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

Posted on February 5th, 2010 12:41pm by Larry Allums
Filed under Brief Encounters With Che Guevara

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?

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