Existential anxiety is at the heart of Gillian Linden’s debut novel, “Negative Space.” Its unnamed narrator is a part-time English teacher of sixth and ninth grade at an elite private school in New York City, where the tuition is “higher than the average American salary.” It’s late May, 2021: The school year is nearly over, and the narrator is still waiting to hear if she will be offered classes in the fall, while navigating students’ demands and pandemic-era protocols. The narrator’s home life is no less stressful, as her husband is constantly on work calls with Hong Kong and her two children are inquisitive and restless.
For a novel that chiefly recounts the narrator’s many worries, “Negative Space” is appropriately uneven — sometimes heavy-handed, sometimes wonderfully subtle. The narrator’s references to the pandemic feel less like windows on a historical moment and more like stand-ins for her pervasive anxiety, reminders that life could be capsized at any moment. This sense of unease seems to surround her experience of motherhood, too; her children, particularly her daughter, Jane, have their own existential crises. “Mom, I’m afraid of death again,” Jane says early on. “I’m afraid I won’t be able to talk to you when I die.” The narrator’s own preoccupation with death means she can’t give Jane a satisfying answer, since the reply of a caring mother — of course you will, dear! — feels like a lie. “I don’t think so,” she hedges, “but I don’t know.”
The narrator’s concerns are most interesting when they circle the absurdity of her professional life. Fittingly, she is preparing to teach Franz Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis,” and Linden sometimes seems to be aspiring to re-create that classic’s climate of destabilizing disquiet. Looking for copies of a play she’s teaching in another class, the narrator walks in on a troubled student, Olivia, huddled up in an otherwise empty classroom with the chair of the English department, Jeremy. Ostensibly, they are meeting about the school’s literary magazine, also called Negative Space, but the narrator sees Jeremy’s hand move to Olivia’s shoulder, then “he moved his head to touch hers.” They are not wearing their mandated face masks, and the doors had been closed when the narrator arrived. She is surprised, then immediately wonders if she needs to do anything about it. Did she witness a fatherly gesture or an inappropriate moment? Jeremy assures the narrator that she has not interrupted anything untoward, but she remains concerned.
In what is perhaps Linden’s most pointed attempt at the Kafkaesque, the narrator proceeds to encounter such a web of school bureaucracy that she finds it almost impossible to report the incident, despite the school’s intensive messaging that teachers are “guardians” and “protectors” of the students in their care. “I had the feeling, again, that I was missing a sense of scale, that I was being placated, like a child,” she reflects. Jeremy patronizingly thanks her for her attention and care, while assuring her he has stepped back from the literary magazine. School administrators are most concerned about whether she saw Jeremy “nudge” Olivia’s head or “nuzzle” it. Could it have been just a bump? One of the novel’s funniest and most maddening scenes involves a dean cutting a meeting short to order smoothies for faculty.
Linden ably depicts the bind of the adjunct instructor. As a part-time teacher, the narrator’s position between the elite institution and the outside world attunes her to the absurdity of both. But without the stability of institutional affiliation or the guarantee of future employment, she finds herself alienated from the system’s logic and vulnerable to retribution.
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In the end, the narrator’s worries are well founded. Early in the novel, she ends a conversation with Olivia with a sort of punt: “How, I thought, do I wrap this up? I said, ‘I hope you like Kafka.’” This banal phrase haunts her throughout the novel; she wishes she had said something more poignant. The final pages of “Negative Space” seem to echo the impossibility of concluding on the perfect note, of pulling everything together in life. In the end, though, I felt as if I might reach for “The Metamorphosis” instead.
Bekah Waalkes is a writer and PhD candidate in English literature at Tufts University.
Negative Space
By Gillian Linden
W.W. Norton. 160 pp. $26.99
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