Ryan Gattis | 'There is a legacy that persists. It is an absolutely defining moment'

The seeds of Ryan Gattis’ new novel “started in a pretty gigantic failure”, the author admits.

After seeing “moderate success” with Kung Fu High School (Sceptre)—his second novel in the UK and his first in the US, which was acquired by film studio The Weinstein Company—Gattis spent six years writing a novel set in Japan, which he says was “an absolute mess”.

After finally giving up, a series of events—including Gattis’ introduction to art collective UGLAR (the Unified Group of Los Angeles Residents), of which he is now narrative director—led to the idea for All Involved (Picador, 21st May).

Following 17 people over the course of six days during the 1992 Los Angeles riots, All Involved is a brutal novel, full of violence and danger but also brimming with heart. It’s a novel as much about remembrance and humanity as it is about a group of people pushed to unpalatable actions and the “secret history” of LA.

The riots may have taken place more than 20 years ago, but they have not been forgotten by LA’s residents. “I was in my early teenage years in Colorado [when the riots happened] and saw it on TV,” says Gattis from his home in LA. “I didn’t realise how shallow and narrow my understanding was. It didn’t occur to me how it affected people of different ethnicities living in the city.

“There is a legacy that persists. It is an absolutely defining moment. Once I made the decision [to write the book] I saw it everywhere. It’s as if the remembrance is so strongly tied to place; it gives people this psychological map of the city. People were very marked. Enough time has passed that people have had time to reflect and are able to speak clearly about it. It’s so visceral.”

While All Involved is fictional, its premise—that the chaos of the riots was used by various people as a cover to commit crimes—is very real, and Gattis’ research saw him speak to dozens of people who experienced the riots first hand, including former gang members. Some of those encounters—Gattis doesn’t go into detail—were “scary”. “The framework I came to it with is the LA street-art world,” he says. “That is how I understood it. Unfortunately there’s some overlap because there are so many gangs and gang territories. I was learning on the fly. At the end of the day, as I was told a number of times, I’m just a white boy from Colorado.

“One of my maxims was to make sure I listened and learned and if I made a mistake, I never repeated that mistake. One of the rules was never lie to anyone, always answer every question as best you can. The other one was presume everyone knows everything about you. At first it was scary but then it was explained that you should presume that you’re an interloper. I suppose it helped that I was an outsider. I don’t speak Spanish, although I understand it okay and can read it. Being a fiction writer, an outsider and being a teacher, that opened some doors for me. There was a respect accorded along with that.”

Work in progress

All Involved begins with the murder of an innocent man, Ernesto, but the first thing Gattis put down on paper was the story of female gang member Payasa, Ernesto’s sister.

“The very first draft was just her story,” Gattis says. “After I had written it, all I did was think about Ernesto and the type of person he was and how his being an honourable person in a very dishonourable world had moved her [Payasa] to take retribution. Once I wrote that, I thought ‘what happened with [their brother] Lil Mosco?’ I found that the plot started running me, in a way.”

After the bad experience with his aborted novel, Gattis was unsure how people would react to the start of All Involved, although he recalls that he “thought it was the best thing I’d ever written”. Luckily for Gattis his agent, Lizzy Kremer at David Higham Associates, liked the section he sent her, and persuaded him to turn it into a full novel.

That’s what Gattis did, deciding to cover six consecutive days in 1992, even though at times other things got in the way of his writing. “I finished writing day two and I got dragged, kicking and screaming, to my wife’s best friend’s wedding in Hawaii,” he says. “I got on the plane and took my notes and computer and I worked during the morning, but at the cocktail hour I was accosted by a former LA firefighter. He had heard I was writing a ‘gang story’. He was not happy about that.”

That initial encounter led to meetings back in LA, with Gattis using what he learned to inform day three of the novel, which features a firefighter as one of the narrators. Told as it is through a variety of first-person accounts, All Involved is scattered with plenty of gangland terminology, as well as Spanish words and phrases used by the book’s Hispanic characters. So how does a “white boy from Colorado” who doesn’t speak Spanish write in the voices of LA’s gang members so convincingly?

“What I tried to do was make sure I listened,” Gattis says. “It started with listening and then at some point there is an immersion. I started feeling patterns and understanding slang. Mastery comes after that. There was a lot of seeing what worked and then it was feeling what worked.”

Civil unrest

The riots are often referred to as the Rodney King riots, as they followed the acquittal of a group of police officers who were accused of using excessive force to subdue civilian Rodney King. Gattis’ novel comes after a year in which the US has once again been embroiled in heated discussions about race relations, and about the fragile relationship between authority and those with a lack of power.

Though Gattis could not have anticipated the political landscape All Involved would be released into, one of his characters, a drug addict called Lil Creeper, acknowledges that riots occur in LA on a fairly regular basis—roughly every 30 years. “One of the most stunning things I heard anyone say is that there is a group of people in LA waiting for the next one,” says Gattis. “There are people who cannot wait to take advantage.”

That kind of outlook means that at times All Involved seems relentlessly bleak, with its cast of murderous, morally dubious LA gang members and authority figures. But Gattis was keen to make sure that there was some light in the book. “I think it is a hopeful novel,” he says. “Meeting so many people and hearing incredibly sad stories, I think even as I was writing it I needed that hope, but I think it’s tempered with a realistic sensibility.

“Of course the city is going to get through it, and it will keep going.”

Metadata

Publication 21.05.15
Formats HB/EB
ISBN 9781447283164/ 9781447283195
Rights sold US (Ecco, HarperCollins), Czech
Republic, Holland, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Brazil, Spain, Mexico, Sweden
Editor Paul Baggaley, Picador
Agent Lizzy Kremer, David Higham Associates