A long interpretation of Negative space

Looking online I did not find any interpretations of the book that sat very well with me. So I have decided to take a stab and try to explain why I think it is interesting and my interpretation of it. Obviously spoilers ahead if you haven’t read it.

To be thorough, a brief surface level synopsis: the novel is written from the perspective of three teens, circling an enigmatic teen named Tyler who seems to be hell bent on his own destruction/transcendence. He uses Ahmir and Jills love for him to manipulate them for his own ends, and Lu knows of him mostly from the watchpeopledie subreddit and from her best friend Jill. Also everyone is using a gas station drug psychedelic called WHORL to get high and everyone is commiting suicide.

Now that that is out of the way, one thing I have not seen referenced, but I feel is pretty important is this passage at the end of chapter 1:

LU

People say there’s no more history left to make. They say we have no more mythology. So let’s tell a story. Let’s say that once there was a town. This town. Home to women and men and minor gods and warlocks. I loved one of them. I won’t tell you his name yet.

AHMIR

The myth is that I honored him. That I summoned strength and dragged him through the woods and buried him in the river like he’d asked. The myth is clean and sensical because it needs to be. The truth is stupid. The truth never makes sense unless you force it to, just like anything.

There is a tension introduced between two of our narrators. Lu introduces the book as mythology, Ahmir introduces it as a nonsensical truth. The rest of the book exists in the negative space between them. I don’t think there is one version of the narrative that makes perfect sense and that was definitely an intentional choice, to interpret the book is to impose on it.

One thing that I found interesting is that Ahmirs narrative is played pretty straight. Unlike other characters who seem to be manipulated by external forces, Ahmir seems to mostly act out of a desire for Tyler, which is mostly unrequited. WHORL lets him see strings but he never seems that affected by the supernatural. He sees the duck creature and the decay of the town and he doesn’t really reveal that it holds any meaning to him beyond the literal. In the final chapter in the cave Ahmir finally acknowledges how shitty Tyler was to him and is able to move on with his life.

AHMIR

He smiled up from his shredded canvas. A smile frozen and flat, motionless, bodiless, essence-less. Empty flat eyes.

I spoke to him. I told him that no matter what was happening around him, he could only ever see himself. I told him that his life was only ever going to be remembered as short and cruel and ultimately insignificant. I told him I wasn’t sorry.

He said nothing. He couldn’t. He wasn’t there anymore, and never would be again.

I spit on the pile of him and sank to my knees, sobbing into my palms, until I couldn’t anymore. I whispered something no one will ever know. I blew out the candle, got up, and walked back to the cavern’s mouth.

Negative Space features a pretty vague and collective cosmology. Tylers father, Baumhauer, strings, wasps, saints, books. Lots of metaphysical questions, the physicality of thoughts, and the nature of free will. The most notable one being the inversion in my opinion, basically that being alive and dead are two different states that can be interchanged. Lu is the only character that is naturally adept at inversion because of tenous attachment to the physical world, it is heavily implied that she is autistic and transgender which gives her a permeability into the inverted state without extreme experiences. She synthesizes the esoteric and her experiences into the town into mythology. “I hum. I whisper the names of everyone I’ve known and remembered. Even the bad ones. They deserve to be remembered and whispered, too.”

Jills arc falls somewhere between Ahmir’s and Lu’s, for most of the novel she is consistently manipulated by Tyler as he destroys her life and everyone she loved. After Tyler’s death she finally claims her own agency to go to college and attempts to be in a loving relationship. Soon after it is crushed by the idea of Tyler but she finds a way to destroy the idea of him. She kind of becomes a ghost and the center piece of a greek tragedy. At the end of the book Jill remarks, “I’ve given up on there being a story other than what they say about me now.”

I think Negative Space is a story about stories, the story of vulnerable teenagers in the small towns of middle America, and how we remember those who took their own life.