Readers of contemporary fiction may recognize an increasingly familiar protagonist type: the blank (or at least semi-blank) slate. They’re lead characters about whom their authors reveal very little, as though meting out their personas with tweezers. Think of the narrator of Jhumpa Lahiri’s : an unnamed woman in an unnamed city with an unspecified career and little in the way of human attachments. Or the dislocated and unnamed narrator of Katie; the effaced narrator of Rachel Cusk’s trilogy; or even, at the far end of the spectrum, the narrator of Mississippi-born Catherine Lacey’s , shorn of gender, race, age, voice, and personal history. They’re the character equivalents of certain E.E. Cummings poems, where the white space surrounding the text is as much a part of the poem as the text itself.
