Just the Facts

In "Getting Married," the opening story to Larry Fondation's Unintended Consequences, a nameless narrator holds fifteen people hostage at gunpoint inside a seedy Los Angeles bar. The police finally get him on the phone and ask for his demands, but he comes up blank. "'Huh,'" he says. Then, considering, "'I need a drink.'"

It's an odd, funny moment, but it's also emblematic of a larger theme in the book: characters who come face to face with violence—or near-violence—but are unable, or maybe just unwilling, to understand it, even when it's of their own making.

The potential violence of that first story is rather quickly defused—the narrator turns over the gun to the bartender; the bar's patrons quickly go back to being amiable; life moves on—but elsewhere the book's characters are far less fortunate. There are shootings and stabbings, pedestrians mowed down by cars, botched robberies, brutal beatings, even a nun who takes a bullet for trying to talk two gun-wielding enemies into a peaceable truce.

If all this sounds rather senseless, it is, though the senselessness seems to be exactly the point. Where other writers might want to take these characters apart, explore what makes them tick—all the particular hows and whys that have driven them to their rather desperate precipices—Fondation is instead content to report from the precipice itself. It's not the whys of these characters that matter, the book seems to say, but only the whats: that these people exist, that we take note of their existence.

In that sense, the book, when taken as a whole—there are roughly sixty stories here, most no longer than a page or two—reads like a daily newspaper of the desperate and dispossessed. If these characters were ever to appear in an actual newspaper, it would likely be in the back pages—the police blotter, or maybe the weirder sections of the classifieds—but in Unintended Consequences, they've suddenly found themselves on page one, above the fold.

That journalistic sensibility pervades not only the stories' plots but also their prose, which keeps to a clipped, just-the-facts style. When deployed effectively, this kind of writing results in a spare, oddly affecting beauty, like when the narrator of "The Big Island" recounts his friend's final days in the hospital: "During the three plus weeks it took her to die—something inside her crushing something else inside her—I never left her side."

That's pretty much what passes for introspection here, which makes a kind of sense—plenty of people, after all, aren't particularly interested in examining their own lives—but it can be frustrating, too. The book's best turns are when the narration slows down, even briefly, to illuminate a small moment—that hostage-taker on the phone, for instance, glancing around at the mess he's gotten himself into, completely clueless, revealing himself through his own heavy silence. But too often it feels as if these stories are being narrated by tour guides in a hurry, pushing us from one room to the next because there's just too much to see and too little time.

There are exceptions, a handful of stories that push beyond their headline-worthy setups to become surprising urban fables. Like "Desire for Blood," which opens with a narrator who wants badly to kill a man but also wants to avoid doing hard time. The solution he cooks up involves training in the martial arts and hanging around bad neighborhoods in a wheelchair, waiting for someone to accost him. Yet when he finally is attacked, it's not on Skid Row but out front of a Beverly Hills movie theater. He bludgeons the man to death and manages to get himself exonerated by pleading self-defense. But at the trial, he learns a crucial detail about the stick-up guy: he'd turned to crime only to raise money for a sick family member...