The Law of White Spaces

Dr. Abraham Fleischmann cannot remember the name of his best friend, and is beginning to lose his medical vocabulary. Despite months of memory training, he now finds himself at the graveside of his brother, unable to remember the prayer for the dead. Vera is a mute sixteen-year-old whose growth and development are so stunted that she resembles a six-year-old. When she enters into a deranged and destructive relationship with an army doctor, she haltingly and occasionally wants to address him in the voice of a teenager. Over a period of twenty years three brothers contract different illnesses with identical symptoms. When two brothers die, the third is struck by mortal fear. The Law of White Spaces holds a bizarre, nearly gothic fascination. It is a powerful testament to one character's declaration: "Everything is written in the white spaces between one letter and the next. The rest doesn't count."