Ken Sparling - Dad Says He Saw You at the Mall

Back in 1996, Ken Sparling published a novel that was unlike any novel I had ever read before and I was amazed by what he had done. That novel was Dad Says He Saw You at the Mall . It’s years later now and I’m still amazed by the book every time I re-read it.

— Michael Kimball, author of Us and Big Ray

Ken Sparling’s 1996 classic might have been out of print for almost a decade and a half, but its virtuosities have hardly been forgotten and have hardly gone unloved to death. What a joy it is, though, to see this piercingly funny, nervous, and thrillingly sad novel-in-fragments available at last for a new generation of readers to discover its loopy domestic lyricism of the shifting lonelinesses and companionate spells at the heart of contemporary marriage. I envy anyone reading Dad Says He Saw You at the Mall for the first time.

— Gary Lutz, author of Divorcer and I Looked Alive

When I first read it as a young writer, Dad Says He Saw You at the Mall was my bible. I read it, reread it, and even read it to other people. It felt like a revelation, a master’s class in writing. It taught me it was still possible to create a kind of literature that was utterly new, and all these years later it still stands alone as a novel unlike any I’ve ever read. Dad Says rips the veil off our most private thoughts and gives voice to the feelings we spend most of our lives trying to repress or just plain ignore. With economy, tenderness, and great humour, Sparling not only lays to waste our notions about what a novel can be, but also what being in the world can be. This is a brutal book.

— Jonathan Goldstein, author of Lenny Bruce Is Dead

When someone asked me what Dad Says He Saw You at the Mall was about, it felt like I’d seen a beautiful tree and struggled to describe it to someone, only to have that someone say: “Yes, but what is the tree about?” You wouldn’t know how to answer that question. It isn’t the right question. The tree wasn’t ever about anything. It was just beautiful.

I always start out with nothing but intent when I go to make a book. I always already want to make a book long before I have any words written to go in the book. I never have any idea what I want the book to be about before I make the book. And I continue to have no idea what I want the book to be about until I am finished making the book; and even then, when I am finished making the book, I still don’t know what I want the book to be about.

For me, making a book is the same as trying to find out what the book will be about.

Making a book is the same as trying to find out what it means to make a book.

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You can feel intent without having a specific intention. You can be intent without knowing what you intend.

In making a book, I am exploring the implications of my intentions within the context of creating a novel. What are the implications of attempting to bend raw, empty, intent, utterly devoid of content, into form? I begin in intention. But intention crumbles. In the face of the world around me, intention falters. It flounders. It fills with faults.

Only a feeling can be whole, and only by assigning meaning to that wholeness do we disrupt that wholeness long enough to understand it as a whole. Intention begins as a feeling of wholeness, the way only an empty feeling can feel whole. Nothing remains whole insofar as nothing remains entirely empty of anything; as long as it remains nothing, it remains whole.

As soon as we assign something to nothing, as soon as we attach meaning, words, implications, decisions to the nothing we feel initially in our intentions, our intentions seem to fall apart.

My intentions lose their feeling of wholeness in the push and pull of the world’s intentions. All around me, in what might be perceived as the intentions of god or of fate or of blind fortune or of misfortune, are the fragments of story that attach themselves to the feeling of intent I begin with.

The wholeness of intent doesn’t disintegrate into fragments, it pulls fragments to it like iron filings to a magnet, until the weight of the fragments pulls the wholeness of intention down and kills it.

This is what a novel is: the struggle to defeat the death of intent; the on-going struggle to rescue, to preserve, to maintain the wholeness of intent even as it gathers the fragments of story to it, so that the wholeness of intent shines through every fragment of story the novel gathers. Intent, not story, holds the novel together; intent is the struggle to remain whole in spite of story.

~

How does a system of organization where making is the same as finding out how to make keep from collapsing in upon itself? How does a writer move forward within a system that seeks to stay where it is, as a means of determining what it means to move forward?

I’ve never been very good at planning in any traditional sense and a lot of what we do in this world involves planning. This sort of pisses me off. This doesn’t mean that I’ve given up on the idea of planning, just that it pisses me off that I seem to have no choice but to plan.

Not being very good at planning has forced me to think hard and constantly about what it means to plan. And, while all this thinking about planning might not have made me any better at planning, I think that I have come to embody in my writing a system of organization. Dad Says He Saw You at the Mall is the foundation of that system.

Some might say that my novels are not organized at all; but if the work I do in developing a book involves an enormous amount of reflection on the idea of planning, even if that reflection is evoked through a kind of anger about having to make plans, then I think that what some might call a lack of organization is more likely a different manner of being organized.

A person who is good at planning will always look conventionally organized; that is, organized in a manner that is authorized by convention, by repeated exposure to its own manner. Convention shelters a shared manner of being. Like pop music, the melody may be new, but the structure that shelters the melody (rhythm, timbre, harmony, etc.) remains stubbornly consistent.

Conventional organization will never question or attempt to influence the nature of organization, because as soon as the plan falls into question, it begins to look less organized to anyone who understands organization as a manner of sheltering within the authority of a plan.

Those who seek organization in a plan know when something is organized because it looks like it is organized. Strange as this may sound, it is what we do. We root our understanding of organization in what we have already come to understand as organized.

But truly being organized means the same as truly being anything. It means truly being. It means existing as an example of what it means to be.

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Our goal in organizing our project of addressing a book is to get to where we are hoping to be at the end of our project, but without, at any given point throughout the project, knowing where we are hoping to be at the end of our project.

We hope for an outcome in order to experience hope. The outcome we hope for in experiencing hope is no outcome at all, for the outcome of hope comes always at the end of hoping for that outcome, and so comes to be the end of hope.

The writer who is able to aim for the end of the project without ever knowing what that end will be, opens to the reader the moment of intention hidden within the fragments of the story, offering the reader an opportunity to experience a wholeness of intention unavailable in the incremental manner of organization embodied in the story.