Novel offers explosive look at L.A. riots
Twenty-three years ago this month, a jury acquitted three white Los Angeles policemen charged with using excessive force against an unarmed black man named Rodney King. Within hours of the verdict, and for six days afterward, the City of Angels was a cauldron of fire and blood.
Most Americans who were alive and aware in the spring of 1992 know this story, which provides the backdrop for Ryan Gattis' novel, All Involved (***½ out of four), a poignant, fierce and often graphically brutal panorama of a city "taking itself to heaven in pieces," as one of its many characters puts it.
Yet neither King nor any of the indicted LAPD officers figure prominently in Gattis' sprawling narrative. (They're barely mentioned at all.) The verdict seems to barely exist outside the immediate concerns of these characters, most of them Latino, to either somehow get through the days and nights of seemingly random violence or use the cover of widespread looting and arson to get even with somebody else.
"Devil's night in broad daylight" is how one character, a ruthless street gang kingpin known as "Big Fate" or "Fate" for short, describes the chaos. "Go out there and get wild…Come and take what you can…Cuz the world we live in is completely flipped now. Up's down. Down's up. Bad is good. And badges don't mean (anything)!"
Fate's voice is one of several given their own individual chapters as each night of the marathon riots bleeds into the following day. Some of these characters live long enough to affect other characters, whether they are other gang bangers out for blood or those trying desperately to heal or help throughout the firestorm. Other characters die right on the page, in the middle of a thought they'll never think through.
The novel's first voice belongs to Ernesto Vera, who's walking to his South Central L.A. home from a catering gig at a child's birthday party from which he sees in the distance billowing smoke from the riots ("four black towers going up like burning oil wells in Kuwait…"). He's pretty sure he's not going to work the next day. What he doesn't expect is being jumped in the gathering darkness by gang members who beat and kill him.
The next voice we hear belongs to his sister Lupe, aka Payasa, whose disbelief over her brother's murder ("He's civilian. He's off-limits, so there's no way…") morphs to murderous rage of her own, which is passed over to Fate and other members of her gang ready to exact their own rough justice on the rival gang members who killed Ernesto.
And this, remember, is only the beginning of the city's days of rage. The ensuing chaos swallows others up, whether they're shooters, snitchers or bystanders.
Yet in rendering each character's inner testimonies in evocative, persuasively nuanced rhythms, Gattis allows their flaws, virtues, passions, doubts and dreams to flow so freely that it's difficult for the reader to arrive at the kind of simplistic assessments that enable prejudice or dismissal.
A Korean teenager incensed enough to go armed-vigilante against the rioters is himself rousted by the police for unlawfully carrying a firearm and has an unexpected epiphany: "This is what injustice feels like." Fate's henchman Robert is nicknamed "Clever" or "Sherlock Homeboy" because he's smarter about rules of evidence and other legal niceties than the other gang members, and even some of the police. He's so intelligent and reasonable that you wonder what he's doing in this crowd, in this neighborhood, in this situation.
You won't get answers to such questions in All Involved. But the reason such books exist in the first place is to make you ask these questions.
All Involved
By Ryan Gattis
Ecco, 372 pp.
3 1/2 stars out of four