Larry Fondation interview for The Industrial Worker Book Review

Interview by Interview conducted with William Hastings

1: What is most striking about your books is the style, your compression of line and event. Whereas many realists go for the long line, the expansive book, you have moved in the opposite direction. And yet, realism is never lost. How did your style come about? There are echoes of Algren, Farrell, Borges, Dos Passos, but its always you.

Stream-of-consciousness went for the flow of the mind, of thought; I am trying for the flow of action, of events. I don't think most of us – especially in this "Information Age" – live our lives in a smooth and continuous narrative arc. Particularly not the poor – people without power who must react to the actions of others, rather than have the opportunity to initiate. So my style has emerged from how I see and hear and experience street life, as it were. The influences you cite are definitely there, but also Selby, Genet, Mary Robison (among contemporaries), Guyotat, Iceberg Slim, Beckett…I think we need a kind of "street Beckett" to reflect life as it is lived now…

Also, I am highly influenced by the visual arts. The photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson talked about capturing life at "the decisive moment." The idea is to evoke a broader, more complete story at a given moment in time….

Finally, when I was a punk ass kid in blue collar Boston, our lives on the corner were marked by long stretches of boredom, punctuated by short periods of intense action – sex, violence…I think that's the way it goes down for most people….action is a cure for boredom…

2: You say that we lack a narrative arc, or at least a smooth one, in our daily lives, especially the poor. How much of this is purposefully imposed upon us? Is it to the benefit of others that our lives lack narrative?

Rich or poor, I don't think any of us have a "narrative arc." That's in a sense imposed on all of us. For one thing, it's what sells. Though sometimes, I think a narrative arc, a three-act structure, whatever, works for some stories and in some ways. It can help shape how we think about story, give it meaning…Having said that, what the poor are deprived of is the opportunity to tell their own story, smooth or rough. That's the injustice. And the imbalance of that power is why "free speech" per se – especially as the Supreme Court defines it – is such bullshit. The bully pulpit, unfortunately, belongs to those who own the microphone.

3: Why does American literature continually turn its head away from homelessness? Why do we turn our heads away from the homeless when we walk down the street?

Increasingly, writers are rich. MFA programs exacerbate that. Today, you need $50,000 or more just to get your "union card" as a writer. And – as Robert Reich points out, we now have the "secession of the successful;" rich people have gated communities and private security guards. So we have a huge bevy of writers who have lots of polished talent and nothing to say; they write works of glittering shit, but it's still shit. Books about the poor are like Hallmark cards. Poor people have to have special talents just to get noticed. Then it's a Hollywood movie. Like "The Soloist." The Joads didn't have "special talents." Professor Sean Bernard did a great review of "Fish, Soap and Bonds" in the American Book Review – great not because he liked my book, but because he called on writers to write about poor people who "are just poor."

In the broader context, we turn away from the homeless out of fear. Not fear of them. But rather fear we might be just like them, or close to it. And we can't stand that. We now identify up the ladder not down it. We all want to be rich. We've lost any class consciousness that came over from Europe and other nations in the early 20th century. Now, with our Louis Vuitton, we all emulate the rich, and we're scared shitless of the truth – most of us are a couple of paychecks away from homelessness…

If we turn away from the homeless out of our fear of being like them, was this then your greatest challenge when writing "Fish, Soap and Bonds": to make people that we fear characters worth reading about, instead of turning away from?

I think it is about asserting our common humanity and the essential dignity and worth of every human person. We are all children of God, if we are religious, and children of humankind, if we are not. Now those are abstract statements. The task in fiction is to make it concrete. As William Carlos Williams said: "No ideas but in things" – or. in this case, people…I truly believe that the stories of the marginalized are stories with the same resonance as all others, and I try to write towards that light….the literature of witness is an important one, one that tries to depict and reveal….I aim for that in my work.

4: You have worked as a labor organizer in Compton. How did the work affect your writing, your approach?

That's both an easy and a hard question. I think the simplest answer is that – working in South LA, Compton, East LA – I've seen a lot. The work has reinforced my sense that the margins tell us most about the whole.

5: The fringes do say the most about us, as you mention. But you write about a particular fringe--the urban. What does the urban fringe say about us that is different than the rural fringe others write about?

I have lived in cities all my life. I simply don't know the rural experience. Or rural poverty. But many fine writers do. Chris Offutt does. Daniel Woodrells' "Winter's Bone" was that rarity – both a good book AND a good film….But I think – urban or rural -- the stories are similar: tales of dispossession. Only the settings are different.

6: Kate Ruth's illustrations work perfectly for your last two books. I am reminded of the synergy between Hunter S. Thompson and Ralph Steadman. With as visceral as your prose is, why did you choose to work with an illustrator? Now having done it, do you want to write a book without an illustrator, or has that become an integral part of your work?

Another for me, of course, is Dos Passos and Reginald Marsh in the USA Trilogy.

Kate and I met randomly in a sense. We found each other on the Internet. We collaborated for a few years before actually meeting each other. And, even now, when we hang out, we rarely talk about the writing and the illustrating. The work just flows. And that is an ideal situation.

As I said earlier, I love the visual arts, and I love Kate's work. While I try to subvert the sequential nature of writing through brevity and compression, it can't be done. It's the nature of the medium. With the drawings there, we can go for a kind of simultaneity. The art jumps out before – and during – the story. She's great, and I feel lucky to be working with her. (P.S. you can see our work (and her solo stuff) at: http://www.kateruth.com/WWW.KATERUTH.COM/KATE_RUTH_-_LARRY_FONDATION.html

7: Talk about your writing process. Do you write at night? At home? Computer, pencil, typewriter?

At night – in all media – and at bars!!

8: With the inequality gap in America widening, is your work becoming less a descriptor of what is and more of a forewarning of what's to come?

Unfortunately, yes. In order to develop a "politics" – a world view, not a party affiliation – one must see the world as it is, not as we'd like it to be. We must start where we are, and see that reality clearly and starkly. For me, as a writer, that means starting at the margins, with the outcasts. Sadly, in the new Gilded Age, i.e. now, more and more of us are marginalized and fewer and fewer of us realize it or recognize it…. It is both what's to come and what already is.

9: Your homeless characters all seem to be stuck in their respective situations, and yet none of them expected to get there. If we cannot expect to become homeless, what is it about being homeless that traps us?

Most people dream of falling off a cliff. I am no Freudian, or even much interested in psychology per se at all. But I know that I am much closer to the people I hung out with on Skid Rowe when I was researching "Fish, Soap and Bonds" than I am to Steve Jobs. We are closer to the abyss than we think; we just don't want to fucking admit it.

When researching a book like "Fish, Soap and Bonds" and having to go into Skid Row, does the idea of objectivity become completely bullshit? In nicer terms: is it possible to remain objective, or is that a myth journalists keep telling themselves?

"We are addicted to reality. But our "reality" is not the way things are. Rather it is the way we suppose things to be, the way we want things to be -- our way of making myth, however hollow or forced, at whatever cost."

Those are my words – from an essay I began a few years ago – during the James Frey "Million Little Pieces" debacle…

Objectivity, truth, reality – all are slippery slopes, as are grand pronouncements about the nature of those concepts. But we can reflect on the ideas both in context, and in usage…

Of course, in fiction, there is no need to posit objectivity or reality; it's fiction! But there is, in literary works, a truth-claim, in the philosophical sense. But, if you look at what's published, it's mostly tales of rich peoples' angst. So there is a bias in the industry as a whole. We don't see many books about the poor, with the exception of triumph of the human spirit stories, rags to riches, etc., which are basically Hallmark greeting cards, not works of literary merit.

The proliferation of memoirs (non-fiction sells!) is deplorable in general. These writers are NOT Grant or Churchill. Generally, they have nothing to say. And the commercial aspects lead to shit-shows like the whole James Frey mess. He wrote "A Million Little Pieces" as a novel; it was his publisher that called it a memoir – to boost sales. But the bigger point is that the whole memoir genre is largely a cesspool.

In journalism, I know reporters who try very hard to write accurate, fair and balanced stories. And they often succeed. But that's not the issue. The real problem is institutional bias. The New York Times says: "All the news that's fit to print." What that really means is all the news the New York Times sees fit to print. So much depends not only on Williams' wheelbarrow, which it does, but also on our initial premise, or perspective: the bombing of the World Trade Center vs. the bombing of Baghdad. Unofficial terrorism vs. official terrorism. Zizek's Violence is great on this point of accepted wisdom, or what Gramsci called "ideological hegemony." The Wall Street Journal is objective – if you accept the premises of multinational corporate capitalism…

Shit, I am glad I am a fiction writer….

10: Is the fragmentary nature of your style a reflection of the day-to-day living, moment by moment hustling, that so many in this country use to just survive?

Urban life seems to me to be marked by a multitude of occurrences, of discontinuous incidents and syncopated rhythms. Traditional narrative arc works well for certain kinds of portrayals. But not necessarily for the jumble of urban living, especially living on or close to the streets. I try to approximate the discontinuity with short, stark vignettes that I hope, when taken together, add up to more than the sum of their parts.

11: For as truly short, bordering on flash fiction, as your short stories are, they never lose a dramatic arc or dramatic tension. When I read short stories that are printed in many of the big slicks and the literary quarterlies, many have no tension at all and seem to just float and die out. Can you talk about your approach to short stories, especially with regards to never losing momentum or drama?

Well, I do "plot" traditionally in one sense. There is "action" in my stories; things do happen. In some kind of arc or sequence. But my goal is compression, especially in the very short work. Except in much longer work, I'll leave back story and all that to inference. I respect my readers; I think they are smart and I trust that they can fill in the details by engaging their own imaginations much better than I can by writing way too long and boring.

The other pat of this answer is subject matter. As I mentioned earlier, so many writers now are products of university programs. Jack London didn't go to college; Steinbeck dropped out of Stanford (smartly) after one semester. Writing is visceral, not academic. Reading should feel like getting punched in the stomach. Even Grimm's Fairy Tales do. Middle and upper class angst is boring and repetitive. We don't need a neo-Henry James. Nor a Jonathan Franzen. Safe art is the enemy.

12: Los Angeles is a city many writers have laid claim to, West, Ellroy, Mosley, Chandler, Bukowski amongst the most famous. What is it about LA as opposed to other cities that has you writing about it?

Those are all great writers. Hell, add Fante, for sure, Didion, John Gregory Dunne….I'd be honored, etc… But even among the living writers on the list, most write about "LA Then." I am interested in "LA Now." Don't get me wrong. I love the noir stuff. I love the myth of LA – the shattered dreams of West's work, the thwarted longing of Didion's…the dirty streets of Fante and Bukowski, the "bad men" of Ellroy. I love the myth of the City. But there is a current myth too, and it is different from then.

For me, I have lived here in LA for more than 20 years. I have spent most of that time in places that don't get talked about, written about. There is no Hollywood in my LA – at least no more Hollywood than that which makes the death of one's dreams more painful. In the Los Angeles that I know, Hollywood – and all its attendant bullshit –is no more than a taunting presence. Gary Phillips gets that; Salvador Plascensia gets that. But there aren't too many that do. I hope I can be among them.

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