails without producing a shock in the reader, without the reader even being fully aware of it, is one of its greatest accomplishments. My favorite thing about the book is the closely observed, somewhat surreal poetry of contemporary life. Linden doesn’t show us a careless mother but a student who complains of one in a poem, which may in a way be an homage to how much care and feeding the mother put into the kid.
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 Didion. The novel takes you to the heart of our moment in time, with its thicket of sensitivities, shibboleths, and bureaucracies.
A writing assignment the narrator gives to her sixth-graders, who are reading Animal Farm, goes awry when they are asked to “explain away an imagined crime,” and three students write about burning down the school. “I’d emailed the pieces to the grade Dean and the school psychologist,” the narrator says, “and for the rest of the year, every time one of them even alluded to fire, I had to write more emails.” An alternate title for the book could be “Mandatory Reporting.”
A discussion in a ninth-grade class about unhappy endings in literature turns to personal stories about loss: “Pets, friendships, the effect of Covid.” Olivia, a student whose wealthy parents are going through an ugly divorce, the details of which have been in the papers, says, “In certain circumstances, you could understand why a person would want to end things.” The narrator thinks, “Oh that’s fine. I don’t have to do anything about that. But this thought often preceded the belief that I did have to act.” The authorities are duly informed. Everyone, including Jeremy, the sixtysomething chair of the English department, thinks it’s fine.
Soon after, the narrator walks to the room which serves as headquarters for the school’s literary magazine, Negative Space. Pausing in the doorway, she sees Olivia and Jeremy sitting beside each other in close proximity: “They looked like a pre-pandemic image from a school brochure, knees and hands almost meeting, bent over a piece of paper that seemed to have a poem written on it.”
Then she witnesses an ambiguous gesture—or thinks she does. “His hand was on her shoulder. He moved his head to touch hers. It’s fine, I thought. It’s a fatherly gesture. When I was in high school, teachers had touched me. Men and women had hugged me, ruffled my hair,” she thinks. “Things were different now, but Jeremy has been most of his career in that other time, when not all touch was transgressive. I don’t have to do anything about this, I thought.” But again, she does report it.
Unlike in Rachel Cline’s The Question Authority and Susan Choi’s Trust Exercise, novels that attempt to reckon with the act of sex between a teacher and a student, the situation in Negative Space remains ambiguous. (Was it a nudge or a nuzzle?) Instead, we have the Kafka-esque feeling that our mechanisms for dealing with these problems are themselves problems.
Thomas Beller is the author of several books, including Seduction Theory, The Sleep-Over Artist, and J. D. Salinger: The Escape Artist. His latest book, Lost in the Game: A Book About Basketball, is out now