Time is the Longest Distance

by Larry Fondation

Lawrence is an awkward, bookish man. He’d been a grad student with a notion to write his thesis about a connection between Nathaniel Hawthorne and Nathanael West. That was before a nervous breakdown interrupted his studies and left him homeless. He finds himself on Skid Row during Operation Clean Sweep, a citywide campaign to get rid of LA’s homeless. Lawrence is articulate, and sometimes lucid, but more often not. He is well-read, and sees current events through the historical lens of Puritan New England. He views the arrests by the LAPD as a recurrence of the Salem Witch trials. His main concerns are keeping track of his lucky quarter and a piece of blue string. But the police sweeps and the transience of homeless life silently conspire to separate Lawrence from what is even more important to him—his friends, Albert and Joey, and especially, Bekah. Time Is the Longest Distance is a novel about disruption, loss and longing when you have almost nothing left to lose—but not quite nothing.

228 pages, Paperback

Published December 18, 2017

About the author

Larry Fondation has lived in LA since the 1980s and worked for fifteen years as an organizer in South Central Los Angeles, Compton, and East LA. His fiction and non-fiction has appeared in a range of diverse publications including Flaunt (where he is Special Correspondent), Fiction International, Quarterly West, the Los Angeles Times and the Harvard Business Review.

Reviews

[Fergus, Weaver of Autistic Webs · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'LL GO ON. I CAN'T GO ON. I'LL GO ON.
- Samuel Beckett, writing about the homeless.

Larry Fondation is a devastatingly Brilliant writer. And he is Down & Out in L.A.

During the recent administration in the US - which shall go unnamed - the wisdom of certain California lawmakers decreed that it was time to Gentrify their once-fair city. Let's make LA Great Again!

Good plan, thought the majority of electors. Helping the riff-raff is too costly, so let's wash our hands of 'em.

Not quite, folks - but close... More like this:

"We'll call it a Clean Sweep. And we'll give our municipal courts sweeping powers."

State of emergency? I doubt it. These folks were already fragile - breaking them with the Full Force of the Law was child's play.

And Larry lost many of his closest friends through those measures.

Larry's no slouch, as I said. He has a university degree and has pursued grad work in American Lit. Until he lost it.

So what? Some people we know right here on Goodreads lost it too at university. Like me. I was considered toast. And even (yes) riff-raff by formerly admiring professors. All because of a chemical imbalance.

But I went back and completed my final two year's degree work notwithstanding, a year later - thanks to the loving support of my family.

Larry, alas, lacked that safety net - he fell through the cracks and became homeless. He lost everything.
***

Five years before I retired, I started to work later hours - I was burning out, fast. My wife, who often took the same late hours - 9 to 5 - introduced me to David, a young story-swapping buddy on the commute.

Anyway, Dave and I were talking about luck at work and I mused philosophically, "David, it's a hard thing for a guy (meaning me) to fall between the cracks..." and Dave just looked at me like I was from another planet!

Well, wouldn't you know, four years later Dave's corporation gave him, a young father, faithful husband and mortgage owner, the dreaded pink slip. Well, Dave was devastated. Next day, I told my childhood friend Mary - a senior exec with the same company - the sad news.

When Dave got on the bus serendipitously just moments after, she tried to console him. But it would take more than platitudes to help poor Dave.

Similarly, it takes more than mere sympathetic platitudes to help guys like Larry.
***

"What can I do?" you may ask.

Well, first thing you can do is buy this book.

And then, you can tell our leaders that guys like Larry are as much members of the human race as THEY are -

And are entitled to a tiny bit of a Fair Shake!

Pretty, glitzy cities notwithstanding.

[Jeff Bursey · Rating 4 out of 5]

Larry Fondation's work, even in his shorter works, contains surprises, empathy, clear-eyed understanding, and formal characteristics that set them apart from the usual tales of the down-and-out. Here he is in Numero Cinq in 2015 on his writing: "When pressed, I describe myself as an 'experimental realist.'” Most of his books are "collective novels" (same NC piece) that offer a chorus of voices.

In Time is the Longest Distance he takes a different approach. Most events in the summer of 2005 and later (though dates aren't always precise in his work, for the time of the poor is timeless and enduring) are funnelled through the consciousness of Larry, a former biology student turned onto literature (before an unexplained thing happened that made him leave university), whose life consists of moving from shelter to doorway to garbage bin, as he has thoughts and the "thoughts between thoughts," a phrase that appears often, as do covids and ants, memories of his mother (who he remembers as alive but thinks would be very old), and references to Nathaniel Hawthorne and Nathanael West. Larry's mind is filled with literary references that pop up randomly or are pressed from him by events, and the presentation of material, from street sweeps to his love for Bekah, is fragmented. The reader is placed on the streets by prose that meanders, focuses, jars, illuminates (if only briefly), and loses itself in muddy places like Larry loses himself. He often shouts, we're told, and on the page one can hear something of the internal monologue that could easily erupt into a rant. We are made uncomfortable by the closeness to Larry and the distance we like to keep from the real-world embodiments of Larry.

Most of the book is told in short pieces that cohere, and many contain questions about time. They indicate desperation and loss as well as endlessness and the end of time all at once.

I've always liked Foundation's books. This is another one well worth reading.