We See What We Want to See
Reviews
By Robert Warf
Published by Clash Books in January 2024, Brian Allen Carr’s latest novel, Bad Foundations, occupies crawl spaces, both those in need of repair and those beyond it. Throughout, Carr firmly grounds readers in the various tight spaces that his protagonist, Cook, encounters. We in fact never leave these spaces, seeing all the rotting beams and humidified ghosts underneath every floorboard.
For me, the experience of reading Bad Foundations is akin to listening to an extended jam session with my favorite band where various members all riff off one central rhythm—that being what lies beneath the surface. In many ways the novel operates as a multifaceted metaphor, constantly recurving its focus down to what lies at the foundational level of each situation Cook finds himself in and how he can go about repairing the damage discovered.
Perhaps I’m making the metaphor sound simplistic. It is and it isn’t, which is what drives this novel. As Cook establishes early on, “We see what we want to see.” This statement is returned to again and again. Carr begins by structuring the initial chapter so that Cook interrogates himself through the first of several pretend interviews with an imaginary version of NPR journalist Mary Louise Kelly where he relates understanding the directions our lives take to seeing what we want to see. The following chapters do exactly this, showing readers Cook’s job working in crawl spaces and assessing foundations, which he describes as “always feel[ing] like the worst foundations are under the homes that don’t look like they should have bad foundations.” What starts as a rumination on crawl spaces soon transitions into what attracted Cook to working in these confined spaces himself. This initial interest originated from when a summer-school friend’s father, JP, died working underneath a home in the same spaces Cook would later work. Carr progresses from this explanation of what motivated Cook’s decision to work in crawl spaces to what kinds of people and personalities choose to work in them. This then serves as a natural transition to Carr examining Cook’s coworkers in the sales office and their varied personalities that collide and shape the drama underlying the business of foundational inspectors themselves. This riffing from question to question and idea to idea is what thoroughly captivated me while reading, making the experience almost feel like I was underneath a foundation myself, examining different types of cracks that only Carr can expose.
Equally exposed here, too, are the characters occupying Cook’s life. These characters that Carr lays out for us are people we all know in our own lives and workspaces, which contributes to their overall effectiveness. For example, Cook’s boss, Mortimer, obsesses over sales numbers, calling in with a mask on to assess sales in between reminders for pronoun use, all the while taking it upon himself to redefine each employee’s pronouns after they reveal their numbers, with lines like “That’s a he / him all day long. Those are he / him numbers from Germ. 250. He / him.” Or take Cowboy Dan, an older crawl space worker maintaining his job solely by virtue of being grandfathered in from the previous owners, who gives a trolling workplace presentation on how he got into the crawl-space business after being forced to walk the plank of a boat and swimming up a drainage pipe where he discovered he sought to trace the origin of his confusion within the chaos of the world. This presentation culminates in Cowboy Dan explaining how he uses his work laser to find ghosts in crawl spaces. There are many more examples of colorful characters in this novel, but they are all representative of the underlying chaos and camaraderie within a workplace that only those working there can understand and experience.
Each of these characters is also representative of a larger, more central question that ultimately drives the narrative: Who really knows what they are doing? In each instance of Cook visiting a home, the homeowner relies on Cook to identify the issue with the foundation. Cook may not know the answer, but the homeowner is clueless because they don’t know the answer either. And even if the homeowner did know, as Cook himself states, “You can know what you’re doing and not be able to do what you know. It’s like when you give away the joke at the wrong time in the punchline. The ideas are there, but what is it?” This question of who has the answers is further exacerbated within the chaos of Cook’s workplace, where their top salesperson is routinely drunk, another believes his laser can spot ghosts, and their boss is purely concerned with sales figures and not whether anyone understands what they are doing. Structurally, the novel also follows this same question, having Cook seek answers from those who “know,” whether it be emailing renowned theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli to see if lasers can actually spot ghosts in crawl spaces or musing about the legality of delta-8, which Cook defines as “a kind of loophole byproduct that emerged from our cannabis laws. It’s kind of a problem in search of an answer.” Throughout the novel Cook is in search of answers that no one seems to have. Answers that Cook will never get unless he is underneath them and looking, and even then, he would have to know what he was looking at to find them.
Stylistically, Carr uses multiple forms and perspectives to help readers understand what they are looking at inside crawl spaces, with manual-style illustrations of foundations and text threads between Cook and his coworkers appearing every couple chapters. These varied forms mesh seamlessly with Carr’s prose to reinforce the feeling of seeing the exposed beams of a crawl space or, in the case of the text threads, the inner workings of Cook’s workplace.
Similarly, from a cursory glance at Bad Foundations, it’s easy to read this as a funny novel moving from one foundational rumination to the next. But such a reading would undercut Carr’s excellent humor, which serves to make his constant recurves to underlying societal cracks effortless and never annoyingly obvious. Perhaps, too, none of this recurving ever comes off as stale because of how entertainingly everything is rendered through Cook’s eyes. There are so many instances where Cook and his coworkers find themselves in situations that are equally funny and bizarre. Whether it be descriptions like “There was a bar called Belly to Belly, and they had a mechanical bull with customized settings, and every time I crossed I had them put it to ‘Pony Boy’ and tried to ride it to heaven,” or lines like “A lot of things built 100 years ago weren’t even level 100 years ago,” Carr’s humor is at the forefront of every situation. And I’m not even touching on Trap Tre, a young rapper who muses about how the world is flat while sharing a jail cell with Cook, or eighty-two-year-old Harvey, who “borrows” flowers from graves with “prim and goofy” last names so that he can relocate their flowers to a mysterious nearby tombstone with a chiseled-out name that has become the object of his obsession. Again, this novel is funny in its bizarreness, while also being astutely observational of its world and the characters occupying it.
After reading Bad Foundations I’m not sure that I ever want to look under a home and see what it’s really made of, but I feel like I could crawl under a home and understand the signs of when and where it’s all going to go bad. They’d be obvious, right in front of me, but I’d never want to look now.
Robert Warf is from Portsmouth, Virginia. He has work in Post Road, Necessary Fiction, X-R-A-Y, HAD, and Witch Craft.
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