In the past month, I've found myself sitting next to people reading erotic/semi-pornographic material on the subway more than once -- probably about 3 times. Each time is as awkward as the last. Sitting next to someone reading something explicit would be a total non-issue if not for the fact that I'm a bit nosey (especially about what people read on the train). Catching sight of a drawing of a naked woman or a couple of phrases describing a graphic sex act on an ordinary train ride is plain uncomfortable. Suddenly the tight spaces of the subway car seem even smaller.

Reading Negative Space, I inadvertently became the pervy train passenger curling the pages of my book out of view from the person sitting next to me: Though this is a story about the workings of the mind and heart, there are quite a lot of sexual descriptions in this novella. Negative Space traces, in elegant, obsessive detail, the dissolution of the narrator’s marriage of 20 years over the course of one evening when his wife confesses she has been unfaithful. As they sit on their French terrace overlooking a 300-year-old olive grove, drinking wine and smoking, she begins to lay out every contour of her infidelity, and the reality of her new relationship -- “a new love accompanied by a dead trumpeters trumpet.”

The obsessiveness of the narrator's introspection (“Searching desperately for the woman I thought my wife had been, I found the door to the universe open like a canyon, like universe”) is what makes this book fascinating -- and what elevates the crude betrayal, jealousy and loss at the center of the story into something far more rarefied. It's a haunting dissection of failed love that's far heavier than the slim book suggests.