Terrace Story: A Novel by Hilary Leichter. HarperCollins, 208 pp., $28.
New York is a long line of people at a party asking how much you pay for rent. This brief exchange, as quick as it takes to say your name and how you know the hostess, is underwritten by the mutual suspicion that everyone is dealing with a steal. We pay an obscene amount, but we jumped through a lot of hoops for it. We pay very little, but we still lack so much. Or worst of all: We stumbled on a place whose cost made the most sense, but someone first had to die. Always, the admission of what luck, what burden is placed elsewhere and unseen, ends the conversation. The two parties move on, finding other ways to like or hate the other and determining on that basis whether the person with the best deal really deserves it. This opening talk is small because it matters so little, when it comes to a person, exactly how they wrangled wherever it is they happen to live.
To judge from her novels, Hilary Leichter does not believe any talk is small, knows instead that every scrap of conversation is an entry into something larger. With Terrace Story, the follow-up to her darkly fantastical debut, Temporary, Leichter wrenches open the worlds we steal apartments to live in. What begins as a story of a young family living in a small space quickly collapses in on itself, revealing a fairy tale of displacement and homemaking.
Though without a central protagonist, the novel can be said to be tied together by Stephanie, whom Leichter crafts with precision, never allowing her an easy pass. As a child, Stephanie discovers she can create space where there is none. As a baby, she expands her nursery; as a child, she expands playgrounds and then her own house, much to her parents’ bemusement. As an adult, she modulates, we are to assume, her own body for the men who enter it. She cannot, it turns out, fully share these spaces she creates, for the simple fact that they cannot exist without her; in that sense, it’s no gift at all.
Those who spent childhoods living in their imaginations will appreciate the delicacy with which Leichter handles what safe, secure pain it is to have agency over your own expanding world, the way a refuge can turn into a fortress. Stephanie works at a marketing agency, and how fearful was I that that detail would hint at greater aspirations, the trap so many writers fall for: If my character is sad like me and powerful like me, why don’t I make her a terribly smart writer like me? But Leichter is nimbler than most of her peers and is careful to avoid received ideas. Instead, Stephanie is miserable because Stephanie has no outlet except the space she can create, which no one, it seems, wants to go into.
Until she finds Annie and Edward, and her extra space is the only place they ever want to be. Leichter is clever enough not to tell us why. Before Stephanie, the couple exists in bliss, newborn in tow. Their greatest fear is not a lack of room but a lack of each other. Annie is so terrified of life without Edward that she becomes obsessed with his death, picturing it happening when he leaves home on his bike or spends too long doing anything. Actual disaster sets in from the discovery that even they, bound together so tightly by love, can lose one another. It is the new place Stephanie makes for them, a terrace adjacent to their apartment that only materializes when she visits, that enacts their dissolution. “What a relief,” Leichter writes about the made-up space, “to have more, after having less.”
Leichter has a remarkable ability to weave narratives, and the compounding story arcs she gives her heroes—the only villain in Terrace Story is lack itself—transport the novel to an elusive realm of tenderness. It isn’t clear how this material is meant to hold together, as when late in the novel, Leichter introduces Annie’s parents, another couple in love, though with a more cavalier approach toward marriage. We know that the mother, Rose, is a journalist who covers the untimely extinction of animals, but which ones have died out by the time we meet the trio of husband, wife, and terrace maker is never quite revealed. Leichter’s writing demands curiosity from her readers, so it seems better to assume every time line takes place at once, just out of the others’ grasp.
Where, the twists and turns ask, do the mistakes begin, and where do they end? For all of Leichter’s brilliant upturning of storytelling convention, the novel is hemmed in by familiar limitations: There is never enough space, because there is never enough anything.
It’s hard not to get sucked into the whimsy of it all. Terrace Story is bound together by medieval allusions, the knowledge of what exactly a folly is, and the envisioning of houses that may or may not be haunted. But as with her first novel, Leichter’s writing exudes calmness, offering an easy grip as it walks you through world after world. In fact, the writer I am most reminded of when I read Leichter is not anyone else working with themes of real estate or heartbreak or grief or climate change, but A. A. Milne, the author of Winnie-the-Pooh, who takes a few characters in a vast forest and shows you all the reasons you might love them, until you find you truly do. Thus, a tale without morals so much as morality, where anyone is welcome to make whatever mistakes they like.
But of course, the characters in Terrace Story are not woodland animals. They’re people, and what mistakes they make matter. Stephanie, for all her powers, is so brought down by the wrongs she thinks she’s orchestrated that she begins and ends the novel in a state of heightened feebleness. In all cases, her missteps appear to be the result of a passive misunderstanding of her own powers. Take her greatest crime: shutting a door on the terrace she built without realizing it would permanently sever the family who lived adjacently. How much blame can be assigned to such a person? Someone incapable of comprehending what it is they are?
But more so than the perpetrations themselves, I found myself wondering about their ripple effects. Where, the twists and turns ask, do the mistakes begin, and where do they end? For all of Leichter’s brilliant upturning of storytelling convention, the novel is hemmed in by familiar limitations: There is never enough space, because there is never enough anything. What does it mean that everyone always has to have something?
For Leichter the solution is clear: make more something. This is not a happy fix. Not everyone is welcome in the many private worlds that sustain the characters of Terrace Story. The same rules of our world are, after all, the ones that rule the whole wide universe. When, in its final scene, the novel goes to outer space, Leichter abides by these laws. You cannot create more space, she comes to explain. You are always just taking someone else’s instead.
Then what else can be done? Where else can people go? Into nothingness, it seems. We follow Annie, our fallen or maybe just floating hero, as she slips into shadow. Asked what it’s been like, living a solitary life without anyone else to love, she balks. “I reject your premise. The premise that there is no love when a person is alone.”
It’s clear that Terrace Story was written with climate change in mind, with the lack of housing in New York, where Leichter lives, in the forefront of that emergency. Throughout all versions of the story, animals go extinct, people try to find each other, but people go extinct, too. By the end, some birds are just memories; some parts of the land we live on are, too. What’s left when the world is no longer able to hold all of us? Longing, comes the answer. When someone goes missing, the hurt is eternal.
But so is everything else. Leichter understands that the future is not an endpoint to be reached, just as the past is not a beginning. How two people came to live in one place is a living story, their time lines are residents in their home as much as they are. Space can be expanded when a fuller story is told, no mystical ability required. And when the truth is withheld or obscured, the walls start closing in. The room we make for people and animals and furniture and things is just that. What binds them in perpetuity is love itself; it’s as clear in fiction as on earth. For even the person who lives alone lives with everything that made them, too.