How to build a foundation
Brian Allen Carr talks about his book Bad Foundation
What no one tells you about buying a home is that it falls apart and it’s your job as its owner to somehow keep it upright. Houses are not permanent structures. There are countless jobs associated with building new homes and fixing old ones. There are plumbers, electrician’s, handymen, floor installers, sheetrock hangers, and foundation inspectors who check to see if your home is crumbling from its base, which would be terrible and is somehow inevitable because nothing is permanent. Many of the jobs are thankless and require crawling into unforgiving places, seeing the unseeable and finding the ghosts of our home.
Brian Allen Carr is one of those people who has crawled under homes and into the unspeakable voids beneath where we live as an inspector. He puts that experience to use in his new novel Bad Foundation, a hilarious book about, well, a foundation inspector named Cook whose home life and career are crumbling and to solve some of the issues he has he decides to take a journey to hopefully reverse a possible curse. Carr writes with propulsive force and wit. Bad Foundation has a Charles Portis-esque quality to it in that it’s a story about a man traveling and meeting with colorful characters and is filled funny and biting dialogue — some of the best in Bad Foundation are text messages.
Carr focuses on the journey and his writing is tight. Bad Foundation has the feeling of a writer who isn’t looking for acceptance, and that’s refreshing in a world where we’re all looking to become famous for one reason or another. Carr writes with a freedom. Maybe it’s because Carr himself was once a cook and now works as a foundation inspector. Or maybe it’s because Carr has found solace in books dating back to high school, which took him four and a half years to complete.
“I would steal books from the library,” Carr says. “I'd skip school and hide out in the library. I didn't graduate high school on time because of how much I'd skip algebra to read.”
To finish, he spent an extra semester studying geometry with sophomores. At night he worked as a cook — he’d eventually go to culinary school — and he’d show up to class hungover with a newspaper.
“I’m pretty sure I only passed because the teacher felt sorry for me,” he says.
Feeling bad or not, those days spent in the library reading instead of working on algebra have paid off.
It took time for Carr to finish college as well. He completed his undergraduate degree at 27 and his MFA at 30, both at the University of Texas-Pan American. He got a college teaching job but hated it and when his family moved he decided he wanted to do something else so he got a job inspecting home foundations. It’s not a glamorous job, but it’s one he loves and it has given him the base for his novel, which starts out with one of the best dedications in modern literature:
For Taylor Swift
My kids will probably spend my royalties on your merch, so I might as well dedicate the whole book to you.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
I flew through this book and I think, while it is about the foundations of homes and filled with details, it’s a book that moves fast.
That's the type of book that I'm drawn to. When I think about writers who I'd like to emulate the most, I think about people who have catalogs that are a little bit larger. The ideas in each book are robust, but maybe not always a million percent fully fleshed out. There's an aesthetic, though, that drives the thing, and you can get through them fairly quickly. To me, good examples of that are like Jim Thompson, Kurt Vonnegut, and Charles Portis — to a certain extent though, his output was a little bit smaller.
Sentence by sentence, I would put Portis up with just about anybody.
His dialogue is the best dialogue, I’d say.
That's 90 percent of his books.
Yeah, the thing is, though, that with the right type of writer, they can get away with giving you a lot of dialogue. Not everybody can. For some people it just kind of falls apart.
I like writers with catalogs and books that are like that. They move, but they're kind of smart, there's some sort of philosophical underpinning that's at least being reached at. It's not just pulp. Then maybe it's teaching you about something that you otherwise wouldn't get that into.
The Killer Inside Me by Jim Thompson, it kind of explains what a sheriff's life is in a small Texas town, and then it's got a fast story around it and then it’s about what does it mean to be evil? But it's just a fucking murder story. I like that kind of shit. Similarly, Cat's Cradle is really just a story about a guy taking a trip, but I mean it’s more than that.
I feel like this book could be a TV show. It has some of the surreal aspects that “Atlanta” had except in the midwest.
I thought a lot about “Atlanta” when I was writing this book. I love Atlanta. It's my second favorite TV show right behind “The Twilight Zone.”
What sets you all to write a book about a guy inspecting foundations?
Then I taught higher ed for about 10 years. My wife's from Indiana and she wanted to move home, and so I got a case study writing job up here at an engineering school called Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology, and I was writing about engineers, but it was a one year grant funded gig, and so we were going to [do it for a year] and I’d do another national search and find another job and I'd go teach again. Well, my family wasn't going to leave, so I was like, there’s no national search. I had an adjunct job here for a little bit. I taught high school for a year, and I wrote Opioid Indiana.
And I was doing the case study thing and I wanted to go to workplaces and write about it. So I was like, well, I'm not making a shit ton of money teaching and as long as I make as much money as I do teaching, I'm going to do any job I can do and I'm going to write a story about it. I'm going to write a book about it. I sold cars for a year and a half. I was really good at selling cars, but I couldn't figure out the novel I wanted to write. When the pandemic hit, I was like, I'm going to go try something else. And there was a foundation company hiring, and I was like, how fucking weird? I'll go do that and then I'll write a book about it.
It turns out that if you're pretty decent at this, and I work for a really good company, I can have a lifestyle that's not dissimilar to what I had when I was teaching higher-ed. I look at two houses a day, I come home, I do a little paperwork, I sit around and read. So I've been doing this for a minute. I don't know if I'll ever do higher-ed again just because I hate it. I’m not going to lie. It feels like fucking East Germany a little bit. Once you've done this for a little bit, dude, it's hard. The idea of going to a place and sitting in fluorescent lighting all day long, I don't know if I could wrap my brain around it.
So, I basically took the job with the idea that I'd write a novel based in the world.
That's pretty amazing.
That's the type of weird fucker I wanted to be when I fell in love with books at 16. I wanted to go do stupid Hunter S. Thompson shit. Then I found when I was teaching higher ed, I was just kind of living my life through books and I was like, you know what? Higher ed doesn't like me that much. It's not like I was getting interviewed for jobs. I could get a community college to hire me. I lucked into a good job in Texas. I was fortunate to teach higher ed full-time for several years.
It's really hard to get a higher ed job. So much paperwork.
It is fucking impossible, and it's stupidly impossible.
You study journalism in college. It’s what you started writing. How did that happen?
My main advisor in undergrad was a sports journalist and he wrote these long, really cool, weird books about local sports, but there was a kind of boots to the ground realism to him. If you were decent in his class, he'd get you jobs stringing on Saturday nights for these small papers going out and writing high school football stories. He was fucking real, and it felt real.
Those are the stories that teach you.
The local newspaper thing is beautiful. I was only a stringer. I was never full-time, but I did a lot of stringing. And you learn.
You learn how to write.
Yes, because You're doing an under deadline, you learn how to throw out the idea that first comes to you for the faster idea. When you first start doing journalism, you'll be like, oh, I got three paragraphs, I have to keep writing this story. It's like, well, maybe not, dude. Maybe fucking chuck that shit to the side and start all over again, and you'll find that next paragraph. You know what I mean? You learn how and when to throw stuff away, when to rebuild, how to set up, how to use dialogue, to advance the plot of a story.
You learn about verbs.
Hunter Thompson said the way to learn to write in the active voice was to write sports. When I first started doing journalism in undergrad, I wanted to do arts and humanities type stuff, but the guy who was my mentor for undergrad was like, “no, dude, you need to learn sports.” And I was like, that tracks with everything I've heard. So I wrote sports in South Texas for a couple of years, stringing and going to school and stuff.
We should talk about the text messages in the book. I thought the text messages between the wife and Cook are my favorite. Probably. They're most grounded. They're the most realistic text messages between a couple that I've ever read.
Oh, thank you.
Was the device purposeful? We don't ever really see him interacting with her except for those,
I would say texting is a massive way that we communicate. I would also say that because you have to be more succinct in terms of the communication, you're conveying things a little bit more, and I think therefore you have to be a little bit more honest because you're conveying information quickly. There's no filler, and I liked that. I think text messages reveal a human character a little bit better than dialogue. Even I think I text faster than I talk. When I'm texting, I just bash my thumb, and it's the same with typing. When I'm writing books, I can go pretty fast. I can almost get ahead of how I would articulate something through speech and I think that probably there's an honesty in that too because you're less curated for the real world. There's going to be mistakes in it, right? You're not conveying true speech. The other thing is, the wife is important to the story and with texting you can convey so many things so quickly.
You can show without telling us where their marriage is at.
You get to the deepest parts of that relationship. You're very much a voyeur and it makes sense for all the little shit to be captured. It's not like you're a third person omniscient, like, oh, here's what happened between these two people in this place. It's the stripped down conversation of these two people. I also thought that it mirrored the kind of conversations that the workers had in text too. And it's just so much of a massive way of how we communicate anymore.
And then there is the guy selling the phones in jail with Cook and this is a great subplot. I don't know why it's here, but…
So Trap Tre is a real person.
Wait, what?
Trap Tray's a real person. I spent two days in jail with him. I got arrested on a book tour a couple years ago, and me and Trap Tre were in jail together for two days. He was a great dude. He was such a good dude. He’s a rapper.