The resulting work dares and confronts the boundaries of what novels are supposed to look like and do. For his second novel, Hush Up and Listen Stinky Poo Butt, Sparling and his wife hand made it to order. More recently, The Serial Library guts and re-appropriates old hardcover books that Sparling then loans out to readers via snail mail. Dad Says He Saw You at the Mall, however, is where the artistic trajectory of this under-read voice begins, which is why Mud Luscious Press’ recent reissue (with a new foreword by the author) is such great news.

In Dad, like Sparling’s other books, typical narrative markers whisper only at the peripheries. Minimal, sometimes hermetic, vignettes readily shift in time and perspective, leaving us to cobble together just the story’s gist. It goes something like this: Ken Sparling—author, narrator, protagonist—is locked in a dissolving marriage with Tutti. Some nameless break has turned their past of “so much love” into a present where Tutti feigns sleep to avoid conversation. Ken looks to Sammy, his young son, for connection, but the solaces are sporadic. Even the moments that should be easiest bristle with frustration and menace; as Ken notes one night after Sammy’s meltdown over fish cakes, “dinner comes along every night, relentlessly, like a bomb.”

Ken Sparling

These trials stoke Ken’s memories about his own parents’ separation, particularly those memories about his eponymous Dad, a figure of stunted effort and pity, and more importantly, a possible herald of Ken’s future. Ken remembers his Dad post-divorce, staring at the house his ex-wife and children now inhabit without him: “He stood at the end of the driveway of our new place with the snow getting on his shoulders.” And with Dad’s blurring of perspective and time, it’s like Ken’s looking at himself out there.

To say Dad is a sad story, though, would overemphasize story. And sadness isn’t a narrative here as much as it’s a haze coating the details of Ken’s daily life in Toronto. Dad’s deepest heat abides in these particulars, in the novel’s uncanny power as an arrangement of crystalline instants. At points Sparling names the world with such accuracy, even its most mundane corners turn unnerved, sharp-edged, and stunned. A car’s intermittent wipers talk metaphysics: “Every five seconds the windshield wipers sweep across the windshield and things get clear again for a moment.” Nascent moments of sexual development get the confusedly circular treatment they deserve: “It was having the boner that gave me the boner.” And Sparling catches and articulates the moment a relaxing day instantly, claustrophobically, telescopes into existential panic: “I was reading Chekhov one Sunday afternoon, and I saw Tutti out of the corner of my eye. I looked up. Tutti was looking at me. For a long moment I felt lost.” Family, deadpan humor, home, disappointment, and memory give these disparate snippets their tentative connective threads. And as much as Sparling denies—sometimes caustically—the conventional narrative modes, his recursive striking of these notes builds a signature momentum.

Dad ultimately sustains because it offers a bald encounter with a subjectivity shaped and defined by language, something other narrative forms just can’t do. In his foreword Sparling talks about writing as the site where the “wholeness of intent” meets the “fragments of story,” a dialogue that terminates when “the weight of the fragments pulls the wholeness of intention down and kills it.” Wholeness and fragment, intent and implication, love and its disintegrations: these same tussles split Ken and Tutti, Ken and Sammy, and Ken and his Dad. There’s sadness there. It exists intermixed with memory and quick flash cul-de-sacs of joy, but it’s finally, enduringly sad. And what Sparling knows so adeptly is how that sadness thrums through language, in the chasm that opens when words somehow always fall short of the exact names we might want or feel, even in the moments when the words seem just right.

Related Posts:

• Notable New York, This Week 6/1 – 6/6

TUESDAY 6/1: Isabella Rossellini talks with Leonard Lopate. 92Y. 8:15pm.

Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work. This documentary, which recently screened at the Tribeca Film Festival, was called by Roger Ebert, “One of the most truthful documentaries about show business I’ve seen. Also maybe the funniest.” 92Y Tribeca. 7:30pm.

WEDNESDAY 6/2: Bill Gates: A Conversation with My Father. Bill Gates will talk with his father about parenting, philanthropy, commerce and citizenship. Gates Senior is the author of Showing Up for Life: Thoughts on the Gifts of a Lifetime and co-chair of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. 92Y. 8:00pm.

Crispin Hellion Glover at IFC Center. Crispin Glover presents both his “Big Slide Show,” screens the film he produced and directed It is Fine! Everything is Fine! and also gives a very thoughtful talk afterward. I saw this Monday night, and it was one of the most thought-provoking filmic experiences I’ve had in a while.

THURSDAY 6/3:

Cinema 16. Cinema 16 rehabilitates the tradition of pairing silent films with live scores. This month, three avant-garde shorts are scored by improvisational trio Lemonade.

Crispin Hellion Glover. What Is It? With Big Slide Show presentation and Q&A. 7:30pm.

FRIDAY 6/4: Christopher Hitchens talks about his memoir Hitch-22 with Paul Holdengraber at NYPL LIVE.

Fiction Magazine, Dogzplot and Sententia present: Fiction and Poetry Slam. Robert Lopez, Elizabeth Ellen, Ken Sparling, Kim Chinquee and Shya Scanlon are just a few of the great readers presented. KGB Bar. 7-9pm.

SATURDAY 6/5: Edward Koren: The Capricious Line. Columbia University’s Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery is presenting Edward Koren: The Capricious Line, a major survey of the work of the artist best known for his cartoons and cover illustrations for The New Yorker magazine. Through June 12. An exhibition and tour by the curators will be held at the Wallach Art Gallery at 3:30pm.

SUNDAY 6/6: Greater New York at MOMA PS1.

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News about notable happenings in New York can be sent to rozalia-AT-therumpus.net

Original Notable New York Illustration © André da Loba.

Related Posts:

• “Dad Says He Saw You at the Mall,” by Ken Sparling
• The Rumpus Interview with Elif Batuman
• Asunder
• Drunk Book Buying
• Elitist White People Trying To Make Themselves Feel Better