BLANK SPACE

The sly enchantments of Hilary Leichter’s novel Terrace Story.”

- CLARE SESTANOVICH

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.