From its non-title to its long stretches of white space, Ken Sparling’s novel without a name announces itself as “experimental fiction.” Sparling has long been a student and champion of literary minimalism, and he takes the tenets of the movement to their extreme conclusion, paring the text and characters down to isolated gestures and impressions. Readers looking for anything as prosaic as place names or “he walked into the room and said” sentence constructions should beware.

There are really two works imperfectly blended in the novel. The first, and more interesting, is the tale of a disintegrating relationship between Alan and Aline, about whom we learn little except that they are unhappy and cannot connect emotionally. Alan seems to work in a dehumanizing bureaucracy; Aline seeks solace in the musings of a door-to-door gas salesman. The “gasman” also functions as a mirror to Aline’s deepest desires and frustrations, speaking in meandering poetic fragments: “The hardest thing in the world to harvest is a face,” he says in one of his more coherent pronouncements.

The rest of the novel is made up of a meta-narrative of disconnected voices reflecting on the nature of narrative and memory and systems of knowledge. The writing here too often degenerates into the maudlin seriousness of late-night undergraduate discussions: “There is a nowhere that somewhere cannot be. For instance, you are nothing. You are possibility. All possibility. Nothing is nothing because it is something unspecified.” There are also short sections of prose poetry that read like half-formed ideas from a writer’s notebook, their context hidden from the reader. Suppressing narrative clues is one thing, confusing the reader quite another.

It’s unfortunate that this meta-narrative dominates the novel, because the scenes (such as they are) featuring actual characters relating to each other and their environment demonstrate the power of stripping language to its most evocative essentials. Sparling also has a knack for nailing a complicated moment with a jagged image: “Their hair slapped and twisted in the muscle of wind through the driver’s window.” Too often, though, this experiment in narrative seems written for an audience of one.