Leah Bobet
KEN SPARLING, NOT ANYWHERE, JUST NOT.
Toronto: coach house 2023. $23.95
Complex, dizzying, and coolly deliberate, Ken Sparling's seventh novel—a quietly emergent marital horror story—sharpens counterfactuality and whimsy to a knifepoint to apprehend the act of disappearance: all the tiny terrors we try to actively vanish from our lives, and all the things and people we can't—or refuse to—find.
Boy and Girl—almost sixty, and still thinking of themselves as young—live in a sleepy alternate version of the Toronto suburbs where people routinely disappear without explanation for days, months, sometimes even decades at a time: so often that police have stopped taking missing persons’ reports. The few who return can't explain what happened to them or say where they were while they were gone. “I wasn’t anywhere. I just wasn’t,” one survivor says. "I was gone to myself."
When the boy vanishes from their basement one September morning, the girl is left, bewildered, in a house riddled with unfinished projects and half-rotten possessions, autopsying their suffocatingly codependent relationship: a welter of illusions, unmet needs, and tiny festering denigrations. Dissociative, anxious, and grieving, Girl searches Boy's discarded creative writing journals for clues as to where he might have gone, reading through years of allusive, bitten-off short stories he insists aren't autobiographical. As she increasingly unearths her own agency and the ways her elusive, passive husband has been vanishing for years, she grows less sure she actually wants him back.
Not Anywhere, Just Not is marketed as a “Gordon Lish-style novel” and, true to form, Sparling's stylistic and structural choices carry most of the weight of this claustrophobic, carefully balanced narrative.
Told in a flurry of fragmented anecdotes almost like poetic stanzas, it accretes more than develops, slowly solidifying the traumas and miscommunications Girl and Boy have been living under—what two people have destroyed themselves trying to unsee. It's a reading experience not unlike hanging on in the middle of a flood: all the contradictions, hurts, and omissions threatening to sweep Girl away, and us along with her. Sparling's artfully cracked worldbuilding goes fathoms deep, provoking the dizzying compulsion of great heights—to lean so far over the edge that you might just slip.
As readers, we find ourselves staggering along with the isolated, unmoored girl, and from its first pages, Not Anywhere, Just Not meticulously signals how intentional and thematic this is: "'He’s in the midst of telling the girl something,'" Girl's narration says, early on, "'but the girl feels like she’s arrived too late to understand. She’s missed too much.'" And so have we, but by joining the girl's attempt to puzzle the boy and their relationship out, through nightmarish emotional terrain and her own faint, growing hope, we're able to find out just enough.
Sparling guides this mutual navigation by littering his landscape with hints, mirroring, and metaphors. "But now that he isn't anywhere at all, the boy is everywhere at once," Girl observes; it's the clue Not Anywhere, Just Not offers to take nearly everything around Girl as a map to the truth. The pair of squirrels in the backyard are also a metaphor for twisted marital dynamics; Boy's indecisive logorrhea is signaled through his "overflowing bookshelves that line the back of the unfinished rec room," and the interviews Girl watches with the unvanished survivors, all of whom are still mired in denial, bear a daunting message about the wages of passivity. Following this map is a delicate game of listening to what's repeated and what both Boy and Girl shy away from: inferring the shape of this machine by the contours of its absences, under the intense, suffocating pressure of something we cannot and will not see.
That game of inference is the brilliance of Not Anywhere, Just Not: actively flagging those missing pieces as not just absent but omitted; not just passively, but deliberately vanished. Voices are muffled as if from a farther room; words are spilled everywhere—on the lawn, across the table, into the toilet—but rendered illegible, inaudible, pointedly uncaptioned; words persistently "come out jumbled." Not Anywhere, Just Not takes a cue from blackout poetry in calling undeniable attention to its own communicative sabotage. Both Boy and Girl can hear what's happening: what she doesn't want to hear, and he doesn't want to speak. As readers, we're buried in their pretense of incomprehension.
This artful counterfactuality will appeal to readers of Jeanette Winterson or Kathryn Davis's Duplex: less absurdist or whimsical than a surgically accurate map of dangerous emotional landscapes, with the unreal as its operating tools. Each fantastical element is the caution tape around a relational landmine.
Ultimately, though, Sparling's character writing is Not Anywhere, Just Not's backbone. Beneath the layers of obfuscation and denial both Girl and Boy are simultaneously enigmatic and shockingly evocative creations. Portrayed for most of the novel only through his and Girl's dueling distortions, Boy is a simultaneously pitiable and psychologically complex terror. His propensity to make ever-changing rules in a desperate attempt to navigate life, obsession with rejection, impenetrable and aggressive passivity, and reflexive, evasive self-editing grow increasingly skin-crawling, even as characters he won't name exhort him to be more honest. The shattering depths of his dysfunction emerge like a ghost ship.
Girl's are more obvious and yet slower to unfold, evoked through her stifled, furious body language, intermittent cruelty, enabling, and careening tendency to fill in all the gaps Boy leaves with what she wishes was actually there. If Boy lies to her, it's with her complicit willingness to unhear the truth. Her slow leaps into self-awareness feel hard-won, relieving, and terrifyingly fragile.
Sparling’s characteristically minimalist prose holds these characters delicately, with a detachment that's almost necessary to bear watching them. His awareness of rhythm, cadence, and imagery conjures their emotional states wordlessly through the floor, until you can scent Girl's unarticulated moods—and fear—in the cadence of each line. Scattered through its atmosphere, moments of beauty are picked out with a poet's eye for detail: the incremental lifting of a cat’s nose, or an ugly knit rug rendered beautiful by its stitching.
The result is a quiet, odd, and highly specific tour-de-force, designed for readers who love unflinching but compassionate books where authorial craft works overtime. Not Anywhere, Just Not nimbly executes the high-wire act of rendering a horrendous, complex affective landscape without trauma-logic or prejudice; it is a masterfully machined, dark, and emotionally intelligent examination of the truths we can't admit to ourselves and the towering, tremulous edifices we build to protect them.
LEAH BOBET
Leah Bobet's latest novel, An Inheritance of Ashes, won the Sunburst, Copper Cylinder, and Prix Aurora Awards and was an OLA Best Bets book; her short fiction is anthologized worldwide. Her poetry has appeared in Grain, Prairie Fire, and Canthius, and has shortlisted for the Prix Aurora Award and the Muriel's Journey Poetry Prize. She was the Utopia Award -winning poetry editor for Reckoning: creative writing on environmental justice’s 2021 issue. She lives in Toronto, where she makes jam, builds civic engagement spaces, and plants both tomatoes and trees. Visit her at leahbobet.com.