Synopses & Reviews
Synopsis
With deadpan humor and a keen eye for the strangeness of our days, Negative Space follows a week in the life of a part-time high school English teacher. At home, her two children, increasingly restless in the wake of the pandemic, ask constant questions that flit from the weirdness of television shows to casual conversations about mortality. Her husband, always on business calls with Hong Kong at odd hours, shows up for meals only occasionally. At school, her students seem increasingly disconnected, and some put worrying details of their lives into their creative writing assignments. And then there's the possibly inappropriate interaction she thinks she saw between her boss and a student. . . . Filled with sly observations about our off-kilter days, Negative Space is a witty and resonant novel about the challenges of motherhood, the question of what we owe the people around us, and the search for normalcy in a fractured world.
Synopsis
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.