“Negative Space” by Gillian Linden is a triumph of voice, specifically in its use of deadpan.
“Deadpan” as a term first appeared in the early 20th century as a compound word meant to signal a literally lifeless (dead) face (pan). Deadpan works by juxtaposing emotional inertness against absurd events. The entire movie “Airplane!” is rendered in deadpan. Bill Murray’s core appeal as an actor is in his deadpan, occasionally punctured by bouts of lunacy.
Deadpan is hard to pull off in prose because it makes the writing appear inert and lifeless, but the technique is a marvel in Linden’s hands.
The framing of “Negative Space” is simple, a first-person narrative from the point-of-view of an unnamed, married mother of two young children and part-time teacher at a private school in New York City. The entire story spans a week from Monday to Saturday, each day getting a chapter, and each chapter starting (roughly) with waking up and ending with the narrator putting her children to bed and trying to find sleep for herself.
On Monday, when looking for a set of class copies of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” the narrator stumbles upon what looks like a male teacher at a desk, “nuzzling” a teenage female student in an apparent show of intimacy. Things are complicated. The narrator isn’t quite sure what she saw, and the teacher is Jeremy, the head of the English department who is both the narrator’s mentor/confidant, and the person who will decide if she is to continue to receive classes next year.
While making sense of this incident and moving through the various channels of school bureaucracy preoccupy the narrator’s mind, the bulk of the book is really about the mundane moments that happen throughout her day.
There are trips to the dentist for her daughter Jane who has an infected tooth. There is shopping for groceries, cooking for the family, trying to engage her students in something vaguely resembling learning, checking in with her mother and her friends. She is not sleepwalking exactly, but neither does she appear to experience her own life.
Using the deadpan tone and seemingly unremarkable backdrop and series of events, Linden manages to create a story that is simultaneously mundane and deeply strange. The novel is set toward the end of the spring school semester of 2021, the pandemic period of masking and attempted social distancing in schools. The narrator’s classes are held in a kind of utility athletics room filled with gym equipment that is sauna-hot. Dysregulated and discombobulated by the strangeness of the pandemic, everyone seems to be wondering what the point of all this activity is, without knowing what else they could or should be doing. No one is sure if the students should still read Shakespeare, but you have to read Shakespeare, so the play is assigned too late in the year for students to have to do anything with it.
The novel reads like something between a dream and a nightmare, trapped in an in-between space, not unlike Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” a play that alternates between reality and a fairy world. The narrator’s children constantly express fears of death, but are also young and silly. Linden makes this material both funny, with a number of great punchlines delivered in deadpan, and also spooky, as the world is made unfamiliar.
Reading the novel was a bracing reminder of how readily the world has snapped back to the pre-pandemic status quo without fully dealing with the fractures the pandemic period revealed.
This novel is a compelling and witty reminder that we may have some scars to deal with.
John Warner is the author of “Why They Can’t Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities.”
Book recommendations from the Biblioracle
John Warner tells you what to read based on the last five books you’ve read.
1. “This is Happiness” by Niall Williams
2. “Prophet Song” by Paul Lynch
3. “Old Filth” by Jane Gardam
4. “Tom Lake” by Ann Patchett
5. “Absolution” by Alice McDermott
— John S., Chicago
It’ll only take John a couple of hours to get through Claire Keegan’s “Small Things Like These,” but they will be hours well spent.
1. “Black Swan Green” by David Mitchell
2. “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” by Maya Angelou
3. “The Heart is a Lonely Hunter” by Carson McCullers
4. “The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness” by Elyn Saks Sachs
5. “My First Thirty Years” by Gertrude Beasley
— Kristen D., Crystal Lake
For Kristen, I’m recommending Mary McCarthy’s classic “The Group,” set during the early Mad Men era, only written about the women.
1. “The Great Believers” by Rebecca Makkai
2. “First: Sandra Day O’Connor” by Evan Thomas
3. “Plainsong” by Kent Haruf
4. “The Librarianist” by Patrick deWitt
5. “Following Atticus” by Tom Ryan
— Al B., Evanston
Reaching back a bit for Al to a book with the kind of emotional heft I think he’s looking for, “A Prayer for Owen Meany” by John Irving.
Get a reading from the Biblioracle
Send a list of the last five books you’ve read and your hometown to biblioracle@gmail.com.