Toronto writer Rick Crilly’s debut is labelled as “experimental fiction” by its publisher. This is a fair statement. To less than a hundred pages of fragmented narrative Crilly adds 54 footnotes and 20 endnotes that include illustrations, information from Wikipedia, Biblical quotations, and an extended series of references to French literary critic Roland Barthes.

Crilly writes well. The voice of his narrator is calm, unsentimental, and at times irreverent. The unnamed male narrator documents his friendship with a woman named Caroline through their childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. Throw in an element of unrequited young love (his for her), and the plot may begin to sound a little more conventional than experimental. Luckily, Crilly’s approach is anything but conventional. Caroline and the narrator make for strangely compelling characters – despite, or perhaps because of, the limited information Crilly reveals about them. The story flows well, the oddity of its form notwithstanding.

However, there are also moments that confound, moments that require readers be well versed in, say, Barthes’ critical theories or the finer points of the Catholic catechism. The sheer volume of ancillary material is sometimes overwhelming, and some of the footnotes and endnotes, though intriguing in their own right, have only a tenuous link to the main narrative and, as a result, end up distracting the reader.

Ultimately, The Tablecloth Trick is an experiment that was worth conducting, but the method and tools could benefit from some tinkering before Crilly puts them to work a second time.