Bad Foundations

by Brian Allen Carr

Bad Foundations is a comedic absurdist novel about a home foundation inspector whose own home life is falling apart. Cook does not have an ordinary job. He spends his days inspecting people’s crawl spaces, cataloging their filth and photographing the decay. At his other job, as a father, he has to learn how to bond with his teenage daughter, but that’s hard to do when covered in spider webs. High on legal weed and searching for answers to life’s mysteries, Cook works alongside similar colorful characters trying to make money and save for the future. That is until a bad sales month spirals out into a quantum stay at a surreal Ohio hotel. New friendships are made, old curses are dealt with, and the local police force is put to the test. Told in a stylized working-class voice, Brian Allen Carr is a true raconteur of the American Midwest.

Genres: Fiction, Novels

256 pages, Paperback

Published January 23, 2024

About the author

Brian Allen Carr is an Aspen Words Finalist and two time Wonderland Book Award winner.

His books include OPIOID, INDIANA, MOTHERFUCKING SHARKS and several others.

He is from Texas and lives in Indiana.

Reviews

[Danger · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's a crime to me that Brian Allen Carr isn't a more household name. One of the greatest humanist/absurdist writers of this generation. Bad Foundations is another home run.

[Kyle Seibel · Rating 5 out of 5]

The author tells such a fully realized and propulsive narrative, filled with vexing characters and told in a highly entertaining comic idiom, that I couldn’t put this book down. Walks in the graveyard, road trips in southern Ohio, drinking codeine in a shitty hotel—I’d go anywhere with Brian Allen Carr. Imagine I’ll read this book another dozen times before I unlock all its secrets.

[Sadie Hartmann]

“Carr finds all the grimy, seemingly mundane minutes of our lives and polishes them up before he presents them back to us as treasure. What a rare and beautiful gift that is.”
.
.

This reminds me of when I used to listen to This American Life. Carr gives importance and structure to these vignettes and thoughts and vibes and somehow makes it all go together into this one package that feels really good. I highlighted, took notes in the margins, laughed out loud, thought about places I haven’t been in decades, and felt like hugging my kids. A feel good book.

[Gunter · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some of it will surely be made up, but I get the feeling that most of it is autobiographical. The author’s musings are pretty much all over the place, some nonsensical, most sensical, but I damn well enjoyed the ride and might have learned a thing or two. I did need to read it twice though, since I got tangled up in the string of characters the first time around, but that’s just probably me. Stay gold Brian Allen Carr. Four + stars.

[David Simmons · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading Brian Allen Carr is like hearing Scarface rap for the first time. BF is a book that explores the relationship between a father and his daughters, as well as a lesson on people being weird as all hell boa, and how you deal with living in a world of nonsense and behaviors that make no sense. I don’t know if Brian intended it, but I believe this novel shows how people in relationships are like the foundations of houses. Unpredictable, unreliable and crumbling if you don’t keep an eye on them.

[Daniel Vlasaty · Rating 5 out of 5]

I bought this book when it first came out to read specifically on this flight I’m taking next week. It’s been sitting on my desk like two months. Just sitting there. I picked it up yesterday and read the first page. And then I didn’t stop reading. Fucking loved this like I’ve loved every other book man’s written.

[Benoit Lelièvre · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really liked this novel, but not everybody is gonna "get" it. I don't who else but lit nerds from working class backgrounds like me are going to see the magic in this. But it is there.

It's really a patchwork of good ideas more than a standard novel, but Cook's capacity of seeing mysticism and metaphors in people's crawlspaces was really the selling point for me. His professional discourse is full of double entendres and philosophical questions. That made his credibility to me. I was a little less taken by his journey in fatherhood or his odd conversations with his colleagues, but I thought the overall portrait of a millennial man trying to be a responsible adult in the twenty-first century was moving.

More on Dead End Follies this week.

[Grant Lewandowski · Rating 5 out of 5]

Top guy doing top guy things!

[Carina Stopenski · Rating 4 out of 5]

a peculiar odyssey through a mundane life

[Zach Zoeller · Rating 5 out of 5]

So good. Carr’s prose stays hot & fresh through deadpan observations on ghosts, karma, philosophy, quantum physics, you fucking name it. I could lean back in my chair and listen to these working-class bozos chew the fat any day of the week. Don’t be lame – read Bad Foundations and inspect the world from Carr’s point-of-view. The underbelly, the crawlspace, the muck.

[Emerick · Rating 3 out of 5]

Kind of meandering and aimless, with some absurdist bits. It didn't hit for me and I couldn't really get into it.

[Nancy · Rating 3 out of 5]

There are some amusing parts in the story, and some clever lines, but overall I felt all the humorous dialogue was too obviously self-aware, and much of what his daughters said pushed credulity too far.

Also - is this only an issue for Very Old People like me? - there are typos throughout the book. There's a typo on the first page. I already felt like this book needed a better editor; a proofreader would have been helpful as well.

[Jennifer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brian Allen Carr combines philosophical musings with tack-sharp wit and working class sensibility to create a reading experience that is profound, hilarious, and wholly unique. Bad Foundations is a journey through the annals of work and family life in the Midwest. A study on foundations and how they crumble or are repaired, replete with meditations on space-time, continuity, teenage daughters, and all things unfathomable.

[Safura · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this over months and months because I was too cheap to just buy it, but I’m glad that I read it (and didn’t buy it). There are ton of fun, weird characters and “happenings,” but it’s the story is still simple at the end.

[Pabgo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absurdist comedy. Think, Vonnegut. Think, a less windy/wordy David Foster Wallace. Think, hilarious good time! Not often do you get to laugh out loud uncontrollably with only you and a book in a room.I want to read more of this author’s work, (once again, introduced to me by my literate daughter-she nails it every time!).

[Nina · Rating 4 out of 5]

Midwest Fuccboi Sean Thor Conroe sorry if that’s a cheap shot

[Andrew Stone · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another banger by BAC. I love all of his books, Bad Foundations included. BAC cannot miss.

[Eric · Rating 4 out of 5]

Refreshingly unique and laugh-out-loud funny, Bad Foundations exceeded my expectations. I bought this off a bookstore's indie author rack, mainly because it has a blurb from SA Cosby on the back cover. Why Brian Allen Carr doesn't have a mainstream publisher is beyond me, because he's got more storytelling talent than some very popular authors I've read recently. Don't get me wrong, this book isn't for everyone. Like, if all you ever read are romantasies, then I'm not sure you'll be down with the chapter that describes house foundations in detail without a hint of irony. But I personally like a good, clever, story with relatable characters, and Bad Foundations gave me that. I'm not sure how much of this book was fiction versus real-life experience, but I assume there's a lot of the latter based on how real everything felt.

[Jeff · Rating 4 out of 5]

A quick read very much in the lineage of the Don DeLillo and David Foster Wallace school of writing. The writing is consistently witty and acerbically wry, and sometimes downright silly. The plot, such as it is, is fairly underdeveloped and mostly a vehicle to develop the narrator and move scenes towards new banter opportunities. The characters are similarly funny, but also stilted and thin, barely registering or reacting to the protagonists stoned weird antics and statements in any human way.

It's a fun read, and Carr does a great job weaving his themes and subtext into the mesh, but I wish it had been a bit longer to more fully develop. The publisher also did the novel no favors by dropping a lot of blank or almost blank pages into a thin book, which feels like padding to justify a higher price point (not blaming Carr for this, of course). In all it's the work of a talented writer that needed to stretch further, cook longer. 3.5/5

[Josh Dale · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was a trip. Wasn’t expecting some plot beats, but nothing in excess or steered off course. Modern zeitgeist meets a mid-20th travel novel. Multiple characters you love to see win or lose. Strong emotional core. A good foundation after all. Worth it.

Bonus: love the jacket design & interior layout with sketches. Relate to it heavily in my career.

[Josh Iden · Rating 5 out of 5]

One perfect line-paragraph-page after another.

[Laura · Rating 5 out of 5]

love this funky guy. quite possibly the only accurate representation of blue collar men i've ever seen in literature.

[AutomaticSlim · Rating 4 out of 5]

little trippy, little cheesy. reads fast and almost made me laugh

round up 4

[Sy Holmes · Rating 5 out of 5]

Currently writing from this a hotel room somewhere in Kentucky, which I'm sharing with my coworker who has "don't cry" tattooed across his eyelids. Upsides: I don't have to sell anything, nobody has drugged my Pepsi yet. Downsides: there's no pool table.

I loved this book for two reasons, off the top of my head. The first is that it's obvious that Carr knows what he's writing about, and explains it in a way that lets you in on the strange romance of the "dirty job" without being hamfisted. You feel like he's in your kitchen, letting you know how he knows that you need to drop 20 grand. Somehow, though, you're not mad about it.

The second is the sense of possibility and uncertainty that runs through the book. Cook is aware that the course of his life is both random and preordained, all coming to a head in the book's trippy ending in south Texas. Carr explores ideas from modern social media spiritualism and quantum physics, but in the least self-congratulatory way possible. They're simply things that could be true and ruining your life, or they could be completely bogus. There could be ghosts in the crawl dust. Cowboy Dan could be 4,000 years old. The foundation could collapse or it could go on decaying until Judgement Day. You don't know until you know, and chances are you never will.

[Ezra James · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5

This wonderful novella has some striking similarities to Wim Wenders filmography, where plot and story take a backseat to better indulge in world- building. It follows a brief period in the life a crawl space inspector and his many odd adventures, humorously accompanied by his musings on mold, people and drugs. It’s pretty straightforward and keeps you oddly engaged with great side characters, zany black humor, and the occasional experimentation with narrative structure. Now that I think about there’s also an element to the later half of Celine’s Journey Into the Night. The deeper we go into the narrator’s psyche the closer we are to the abyss. It doesn’t quite go there at the end, but its presence seems to always be lurking around.

[Natasha · Rating 3 out of 5]

Found this book randomly in a bookstore. It just wasn’t my cup of tea. But I could see how it might be someone else’s. It took me forever to read it cause I wasn’t interested in it.

[Jack Bullion · Rating 5 out of 5]

A hilarious-but-dead-serious novel about work in tight, low-clearance spaces. A grounded-but-eerie Time-Life Home Repair installment about how houses and the families that inhabit them both lose their balance over time. A haunted instruction manual that betrays no secrets about the chaos right beneath our feet, right under our noses, or right before our eyes. A transcript of an imaginary interview with Mary Louise Kelly where no questions are posed, and the only answer provided is a detailed catalog of everything hiding from us in the darkness, just out of reach of the beams of our light. Brian Allen Carr’s latest book gets you down on your belly and crawling.

[Pete · Rating 5 out of 5]

a story about work and the dark space underneath us and how we curse ourselves. when i say dark spaces underneath i mean both literally crawlspaces and not literally crawlspaces. also it's much funnier and dumber (not derogatory) than i made it sound. like maybe one mg too stoned in places but who wants to read a book that doesn't have any off-balance long twos that clank. not me

[Zach Nawyn-Hellinga · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not the kind of book I normally read, to me it didn’t feel like there was much plot but I’m 17 and I could just be overlooking it. I did enjoy how real and human it was written. A lot of books have this kind of high-brow narrator but this felt like a real person and it was an interesting point of view because it’s different from most books. Not my cup of tea but I’m glad I read it.

[Cassie · Rating 5 out of 5]

hilarious. heartfelt. I want to give this book to everyone.