On books: The System by Ryan Gattis

I'm a sucker for companion stories. Narratives that exist in parallel with each other, linked but not necessarily directly. Influenced by each other, but distinctly and wholly their own.

Such is the case with The System, Ryan Gattis' latest that is part procedural, part multi-voiced exploration of L.A.'s criminal justice system in the early 90s that inverts its norms via criminals investigating the crimes of law enforcement, and part coming of age story told from inside jails and courts that so often fail to see the humanity in the people they hold.

Buy this book. No, seriously, here’s the link.

On its own, this tightly-paced story encompasses the competing mechanisms of South Los Angeles' highly organized street gangs and the various arms of the criminal justice system, from probation to prosecution to incarceration. Holding it all together is a single crime: the attempted murder of a drug dealer named Scrappy by two rival gang members.

When an eyewitness accuses Omar "Wizard" Tavira of shooting Scrappy and Jacob "Dreamer" Safulu of being his accomplice, the two are swept into a legal culture cracking down hard on gang violence in the wake of the King Uprisings a year earlier. And with Wizard's prior convictions—as well as the gun turning up in Dreamer's dresser—the case seems to be open and shut.

Except one detail: one of the two is innocent and there is more to the story than just a mistaken accusation. The balance of the novel is the search to put together what happened in time to help exonerate the innocent man before he becomes just another wrongful conviction statistic hardened beyond repair during his sentence.

Several characters’s stories are woven together over the course of the novel, drawing on the internecine competition between prosecutors and public defenders, the power that absolute loyalty to the gang holds over its members, and the ways in which various actors in law enforcement can abuse their power, either intentionally or by merely allowing the gears of the system to churn unchecked.

In the balance, this complicated portrait reveals every character clearly and holds all of them accountable for their role in the events of the story. Included in this character list is the System itself, a dispassionate arbiter of fate that empowers some it should not while seeking to crush the lives of others regardless of their guilt or innocence. And yet, in a moving way, Gattis leaves hope that even in this seemingly unwinnable contest, there is still the possibility a person can escape changed and looking to alter their role in the game. Whether or not they decide to change, however, is never telegraphed.

Those familiar with Gattis' work may hear echoes of his excellent 2015 novel All Involved in these details. This is more than coincidental as The System is stitched with connections to the earlier novel ranging from the influence of characters like Payasa and Big Fate to shared setting to a sense of how the violence of the lawless days of the Uprising shifted alliances in such a way that created the violence at the center of the new book.

These connections are effortless and additive, acting as grace notes to the composition here rather than central portions of the score. More than easter eggs but less than intrusions, the connections build out the universe of the two novels in interesting and, ultimately, necessary ways.

For deeper cuts from Gattis' work, though, the resonance of some physical descriptions in The System carried me back to the author's two-novella set The Big Drop. This was particularly evident in the descriptions of one character's drug withdrawls that echoed the physical episodes of collapse a brain injury caused the books' main character, Johnny Ban, to suffer.

Further, Jeovanni "Little" Matta's journey from hesitant gang affiliate to junior shot caller as he investigates how Dreamer and Wizard ended up suspects parallels in some interesting ways Johnny's path from reluctant tool of Japanese crime lords to a world-wise investigator whose choices change the nature of the story's climactic moments.

In total, The System is as gritty a novel as it must be to take seriously the deep darkness these competing worlds produced without losing the human heart at the center of it all. And that's more than enough reason to spend some time in the universe Gattis has delivered here.