A solid foundation

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This article was published 03/02/2024 (689 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Homeowners (and renters) know that if there’s something wrong with your foundation, you may well be in for a world of trouble.

In his latest novel Bad Foundations, celebrated American indie author Brian Allen Carr uses what lies beneath our homes as a metaphor for life as well as a launching pad for a rollicking ride that takes protagonist and narrator, Cook, from his home in Ohio across the midwest to Texas and back.

Not unlike other pieces of blue-collar autofiction — say, Charles Bukowski’s Post Office or Bud Smith’s Work, for but two examples — Bad Foundation finds both humour and heartbreak in the daily grind that is working life under late-stage capitalism.

Not unlike Carr himself, Cook, a middle-aged American husband and father who has worked many jobs over the years, finds himself working as a crawl space inspector and salesman. He doesn’t love the work, but takes to it honestly as a means to provide for his family. A recovering alcoholic, Cook steers clear of booze — unlike some of his co-workers — but leans on high-powered legal weed gummies as a crutch to get through the long, dirty days spent crawling around under other peoples’ houses.

“I used to be a professor,” Cook, who may or may not be cursed, tells a hotel receptionist, who may or may not be psychic, at one point. “I did something like this when I was twenty. Quit. Went to school. Got a master’s degree and started teaching college. And if I’d just stayed doing this, I’d be able to retire in my 50s. I’ll never retire now. But I’ve read the classics.”

A chance encounter with a doddering senior in a local graveyard while out strolling with his teenage daughter eventually sends Cook on a winding road that sees him arrested twice in short order, while all the while trying to make sense of the universe and get his vibes back in check.

“The road ran beneath us,” Cook observes, high on Delta 8 edibles while Pink Floyd plays on his coworker’s truck stereo, before being sent to Ohio to boost his sales numbers. “I wasn’t happy about anything. The synthesizers were synthesizing. The song was about a train, and the train was made of gravy.”

However, Cook’s trip to Ohio falls apart, despite a strong start, and he’s left to put the pieces back together after he wakes up in police custody and his co-worker quits and stops answering his calls. In order to make things right, Cook heads out to Corpus Christi, where he hopes to lift a curse he and his teenage daughter figure was laid on him years earlier.

Carr, author of the critically acclaimed Opioid, Indiana, among others, writes honestly and engagingly about working-class life and all it entails. While ostensibly a meditation on work and family disguised as a road-trip novel, Bad Foundations also explores ideas of quantum physics, the afterlife, causality, fatherhood and more in just over 200 pages. Chapters are interspersed with AutoCAD-style illustrations and text message and email exchanges, making for a brisk, enjoyable read overall.

Sheldon Birnie is a Winnipeg writer and reporter and the author of Where the Pavement Turns to Sand, a collection of short fiction.