In the first part of SMALL PIECES OF THE ACTUAL WORLD, friends Jim Chase and Blake Huntley take different paths through an acid trip in Alhambra, CA on a fine day in 1969. In the second, Jim is dead and buried, nearly six decades later. However, the cemetery staff discover that a box has manifested itself within Jim’s grave. They also notice that the box contains a manuscript—and the manuscript is dated from the future.

Written by Jack Call, this work has a subtitle: “a philosophical novel in two parts.” This is an ill-defined category, but, at the fundamental level, “a philosophical novel” still has to be constrained by the mechanics of a novel. In that vein, SMALL PIECES just doesn’t follow through here. The majority of the book, in both its halves, is introspective philosophizing that has no bearing on the actual “story.” Not every work of fiction needs to be plot-focused, but the characters are thin, too—which effectively leaves the “philosophical” content hanging in midair. At that point, the reader has no reason to read; they’re better served by a nonfiction work, which will be clearer (and in some cases, more compelling).

The narrative, such as it is, sets itself up with two immense challenges. The first part of SMALL PIECES follows the teenaged Jim and Blake as they drop acid and trip, establishing some of the philosophical ideas to which the adult Jim evidently returns. But as nearly everyone knows, one problem with tripping is the incommunicable reality into which one enters. Everything seems vivid, and important, and awesome—but not to anyone who isn’t tripping, for whom any attempt at communicating these feelings has the same interest as listening to someone describe a disjointed, meaningless dream. There can be narrative, and character, and compelling interest in writing about mind-altering drug use; but writers like Kerouac and Burroughs have done it more successfully.

The second part of SMALL PIECES holds promise. The sci-fi hook is a great one: a box appears inside a sealed grave; the box is made of an unknown material; there’s a manuscript within; the paper itself has seemingly impossible properties; and the whole thing is dated a further twenty years into the future. The perspective shift is refreshing, too: an internet conspiracy theorist is collecting information about these mysterious events. But the text then pivots, even admitting outright that the manuscript is a hodgepodge of philosophical ramblings that never merited publication in Jim’s life, due to a lack of rigor. Unfortunately, even if this section were logically sound (even profound!), the novel would still run into a formal obstacle: it does not develop plot, character, or even really theme; it pivots purely to a manifesto. Again, it’s not impossible to make compelling fiction with dramatic, experimental breakouts into nonfiction (half of Moby-Dick is encyclopedic information about whales); but that device must still serve the novel as a novel. Here, the fiction feels like a loose frame for unstructured musings about life and death, and that just isn’t enough to merit a reader’s time and attention.

Jack Call’s SMALL PIECES OF THE ACTUAL WORLD may be promising and sincere, but it ultimately fails to connect with the reader.

~Dan Accardi for IndieReader