Hypertext Magazine asked Margo Orlando Littell, author of The Distance From Four Points, “How do the harsh, neglectful landlords of Four Points sleep at night?”
They sleep well and easily. They’re not filled with regret over letting their tenants’ calls go to voicemail, or painting over the mildew instead of fixing the interior leak.
Here’s the thing about the landlords in my novel, The Distance from Four Points. They operate according to a set of principles that seem, to anyone on the outside, harsh, even criminal: neglecting repair work, not improving properties in any way, having no mercy on tenants and trusting nothing they say. Their properties are unattractive, sometimes unsafe, uninhabitable for anyone with better options. There’s not a lot of money in small-town rentals, and every penny counts. The landlords aren’t in the business of doing anyone any favors. They just want the rent to be paid.
Most Four Points tenants don’t have anywhere else to go, so they’re stuck with what the local landlords offer. They don’t have good credit or clean background checks or money for a security deposit. Not all are untrustworthy or destructive, but every landlord has a story, and there are enough of those stories that even the well-meaning tenants—the ones who might be strapped for cash but still want and deserve a decent place to live—get grouped in with the rest. So they agree to the landlords’ unspoken rule: don’t bother us, and we won’t bother you. Tenants get a place to live, landlords get a couple hundred dollars a month. No one’s out to make any friends.
Neglecting rental properties isn’t part of most people’s moral code, but while writing this novel I gained a very much unwanted new perspective on why my fictional landlords operate the way they do. I toured a lot of decrepit properties in my small hometown as research for my novel, and I ended up buying one, intending to flip it. I fixed it up, failed to sell it, and wound up a landlord. My first tenant bounced all her checks, refused to leave, and had to be evicted by an armed constable. Everything she ever told me was a lie, yet there she was, living in my beautiful, not-neglected house, not paying me a cent. I found myself aligned with the landlords of my novel—wondering why I’d put so much effort and money into a renovation that tenants didn’t appreciate and wouldn’t respect.
My view of the Four Points landlords changed, after that. They’re a tough crowd, but you know what? They would have known not to give a tenant the house keys without cold hard cash in hand. They wouldn’t have believed the tenant’s explanations of illness, bank fraud, a sick pet. They would have asked for cash up front, no exceptions, and now I do as well. I have new tenants now, and I’m constantly being pulled between the basically good person I am with the hard, uncompromising landlord I have to be to protect my property.
I can’t be nice, but I still sleep pretty well, just like the landlords of Four Points.
Margo Orlando Littell grew up in a coal-mining town in southwestern Pennsylvania. Her first novel, Each Vagabond by Name, won the University of New Orleans Publishing Lab Prize and an IPPY Awards Gold Medal for Mid-Atlantic Fiction. She lives in New Jersey with her family.