STARRED Book Review: Bad Foundations

Reviewed by Nick Gardner

A working-class White Noise, a story about family, crap jobs, paranoia, and an uncertain future

Cook works in crawl spaces, inspecting them for rot, but even when he emerges from the claustrophobic confines, driving across Indiana to the next client, the crawl follows him. The damp basement smell of his coveralls permeates his Prius as his daughter argues that his sales slump is due to a curse. And basement walls crumble around him, a metaphor for his depression and his predicament-prone misadventures in Ohio, Indiana, and beyond. As Cook states, “‘When you look at enough crawl spaces, you can only assume that each one trends toward shit show.’” A quote rife with paranoia that feels remarkably familiar to Don DeLillo’s, “All plots tend to move deathward.”

However, as Cook’s family life, work-life, and mental health erode, rather than turning to Jack Gladney’s preference for academia and, eventually, revenge, Cook fries his brain on legal weed and finds his answers in strange and surprising working class strangers. While the petty arguments and slightly askew realities Cook faces are reminiscent of White Noise, Carr’s characters turn away from academia, from teachers and students. With all of its banter, wit, and pure, unabashed heart, Bad Foundations is a hilarious and fresh drama about the crumbling crawlspaces Cook has built his life on and how he can scramble out of the rubble.

Cook was a kid when his friend’s dad, JP, died beneath a house. And somehow, through an uncertain chain of academic burnout, addiction, and a variety of jobs from teaching to car sales, Cook finds himself in the same place as JP, investigating basements and crawl spaces in hopes that he can sell clients on pricey repairs and not die a similar death.

While in his earlier life, Cook cruised the Texas border, drunk and high, leaving jugs of water for crossers, now that his two daughters are old enough to understand the harm caused by his inebriation, he has moved with his wife to Indiana and a mostly sober, more settled, quieter life. When Cook or his daughters are depressed, they go on walks together through the nearby graveyard, discussing a limited understanding of quantum physics.

At work, he attends Zoom meetings with his Canadian boss and a hodgepodge of coworkers ranging from Cowboy Dan (who sees ghosts in his laser level) to Germ, a crass former wrestler who knows jack squat about his job. As everything around him degrades, Cook seeks to glean good vibes in order to break his curse. Bolstered by a forgiving wife and supportive daughters, he may just survive.

The writer of Motherfucking Sharks, Opioid Indiana, and several other surreal and unabashed books, Carr is at his best in Bad Foundations. The dialogue, often occurring as petty arguments that span subjects from Taylor Swift, to telepathy, to the earth being a computer program, is vibrant and often revealing of the contemporary worlds’ real life predicaments.

Carr’s characters are self-acknowledged “white trash,” day-drinking and discussing flat-earth theories with over-educated coworkers, trying to drum up a living in an inhospitable corporate social structure. While the ideas discussed in the book are intelligent, there is nothing too high-brow about Bad Foundations. The immaculate prose is fortified with excerpts from text message threads, drawings, and illustrations. While Bad Foundations reaches for depth and clarity in the midst of personal and social collapse, the prose is easily accessible for readers of all backgrounds and reading levels. It is a book that even a nonreader would enjoy.

It is the job of satire to show the current state of society in a fresh and revelatory way, and Brian Allen Carr does a remarkable job of turning “white-trash” alcoholics, caring fathers, and legal-weed zombies into erudite scholars of the working-class world. As Cook himself states about blowing smoke rings and juggling:  “That’s the real job of every good father: to perform an old trick for a new world.”

And Carr has done just that. From the canon of working-class literature and literary family stories comes Bad Foundations, an unputdownable dive into the crawlspace sludge of a working man’s life and the inevitable rebirth that comes when he emerges to see his family in a not-so-blindingly-fluorescent light.

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