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Ch. 7: Why Che Guevara?

Like Christine with “The Lion’s Mouth,” I need help with this one, but here are some opening speculations. For me, it’s the most subtle story so far, or perhaps the least obvious, in altering the pattern of the well-intentioned American who ventures outside his cocoon, rolls up his sleeves, and finds himself involved in a way he couldn’t have imagined (with the exception of Syto Charles in “Bouki and the Cocaine”). The privileged narrator in “Brief Encounters” is decidedly more detached than the others, and one wonders what motivates his growing obsession with Che. Is it that his proximity to Che, such as it is, increases as his life progresses—from love (Mona Broun) to martyrdom (Gustavo Torres) to inspiration (Ponce, his wife, and Laurent)? I wonder whether the story puts the question “what is at the heart of Che’s attraction for us?” In a way, he seems to be the presiding presence in all the stories, maybe even a totem figure behind all Fountain’s well-intentioned Americans who go to the “hardest places.” Che the medical student who takes a motorcycle odyssey that shows him poverty and injustice everywhere and makes him a revolutionary against superpowers. Is Che the motivating force inside all these American innocents, whether consciously or not?

Ben Fountain’s “The Lion’s Mouth”

I just finished it, and I am speechless. Reading Roomers, help me here.

Ben Fountain’s Bouki and the Cocaine: Was there a hero in the story?

Does every story have a hero? Not necessarily. I can’t think of a hero in any of the stories we have read so far, but with this one, it seems we are asking Syto and Lulu to respond to their situation with virtuous action, to behave in fact heroically. I have a different take. I don’t see them as heroic, so I don’t judge their actions relative to good and evil, or justice, or to making the world a better place. To me these two are sympathetic characters of the Haitian underclass, unremarkable in most ways, as simple and guileless as the tiny fish they settle for. Like Larry, I do not expect them to be caped crusaders. I don’t even expect them to do the right thing. Lulu was the instigator at the beginning of the story. He says he wants to do the “right thing” but I sense it was more a lark, a little adventure, a dare.  The adventure goes wrong, and the brothers feel ridiculous. They turn in the second drop, and they find themselves the fools again. With the third drop, for Syto, it now comes down to two choices: be a chump or a thief (“I don’t want to live as a fool” he says). His choice is not in relation to right or wrong. It is only about get or be got. When Lulu tries to persuade Syto to leave the cocaine for the thieves, Syto says “I just don’t want them to have it, that’s all.” Nothing suggested to me that they wanted to improve  the lives of their neighbors or vanquish evil. They just were tired of being the fools and having the bad guys reap rewards at their expense. To achieve some sort of cosmic equilibrium, the fools trade places, and the tricksters Gedes are drafted to the cause (see cheery fellow in purple hat above). Still, nary a hero in sight. Or did I miss something?

Judging Syto in “Bouki and the Cocaine”

In her insightful comment yesterday that she doesn’t share the mirth that some of us found in “Bouki and the Cocaine,” Helen rightly reminded us of the gray area that Ben Fountain likes to dwell in, and it also took me back to Charles’ question from last week’s blog on “Asian Tiger” as to whether we ought to expect more from a Sonny Lous than a Tommy Ng. I see the grayness, Helen, and would call it a true dilemma, but finally I can’t find it in myself to fault Syto for what he does to benefit his village. I just don’t expect him to be a caped crusader in the world in which he finds himself, and I’m assuming (maybe wrongly) that the $1.2 million he gets for the cocaine he smuggles in to nephew Nixon is a one-off. I can’t see that it’s his responsibility to take up arms against the bad guys, whether the Colombians or his fellow corrupted Haitians; “fighting evil” is for the self-proclaimed superheroes like America. Nor can I put Syto in the category of Merrill Hayden, who takes advantage of that evil purely for self-gain, or Michelet, who buys himself a big farm with his cut. Nixon (what a namesake he has!) seems to be out only for himself, always has been, but not Syto, even though the new life of his village has been bought at the expense of whatever damage the drugs did to whomever. I think Charles’ question is worth re-casting: once Syto gets the picture, should he fight the evil itself, or is he justified in using his ingenuity to turn just a bit of evil’s flow toward the good?

Ben Fountain’s Bouki and the Cocaine

Here are our newest characters, anti heroes Syto Charles and Lulu.  Just patriotic, poor Haitian fisherman who watch the go-fast drug running boats leaving their bundles of cocaine on deserted  beaches.  They decide to do something positive for their country – turn it in to the “new civilian, postinvaion police, recruited and trainted by the Americans to be guardians of the dawning democracy.”  Wait a minute -the corrupt Michelet is still in charge and when they show him the cocaine, his nasty, threatening impatience quickly changes to simpering giddiness.  What makes them try again with the politico Mereste and have exactly the same result?  They don’t want money, I believe they just want some respect and to do the right thing.  So, when Syto spots another bundle he knows he will take it.  Syto Charles is a little like Mason in Reve Haitian.  Out of naivite, idealism, or patriotism they both put themselves squarely in the way of deadly political forces with no real expectation of monetary gain.  But, in the end, even Uzis, uniforms, trucks and spies can’t compete with Haitian voodooism.

Ben Fountain’s Asian Tiger: Final Thoughts

Larry and commenters: I have just now re-read your thoughtful and thorough discussion of this story. Your comments inspired me to read each of these stories twice; now I am reading your comments twice. Each time I get so much out of them. Well, I too found this story to be dark, a slow dismantling of naivete, in that vein, a kind of horror story. The story-telling was superb. I delighted in the descriptive work: “the smog harbored startling bits of orchids and manure, ” so lovely. But there was also a but of heavy-handedness that I didn’t see in previous stories. Now I may be a literalist and perhaps there was an intention to be ironic, or maybe some of the descriptions were meant to land heavily on the page. You tell me.  But phrases such as these seemed unworthy, or maybe just unnecessary: “Burma, the heat-rash crotch of the world;”   “(the grass was) nature’s nightclub for horny cobras;” ” (with) his serial killer stares he came off as marginally presentable member of the Manson family; “the past chasing him from his bed like a swarm of killer bees” Fountain’s writing can be so precise that any writing that is “too much” really stands out. Am I missing something?

Ch. 4: Ben Fountain’s “Asian Tiger”

In “Asian Tiger,” Ben Fountain continues to unfold his roster of Americans who learn the hard way about the ways of the world. To paraphrase Hamlet’s words to Horatio, “there are more things in heaven (or hell) and earth than are dreamt of in your social categories.” Wrapped up as he is in his pathetic squandering of talent, fame, and fortune, Sonny Lous is duped and used in a way that leaves him devastated once the veil is pulled back and he sees the truth of things. At one point he thinks he’s getting it, sensing “a sea change within himself, a difference of depth, perhaps a broadening point of view. He believed that he was starting to understand how successful people made their way in the world, his learning curve pushed along by the rounds he played with Merrill Hayden.” The dynamics of golf rounds as lessons in life. He has no idea, until he puts together the bodies of the rebels—“Ground beef,” “Human roadkill,” “Blood sausage”—with Kel McClure’s revelation that he has been not some sort of golf ambassador to Myanmar but a piece in the machinery by which Hayden has been able to get his cut of the Tesco deal and pay off the corrupt generals. True, Sonny’s own cut, $75,000, will finance his daughters’ college education (or part of it), but how will he live with the knowledge of where the money came from? At least Mason was an idealist who won’t spend the $80,000 he ends up with in “Reve Haitien” for personal reasons. Sonny as the “Asian Tiger”? I don’t think so, even considering the real Tiger’s fall from grace. For me, this is Fountain’s darkest story yet.

Ben Fountain’s The Good Ones Are Already Taken: Last Word?

I left this story pretty freaked out about the power of the mind. Perhaps my borderline is closer than most people’s, but I can see how easy it is to cross it, to see something or experience something that could take the mind to the other side – where it could shut down, or easily be inhabited by Haitian goddesses, or Baptist admonitions, let alone irrational jealousy about an irrational spiritual affair. This is a short story I wish had been made into a book, because I did want to know more, see more, understand more – especially about Dirk. In fact to me the form failed the story, because the story was epic — and from the reader’s view, forced too much to take place in too few words. Melissa seemed to me the less interesting character, though most fully developed, and I am not sure how her cousin advanced the story, but Dirk to me was the transformed character who hit the spiritual jackpot, and his journey fascinated me. Here is a man who came back from a mad, mad place with two goddesses in his psyche and a countenance more centered, focused, selfless and serene.  Not a bad trade off, in my estimation. But onward: golf, anyone?

Re: Ben Fountain’s The Good Ones Are Already Taken

I’m a little late reading this story, but, wow, what a story.  If Fountain wrote with any irony at all this could be a little humorous.  This good looking all American couple, pretty Melissa and crew cut Dirk sharing a little single wide with a couple of Voodoo goddess temptresses. I wish Fountain had used his prodigious descriptive gifts to describe the goddesses – black beauty and white goddess of love.  What?  In the last stories we could practically find our way around Mason’s house with his vivid images.  This was more of a fairy tale to me, I didn’t feel the kind of emotional attachment to these characters as I did to John Blair, and especially Mason.  After reading the comments to Larry’s post, I don’t believe I read nearly as much into this story as some of you deeper readers did.  Melissa’s character did seem a little fuzzy around the edges – maybe that was intentional, like she only feels real with her husband home with her.  And then he’s not really home.  Rather then a story of sexual addiction, Melissa is a little addicted to male attention – like so many attractive women who continue to flirt and tease just to be sure that they can still grab those looks and stares.

The most interesting juxtaposition between these stories is how both John Blair and Mason left something deep and elemental behind in their journeys – their naive innocence and American idealism, both stories seemed to end on sort of a poignant yearning note.  Dirk, on the other hand, has brought back a complete new emotional and spiritual layer to his personality, and, of course, a couple of Voodoo sex goddesses.

Ch. 3: The Good Ones Are Already Taken

Following Ben Fountain’s great answers to our questions–thanks, Ben!–I will risk a start on story #3 in his collection. I find it very different from the first two, mainly because the perspective is Melissa’s, a woman’s, and also because the strange forces out there in the world unknown to Westerners are not encountered in their native territory but brought back by a man who had a job to do but got involved along the way, like John Blair and Mason in their stories. Melissa just wanted her husband back, and with him the good sex; she also got the voodoo goddess of love with two faces. It reminds me of images from ancient stories of the warrior hero returning home with a concubine or two who were his part of the war booty but always caused trouble–the conquest not as simple a thing as it seemed. What about Ben’s title for the story? It’s a cliché, but maybe with a twist?

Ben Fountain Responds To Your Questions About Brief Encounters with Che Guevara, Life, Citizen Voyeurs

Go to “comments” for February 9. Really. Cool. Guy.

Ben Fountain as Screenwriter

Sorry I’ve been absent from the posting party. Sure, I’ve been busy preparing to take some lucky Reading Roomer to lunch at Stephan Pyles. (We are SO getting the Heaven and Hell Cake!) But I have to say I’ve also been reluctant to post because you guys are way smarter than I am. I write about things like The Bachelor, for heaven’s sake.

But here goes. So, I’m a fast reader. I can’t get through this book quickly. In fact, Chapter 2 probably took me an hour or so to get through–and it’s not long.  Fountain is obsessed with the details. So, while we might not know a character’s name, it’s almost like we can see every square inch of the apartment he (sometimes) lives in. As my friend Jennifer pointed out, you could make a movie directly from the book and have little doubt about how the scene is supposed to look. (You might have to add some dialogue, I suppose.). Anyway, I wonder if have any of Fountain’s stories have been optioned? And I wonder if he has any interest in writing screenplays?

Ch. 2: Art vs. Politics in “Reve Haitien”

Thanks for the really good posts on the idealist observer and, in Sarah’s words, the “slow journey toward involvement.” Shad’s reference to Mason’s analysis of the painting “Reve Haitien” (I’m still wondering if it really exists) is key to how Mason’s journey ends, I think. To understand the mulatto’s Haiti—the true Haiti—Mason seems to conclude, you somehow have to collapse the distance between observer and participant; you have to enter “the current of the dream” depicted collectively in the paintings. The huge claim of the story seems to be that it is through art, not politics, that one comes to understand the world: only Haitian artists can reveal Haiti’s soul. The OAS observers, Mason included, record everything on the surface through daily reports and weekly photographs, but those aren’t the “passage” into the Haiti burning in the mulatto. The more time Mason spends with the art, the more he sees “a way of being that had survived behind the prevailing myths” and “a luxuriance of meaning there that merged with the photos, never far from his mind, in the mission’s files of the Haitian dead.” By the end of the story, with his “glorious friend” gone, Mason seems totally to have lost his innocence and entered the “current of the dream.” I don’t think he’ll ever come out of it because he’s now in on “something waiting to be born, something sleeping.” How ironic that he’s holding the voodoo drum holding the money. I think he’s beyond both corruption and altruism now; it’s as if the dead mulatto has bequeathed his dream vision of Haiti to Mason, whether he wants it or not.

Lillian Bradshaw, the Quintessential Librarian, dies in Dallas

Please visit our sister blog Sweet Charity for more information.

Ben Fountain’s Brief Encounters with Che Guevara: What’s in a Name?

In Ben Fountain’s Brief Encounters with Che Guevara, the author did not give the mulatto a proper name. Thoughts? (Sorry for lame link.)

Ask the Author: Ben Fountain Will Take Your Questions Now

Ben Fountain

Ben Fountain said if D Reading Roomers (doesn’t work, does it) Roomettes? whatever, you all, have any questions, he will answer them. Best question wins a lunch at Stephan Pyles with Editor Laura Kostelny!

UPDATE: Our author is reading all of your questions (which — I might add — are brillante) and will answer them in time. We will release his answers as posts over the course over the coming weeks. So feel free as we go through the different stories to add your inquiries here.  xx Christine

UPDATE: Mr. Fountain’s replies are now in comments.

Ch. 2: Ben Fountain’s Idealist Heroes

In “Reve Haitien,” Mason appears to be another of Ben Fountain’s innocent Americans–naive about what constitutes a life of purpose and value, and especially what constitutes heroism, or whether it is even possible in the contemporary world. He has a glimmering—a nascent vision of a “purpose-driven life” (to appropriate Rick Warren’s phrase)—as his “O.A.S. Observer” status denotes, but the distance between observer and participant is huge. I myself am an even more distant observer; that’s what the Red Cross is for, right? But what if you go so far as to put yourself in the possible path of a strange mulatto who shows up at your chessboard one afternoon? If the milieu of “Near-Extinct Birds” depicts a very fallen world in which supposedly idealist revolutionaries make deals with professedly materialist businessmen, in “Reve Haitien” the hero seems at first glance even more quixotic, the dream even more fragile and far-off.

D Reading Room Has The Cure For (Late) Sunday Night

Sunday night. And no “Mad Men” to divert us. Just some kind of … football game. The next thing we know, the alarm will go off, and it will be…. well, you know. Hey, no big deal, because at the end of this lovely weekend, we get to read the second short story of Ben Fountain’s Brief Encounters with Che Guevara. It takes place in Port-au-Prince. Happy reading all.

Decoding Larry Allums’s Happy Ending Post

For those of us who were in a coma during the Seinfeld years, this.

Ch. 1: Ben Fountain’s Happy Ending, Take 2

I now reveal my kinship with Billy Mumphrey and all other cock-eyed optimists. Beyond the political and historical issues that provide the scaffolding for “Near-Extinct Birds,” I keep coming back to John Blair the protagonist. From a literary angle (rather than political or historical), the story is about him, more specifically what he discovers and comes to understand. Okay, there’s no “happy” ending, but I do think there’s something like an “updraught” to the action as it progresses. There will always be wars and rumors of wars, the Albertos and the Spassos, but the core movement seems to be Blair’s true education (following the one that cost him a lot of money), as when he listens to Hernan’s horror stories and enters them in his notebook alongside the parrot notes “because it all seemed bound together in some screamingly obvious way that he couldn’t quite get.” With Hernan as a strange and unlikely mentor, Blair begins for the first time to connect the ideal and the real: “Sickness, he wrote in the margin of his notes, there’s a sickness in the world, along with parrots the most intelligent and beautiful of birds, also the most threatened—a clue to the nature of things (?)” Such knowledge, which will mature with time, won’t save the parrots, but that doesn’t seem finally to be the point. Along with the film that Hernan slips into his pocket, his insights equip him to produce work that will outlast revolutions and lumber deals. How’s that for unbridled enthusiasm?

Brief Encounters Ch. 1: Who Stars In The Movie?

So Ben Fountain tosses up Jerry Garcia as an Alberto look-alike. What say you?  And while we are on it, how about casting Joan Blair. Spasso? Hernan?

UPDATE: Kevin plays JoanBlair?

Chapter 1: Ben Fountain’s Happy Ending

Is there a happy ending to “Near-Extinct Birds”? It appears not. Could there be? Not unless it were written as a different story, one in which, say, the birds were saved or Alberto became repentant or something like that. But the political milieu of Fountain’s world, which is infernal, doesn’t allow such options. And Joan Blair himself in the helicopter at the end thinks in response to Spasso’s ignorant question—“How does it feel to be free?”—that it feels “like death, and how grieved and utterly lost you’d feel as everything precious faded out.” However, we haven’t noted the little event hidden in the chaos of Blair’s release: Hernan’s slipping the 35 mm film cartridge into Blair’s hand. What’s on the film? What will Blair discover when he gets home and over his grief? There’s a future here, beyond the bounds of the story, that may signal a comic possibility—in the sense of an upward movement, to match the helicopter’s. Hernan is the closest thing we see to a Joan Blair convert. I’m wondering what he’s done behind the scenes.

Chapter 1: Ben Fountain’s Alberto

I am dying to discuss Joan Blair (I laugh every time) but I want to talk about Jerry Garcia Alberto for a while. Our commenter self-described as The Official Fitness Guru of Dallas! posited that Alberto knew that Blair’s bird research might endanger the Spasso deal, inferring that Blair’s capture was a brilliant defensive chess move. Intriguing notion, but I ain’t so sure. I  think the only person with strategic sense was Spasso. Alberto — like so many revolutionaries — seems to be a fatalist, and I don’t think fatalists have the need to think a couple of chess moves ahead. (I apologize for this strained chess analogy, I don’t know where it came from.)

When Joan and Alberto are together, there seems  to be fondness in the air, a bit like a married couple where there is a power imbalance but no animosity. What if Spasso’s heliocopter never made it, and Joan remained stuck with Alberto. How might Alberto have proceeded. Would anything like the wondrous Bel Canto have developed? Or would Joan have been bait for a new initiate? What do you all think?

UPDATE: Commenter “Carlitos” makes a good case that the story should have no happy ending.

Chapter 1: Ben Fountain’s sense of irony

I admire Ben Fountain’s sense of irony. In this first story, I find subtle layers of it,  one dramatic irony on top of another, revealed to the eyes of John Blair, who strikes me as another in a long line of American innocents. Thomas Spasso’s presence toward the end is one revelation—that Blair’s release doesn’t figure into Spasso’s deal. When Blair finds that out, he’s angry, holding his consolation Power Bars and thinking that his situation results from “the casual cruelty of people who’d never missed a meal or had a gun stuck to their heads.” Fifteen months ago, presumably, Blair himself was capable of such cruelty, but now he has suffered into wisdom, so he thinks. But the next veil pulled back—the Weyerhauser deal behind the deal that he stumbles onto—is the one that seems to open his eyes completely and transforms (to use Sarah’s word from yesterday) everything for him. Now he insists on staying for the parrots, but more so for the principle of it all. My question is, when Blair says “I won’t stand for this. I don’t accept it. You people can’t do this,” is he at his most absurd or his most noble? My own opinion is that he’s both at the same time.

Near Extinct Birds and Absurd Humans

Did anyone have a Catch 22 moment when Alberto the comandante told John Blair he didn’t look like a spy? “However, if they wanted to send a spy they wouldn’t send somebody who looked like a spy. So the fact that you don’t look like a spy makes me think you’re a spy.” It seems like the same absurd logic that puts an individual in the military in the “double bind” or no win situation. It’s the same sort of Kafka-esque moment when the American contingent comes and have no authority or real interest in bringing home a kidnapped American. He did get some Power Bars, though. The most hilarious scene to me was the true story when the head of the NYSE pompously invites the drug trafficking war lords to be his personal guests at the Stock Exchange. Of course, the comandantes can’t even look at each other for fear of rolling on the floor with laughter like a bunch of 7th graders in church. And this guy Richard Grasso was for real. Not only did he do business with drug lords, he also was ousted from the NYSE for questionable bonuses, and sued by the state of New York.  And for a timely footnote that sounds like an absurdly fictional part of this story, the New York Supreme Court has now ruled that he was actually entitled to all that cash ( about $150 million, I think) and the state has no suit against him.  Truth is crazier than fiction