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. That might sound easy, but it isn’t. Even more so because depicting absence, making it feel concrete and alive, often renders a book hollow and shapeless, and Linden’s has both shape and heft.
While its setting and anxieties are very current, its style most resembles the so-called Minimalist writing of Raymond Carver and Ann Beattie from the 1980s. Little of note happens in the scenes, and the interactions tend to be polite and ordinary, but a feeling of latent menace—of some indefinable wrongness—lurks behind it all, breeding a strange yet recognizable malaise.
Beguiling, vexing, and exhilarating ... 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.
