Ken Sparling, a Toronto writer in his mid-thirties and fiction editor at Gutter Press has written a quirky anti-novel that both engages and frustrates the reader. In Dad Says He Saw You at the Mall, he dances with the reader’s expectation, and neatly dodges conventional notions of form and structure.

“There are two sounds. Coming home. Leaving home. That’s all there is.”

It is this doorway that the protagonist, named Ken Sparling, tips open and shut to create the world of this book. Sparling, in the novel, works at a library, as does his creator, so we are encouraged to let ideas of fiction and autobiography nip at our ankles as the tale unfolds. What is the interface between fiction and real life? This Sparling is a kind of everyman, whose life is so ordinary, so lacking in event, that his eye is driven to examine that very ordinariness. We see snapshots of our protagonist at work, performing tiny tasks and interacting with his fellow workers, and we see him at home with his wife Tutti and their son, Sammy.

“At night , I am home. And before I am even home, I am walking home.”

The book is loaded with sentences like these, which reach for meaning even as they sound a tone of deliberate flatness.

There is no plot in Dad Says He Saw You at the Mall and no real conflict or story. There is no beginning, middle, or end, and no escalation of tension. Characters come and go, without thickening. What motors the book is Sparling’s particular sensibility, conveyed through tiny vignettes, anecdotes, half-unzipped memories, and musings on the texture of his existence. Much of it reads like journal entries and there is little attempt to provide the usual connections between incidents.

Perhaps it’s more useful to think of collage, and the burrowing cumulative effect of these little moments. This first-time novelist seems to be mapping a kind of internal voice, through shreds of memory and musings.

But is this interesting?

In a way, yes. I quite enjoy having my own yearning for meaning and structure diddled and Sparling’s writing is good enough to be followed on its own terms. Sometimes it’s funny, or sad – and I found the scenes between Sparling and his son quite wonderful with their bits of ruthful behaviour and feeling.

But just as often, reading this book felt like playing a tilted version of the memory game. Remember how you flip a deck of cards face-down and arrange them over a table top, then pick up two at a time, hunting for pairs? Imagine playing the game, only the table keeps mysteriously shifting. You flip card after card, convinced you saw the Jack of clubs there in the corner – but it’s disappeared. When the desire to make connections is thwarted, it leaves a kind of dis-ease, a vertiginous feeling. Sparling’s novel often gave me this sensation. His everyman protagonist refuses to crank himself into a story.

What he does do is play with language. Often this comes out in a cadence reminiscent of Gertrude Stein, using repetition and a looping back of sentences.

Here’s how chapter 45 opens:

“After you go out and do things, you get home from doing them and you go away from the people you did things with, back to the people you live with and the things you have done are done and they are nothing but memories of things that were done and where you are is at home with the people who have never done anything and you can try to remember the things you have done and tell the things you have done to the people who have never done anything – but what’s the point?”

This kind of thing either drives you wacky, or it pulls you into the trance of language.

I found that Sparling’s writing was actually more interesting after I closed the covers of the book. Then I found myself looking at my own world – least for a time – as a series of framed moments.