Dad Said He Saw You at the MallBy Ken Sparling |
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Reviewed by John Madera
Ken Sparling’s Dad Says He Saw You at the Mall, a deeply philosophical novel where almost every measured sentence, every refractive paragraph, is a kind of capsule of its major themes, tracks the meanderings and maunderings of an office drone, a button pusher, a worn-out fuddy-duddy who is bored out of his skull. The narrator, also named Sparling, works at a computer terminal at a library, wallows in an unsatisfying marriage (where familiarity doesn’t breed contempt so much as it ushers a discomfiting resignation), and finds his only saving grace in his profound and often inexpressible love for his son Sammy. Sparling’s deadpan delivery is as obsessive as it is confessional and demands that it, rather than expectations of this follows that, be followed.
Though love is a central theme, Sparling never succumbs to sentimentality or to the pathetic. All of his interactions with his son, like getting him to eat, sleep, and answering his odd questions, are described simply and, though usually performed without comment, are deep manifestations of love for Sammy. He loves him “so much it is all [he] can think sometimes.” But there is also another darker facet at work: Sparling mines his day-to-day life for meaning and, unfortunately, finds that there isn’t much of any in his life. But even despondent moments like observing that life is pointless, that “nothing will happen,” don’t cripple him, blind him with despair. And though it often sounds like he’s numb, he sees, hears, and feels with a kind of desperate awareness unencumbered by notions of meaning and purpose; his senses are even more acute. For instance, early in the novel he notices a man’s (or is he speaking of himself in the third-person?) hair “caught in the wind,” how the
wind was making his hair into things his hair had never been. He thought he would just lean his head against the seat in front of him for a moment. He was riding the bus and the window was open and things were happening to his hair. He thought if he could just lean forward for a moment and put his head against the seat in front of him everything would be okay. Everything he had accomplished was coming out through his skin, as though his skin were stitched together loosely and everything was coming out.
Later, looking at his wife sleeping (something he does quite often in the novel): “At night, when she was in bed, she fell into caverns. These were not dreams she was having. She was falling into her own history, now and then resurfacing long enough to catch her breath.” In moments like these, Sparling captures the ease in which even the saddest of people can easily slip out of sadness by simply looking outside of themselves. There are many moments like these in Dad Says He Saw You at the Mall serving as anchors, or, rather, as steppingstones across troubled waters.
You could call this book minimalist as its clipped, emotionally-stripped sentences (where all but the most essential details are sandblasted away) mirror the various masters of the form, from Beckett to Gordon Lish’s famed coterie (Lish was Sparling’s editor at Knopf) and beyond. Sparling’s prose is characterized by its economy and innuendo, its eschewal of detailed description and exposition, its obliqueness, all of which is used to construct a vivid portrait of suburban malaise. But while certainly beguiling to describe it in this way, it would not get you any closer to the heart of this book, that is, its troubled narrator, who, in a fragmentary manner, through a series of fractured anecdotes, observations, rants, and meditations, inhabits your thinking, makes you complicit in his actions.
And you could make the mistake of thinking that the book’s collage of banalities and philosophical reflections never really coheres into a sum greater than its parts. In fact, Dad Says He Saw You at the Mall is a “fractal” narrative, and, to borrow heavily from Alice Fulton’s extraordinary essay, “Fractal Amplifications: Writing in Three Dimensions,” every line in Sparling’s novel contains the same complexity as the larger piece from which it’s derived. It’s comprised of infinite nesting patterns. Digression, disruption, disintegration are privileged over any conventional notions of continuity. And it exists in a paradoxical space of movement and stasis.
One of Sparling’s most impressive devices is his use of repetition. While seemingly banal and an apt metaphor for the narrator’s meaningless work, his going-through-the-motions life, this repetition of words and phrases, and its many interpolations, are akin to Gertrude Stein’s work, her obsessions. In “Portraits and Repetitions,” Gertrude Stein writes that “there can be no repetition because the essence of that expression is insistence, and if you insist you must each time use emphasis and if you use emphasis it is not possible while anybody is alive that they should use exactly the same emphasis.” Sparling’s insistence is often manifested in short, matter-of-fact statements like this, the novel’s opening sentence: “At night, I am home. And before I am even home, I am walking home.” And his sparkling repetitions are interleaved throughout Dad Says He Saw You at the Mall like when observes his wife’s “walking slow,” how a couple “looked happy,” and how he “only wanted to go to sleep, take everything with [him] to sleep, keep it there with [him], alone with [him] in sleep.” This spiraling insistence makes for mind-numbing yet still heart-piercing reading.
And, to get a sense of the novel’s many departure points, here is the novel’s last sentence: “I was in a washroom drawing Mozart’s head on the mirror in lipstick when a guy in cowboy boots came in and told me there was another way of drawing Mozart’s head.” In between these disparate lines are countless breathtaking passages that, while certainly sprawling, still transfix with their yearning, their urgency and honesty, their melancholic ache:
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?
Though useful as an entry point, or at least as a frame for discussion, likening Sparling’s novel to a collage is not the only way to understand how this novel is constructed. It can also be compared to a stained-glass window, intermittently shattering and coming together. Beware lest inattention causes you to get squeezed between the interstices. As there is no connective tissue here between fragments, what brings this refractive narrative together is what the reader brings, and thus Dad Says He Saw You at the Mall is remade each time a reader comes to it.
While certainly a difficult book, Dad Says He Saw You at the Mall isn’t impenetrable. After all, as Sparling explains, “Someplace along the way [he] stopped wanting to lie to people anymore. [H]e wanted to tell the truth.” He writes what he thinks he can “understand. Like the tunnel your foot makes when it drops through the air.” And what has this taught him? It’s simple: we are doomed. And while Sparling thinks there may only be two sounds—coming home and leaving home—what his novel shows is that in between this hello and goodbye there are battles necessarily left unfought. With so much we can’t explain, fears that time will never soften, times where everything goes dark, perhaps the best we can hope for are moments where, like Sparling, we might find that “there is [no] end to the depth to the soul.”