The unsaid looms large in novel on L.A. riots

SOMETIMES you have to judge a book by its cover because it contains information not in the actual text. Such is the case with Yolanda Barnes’ fascinating first novel, “When It Burned to the Ground.” According to the cover, the novel was inspired by the 1992 Los Angeles riots, but in reading the book, the reader is struck by the absence of any conventional reports of the riots, such as burning cars, burning buildings or murderous mob violence. That becomes the secret of this novel’s power, which is to report on the riots by not faithfully recording them.

“When It Burned to the Ground” is reminiscent of the contemporary Polish novel “Annihilation” by Piotr Szewc, which is a meticulous re-creation of a day in the life in a small Jewish village in Poland in the 1930s with no reference at all, beyond the title, to what will happen. The reader’s imagination supplies the realization of loss, which is far more disturbing than any actual detailing again of the Holocaust.

In the same way, Barnes assembles a collage of characters who are going about their lives -- lives broken by common ordinary sadness, by mania, by circumstance, by futility. She divides her novel into the moments “Before,” “Where,” “When” and “After It Burned to the Ground” and centers it upon mythical Piedmont Street, both hinting at and commenting on the actuality of the lives that will be changed in the self-destructive and hopeless violence of the riots. The street’s history is even traced, from being an upgraded dirt path to the site of Elliot J. Piedmont’s futile campaign to rid it of “plaguing canine hordes.”

The reader is inhabited by Barnes’ characters: a fire-haunted visionary street preacher named Daniel, an anxious woman awaiting a long-postponed meeting with an estranged friend while engulfed in all that such waiting implies and, most memorably, a young woman pawning her treasured brooch at the pawnbroker’s while possessed by the thought, “Oh, Mr. Pawnbroker, what a risk you take. Your face is snow. Your face is ice. Sun melts snow. Fire thaws ice. And then what will you be but a puddle on the ground? For a thirsty stray dog to come along and lap you up.”

The riots killed more than 50 people, wounded thousands and resulted in $1 billion in property damage. They also damaged an aspect of the ordinary universe of black people, which would forever be shadowed in the stringing together of phrases: how could, why would and at what cost?

Such is the power of Barnes’ novel that she does find a language equal to the demands of her inspiration: “The woman came out, a bright red kerchief covering her hair, ends tied at her nape. She swept her porch clean of smoke-colored ashes that still were drifting from the sky in the only blizzard this street would ever see.”

“When It Burned to the Ground” enlarges our imaginations and launches Yolanda Barnes as a significant voice in American literature. Let us hope she always resists the malicious temptations of the conventional.

Thomas McGonigle is the author of “The Corpse Dream of N. Petkov” and “Going to Patchogue.”