Ryan Gattis

“This is LA – you’ve got to take sides,” Ryan Gattis tells me. “Which one is it going to be?” We are sitting in Philippe, a bustling downtown diner. I’ve just polished off a French dip – beef slices hugged by a French loaf, and soggy from meaty jus. Half an hour ago, we were sitting in a leather booth in Cole’s, the oldest bar in Los Angeles, which also claims to have invented the French dip. Here they serve up the jus in a little pot, and you get to dip your sandwich in it yourself. Gattis and I aren’t here just to kick the culinary tyres of LA’s most legendary dish, though.

We’re talking about his new novel, All Involved. Told through the eyes of 17 different characters, many of them gang members, this is a tale of brutal murder, retribution and survival. Its backdrop is the six days of rioting following the assault of a black taxi driver, Rodney King, by police officers in 1992 – when, amid the ensuing chaos, gangs were able to settle scores and steal with near impunity. Gattis’s grandfather was a colonel and his father a captain – both in the US Air Force.

He grew up in a house overlooking the air force academy in Colorado Springs. The future – the future his dad intended for him – was clear. And then, when he was 17, a classmate smashed him in the face. “It didn’t break the nasal bone; it just tore all the cartilage out and kind of deposited it on my cheek,” he recalls. “I felt hideous in a lot of ways. Going through surgery after surgery is not something I would recommend to anyone. And so I spent a lot of time alone. I read a lot. I watched a lot of movies.

And those things became, I think, very central to my life in a way that they hadn’t been before.” For the first time, he wanted to be a storyteller. “I started caring far more about other people … I had this incredible well of empathy now for anyone who had described anything that was physically damaging.” After school, he studied writing at Chapman, a university in Orange County, 
California, before moving to the UK to complete the University of East Anglia’s 
distinguished creative writing MA.

Back in the US, he wrote two novels and returned to his American alma mater to teach writing. Work began on a third novel. It took seven years to write, ballooning to over 200 000 words. “I spent so long on it that no one cared who I was anymore,” he says. Realising that he had to give up – that it was a failure – hit him hard. In 2008, he moved from Orange to vibrant downtown Los Angeles. “Not everyone can be Emily Dickinson. I needed to be part of something – part of a city, a community.”  

Gattis began accompanying a street art crew, UGLAR, to neighbourhoods he’d never visited before – carrying paint, documenting the murals’ progress, helping  to clean up afterwards. Sometimes he got bored – painting is a slow process – and so he would read, or talk to passersby – many of whom were former gangsters. “I have an oral memory, so when I hear things I imagine how they would read – specifically dialogue.” When he heard people talking, “it was almost as if I was learning that rhythm, that structure, that grammar from that world”. 

The voice of a character, Payasa, a female gang member, started to sound in his head, and wouldn’t leave him. When he told people that he wanted to write this character, the response was less than enthusiastic. He told them: “I’m just going to do it anyway and then you can tell me if it’s terrible or not, but I have to get this damn thing out of my head.” “She was just a character at first,” he says. But he needed something – a canvas, a context – that could provide her with the freedom to avenge her murdered brother. 

This was where the riots came in. He knew the stakes were high – it was paramount that those who had lived through that time felt his depiction was “authentic and responsible”. Each evening, he read the chapters he had written to his wife, an elementary school teacher and former criminal lawyer.  As Payasa’s story took shape, he also told  some of the people he had met on the streets what was happening to her. “Every single one said, ‘Wow, I was into it, I like her, that was great’,” he recalls. 

He wasn’t interested in cribbing other people’s stories: he wanted detail, 
atmosphere. Over dinner with someone who had been a heavyweight gangster, he explained Payasa’s attack plan (on another gang) to him, detail by detail. The man stopped him, took “the salt shaker and the pepper and the Cholula Hot Sauce and the sugar boat and said, ‘If you want to get away with killing someone, this is how you do it’… moving my fictional characters around as if they were chess pieces.” 

It helped he was an outsider. “If I was from here, I think that quite a few people 
would never have spoken to me,” he says, because LA is “balkanised”. “You’ve got these incredibly vibrant communities  that are very insular, that don’t really  mix – not often.” Often he told people about his nose – as a way of showing he wasn’t “a tourist”, that he was “a survivor of violence” – respectfully seeking knowledge and understanding. He learnt a lot about “the psychology of survival and the ways in which people make decisions in justice vacuums”.

When policing fails, those prepared to take justice into their own hands – gangs and vigilantes – are empowered. His novel is consequently “a Western in a lot of ways because I viewed it as a lawless time – even if it was only six days”. The book “mirrors my own experience in terms of how life-changing violence can 
be, how painful it can be, how long it can take to heal from”, Gattis says. He was “blown away” by how, to the people he spoke to, “the violence in no way negated hope, love, family, loyalty. In fact, actually the converse was true: it made those more important. In a way, the darkness, perhaps, makes those things burn more brightly.” 

All Involved is published by Picador and is available from decent bookshops.