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Has there ever been a better time to write a novel that’s all about space? Always a literal unit of power (see: private property), it now seems to be our preferred figurative metric, too: the most annoying guest at your dinner party takes up too much of it, the most diplomatic participant at your staff meeting is careful to make more of it, and everyone has an opinion about whether it matters if it’s safe. In this contested landscape, Hilary Leichter’s second novel, “Terrace Story” (Ecco), has a suitably small footprint—at under two hundred pages, it won’t strain a Marie Kondo-ed shelf—but turns out to be a capacious container for our space-related concerns.
There’s real estate, of course: you’ll meet Annie and Edward, cash-strapped new parents, in a shoebox city apartment. There’s the metaphoric geography of intimacy, too: you’ll meet George and Lydia in a marriage full of “blind alleys and impasses.” And then there’s the Muskian frontier: you’ll find Rosie in outer space—a futuristic suburb orbiting Earth—because the planet is having some capacity issues.
As for how all these people and places fit together, part of the pleasure of reading “Terrace Story” is figuring out how its peculiar architecture works. The novel is divided into four sections: characters in the first reappear in the third; scenes are retold from a fresh point of view; striking turns of phrase pop up again and again. But the key to it all is Stephanie (single, thirtyish, in sales), and her secret superpower: she can make the world bigger with her mind. She raises ceilings, expands cupboards, adds more room to the local playground, and creates new terrain in a national park. Visiting Annie and Edward’s cramped apartment, she’s a kind of fairy godmother, conjuring the titular terrace on the other side of a closet door.
There’s both something old-fashioned about these flicks of the magic-realist wand—a touch of Kafka, a dusting of García Márquez, even a spoonful of Mary Poppins—and something distinctly of our moment. Consider such recent Zeitgeist successes as Sheila Heti’s “Pure Colour,” in which an art student lives inside a leaf (with a ghost), or Ottessa Moshfegh’s “My Year of Rest and Relaxation,” in which a boring blonde goes to sleep, Rip Van Winkle style, for many months. These authors are most compelling when they use their surreal spells to transfigure domestic, feminized spaces, exploring where women get to be, and whom they get to become. Moshfegh’s protagonist burrows into her apartment; Heti’s finally finds “her right dimensions” in a tree.
Leichter, too, centers her fable on the off-kilter power dynamics of home life. Annie and Edward, eager for the bonus square footage that materializes only when Stephanie’s around, are constantly inviting her over for “drinks and snacks, and boards of cheese.” But, in the new family’s little bubble, a single woman with an all too spacious schedule will always be an interloper, no matter how many invitations she gets. She sits and snacks, waiting for the bubble to burst.
Above all, Leichter is interested in the bewitched space of narrative itself. The fable, with tidy generic conventions but stretchy moral lessons, performs a kind of magic on the novel, giving a slim work legend-like scope. Stephanie can enlarge her world and also, fatefully, divide it—tearing characters apart and leaving their stories in pieces. Leichter might have tried to reassemble these fragments; instead, she encourages us to peer into the space between them—between lovers or friends, between one narrative and the next, between our universe and all the parallel ones.
Readers of Leichter’s first novel, “Temporary” (2020), will not be surprised to find themselves in enchanted apartments, or even in the multiverse. Her début, a fantastical sendup of the gig economy, features pirates and career criminals, a witch and a ghost, several precocious and parentless children, and a lot of puns. By comparison, “Terrace Story” has a subtler, sadder touch; marriage and family life take center stage. This may sound disappointing, as if your once wild friend had settled down, had a kid, and started serving hors d’œuvres. But convention turns out to be a perilously slippery slope, where the friction between fantasy and reality generates heat.
The scene at Annie’s baby shower would be low-hanging fruit for any satirist. At one point, all the guests write down a piece of advice for the expectant mom:
For Annie, these spatial metaphors are something to laugh at; “I hate baby shit,” she says. But, even as Leichter skewers earnestness, she shows us the tenderness in poking fun. For Stephanie, who attends the shower, then ends up seeking refuge in the bathroom, the blurry line between the literal and the figurative in Annie’s humor (they’re not talking about real baby shit) has serious stakes. Making room has always been a truly physical proposition in Stephanie’s life: it means shaking the very foundation of her house.
How empowering is Stephanie’s superpower? One section of “Terrace Story” is devoted to her biography, in which we learn that, since childhood, she has been “conscious of how she could warp a room to fit her desire.” Having high-school sex in a boy’s car, she adds a few extra inches to the back seat for comfort: “ ‘I can take more of you,’ she said, with the shrug of someone older.” This sounds nice and anti-patriarchal, but as Stephanie’s life expands everyone else seems to get farther away. Her parents are distant, frosty presences; the boy with the car is seen flirting with another girl from math class. Stephanie’s experience exposes the simplistic liberatory logic that making space means making progress. Instead of longing for a room of her own, she’s been creating “deep caverns for someone to fill.”
That sense of isolation is where the drama of Leichter’s book unfolds. It isn’t a spoiler to reveal the worst thing that Stephanie does with her magic, because it happens almost right away. One day, after she’s opened the door to the terrace, she closes it, leaving Annie on one side, Edward and the baby on the other. Husband and wife now exist in different “time steps,” separate universes with no point of contact.
Annie tries desperately to find her way back to the terrace. “Proximity, she thought, will get the job done”:
But the magic space never reappears; all Annie has now is a closet stocked with extra diapers she no longer needs. Baby shit, indeed. She’s learned the lesson that Stephanie has known from the start: even the best approximation of “proximity” can’t contain the infinite, insurmountable distance between people. No matter how close the harmony of a shared life seems to be (literalized as that “familysong”), you still might find yourself all alone in the smallest room in the house.
When the spell wears off, when the magic is gone, there’s a lot of realism left. In Moshfegh’s “My Year of Rest and Relaxation,” the absurdist saga of a wholly empty life satirizes all those other lives—sleep-deprived, micromanaged—that we pass off as full. In Heti’s “Pure Colour,” the narrative incoherence of both grief and love ends up casting doubt on the oldest author of all, God himself. In “Terrace Story,” the simple structure of the fable strains, revealing how complicated the supposedly happy story of female agency has become. If so many stories lack a reliable shape, should we worry that we’ll never be able to tell it straight?
Leichter lets holes open up all over her novel, swallowing up key details: words that characters can’t quite find, memories they can’t quite place. Just before her life is split in two, Annie observes, “There was something crucial here, but the crucial information darted away, refracting and escaping in the pleasant morning light.” If only, perhaps, the brain were a little bigger. But this spatial metaphor, as with the many others Leichter scatters through the book like bread crumbs, is another false promise: Stephanie “tried to expand her mind but that never seemed to work. How to even begin.”
So when, in the scrap pile of advice at Annie’s baby shower, one piece of paper comes up blank, we shouldn’t be taken aback to discover that it belongs to Stephanie. What could, or should, she have written? Such blank spaces confront nearly all of Leichter’s characters; at pivotal turns, their sense of narrative logic founders. That sounds like bad news. You might wonder what can be done with books in which the “crucial information” is never fully captured, the widening gaps never truly filled.
A great deal, as it turns out. Leichter’s novel is named for the embellished “terrace stories” that Annie and Edward find themselves telling Stephanie out on the roof deck, made-up memories that recast their past in a more exciting light. Annie thinks that Stephanie believes these “little fibs,” but she, like us, is in on the game. And maybe, as Stephanie believes, it’s better that way: “Knowing that certain parts were fiction, this is what filled her body with an unexpected warmth. It was love, to recognize the inventions and inconsistencies that make a person whole.”
Is she right? In a novel with this many mysterious holes, what does a “whole” even look like? Leichter doesn’t moralize about her craft, but her book ventures a compelling case for it: for all of us who lack superpowers, storytelling may be the surest way to grasp the elastic dimensions of life. ♦
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