All I can say is: Don’t take my word for it. Read the book and see whether you believe it, whether these people seem real, with all their human blind spots, flashes of brilliance and contradictions. The depth and the rapidity at which we become invested in these lives shows that it’s possible to write from any point of view as long as the writer is willing to do the hard work — the observation, the imagination, the selflessness — of getting a character right.
Fountain excels at writing macho dominance games masquerading as conversation, as well as lengthy exchanges of information that seem like talk rather than lectures or sermons. He can construct affecting scenes, such as one at a festival in a cemetery. There, Audrey and Misha collapse together, each mourning a dead parent — an implication that grief can, at least temporarily, bridge the most extreme political divides.
Not only a skillful author, but a brave one, Fountain is drawn to difficult subjects. An earlier novel, the award-winning “Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk,” featured a damaged veteran of the Iraq war who was promoted, by the news media, as a conquering hero. It takes courage to set an extremely complicated work of fiction in Haiti, to write across the lines of class, color, gender, ideology and nationality. And it’s nervy to blow the whistle on how the C.I.A. has engineered regime changes worldwide, often with disastrous results.
Over 500 pages long, the novel has its slow spots. Some readers may be more interested than I was in the specs of diving equipment. Others may question why so much of the book is devoted to Matt and Alix’s harebrained plan to solve their money woes by finding sunken treasure off the Haitian coast. When a fabulously awful character, Davis, seems to wander in from an Elmore Leonard novel — “Someone needed to slap a warning on his forehead: Contents Under Pressure” — you can’t help wondering why Matt and Alix (neither of them fools) believe they can do business with him or with the rich, sketchy owner of the ship from which they dive in search of gold. But it all makes perfect sense when we realize that, during a time of lawlessness, a historically significant and potentially lucrative treasure hunt is just another ScubaRave, on steroids.
Given the thrum of political anxiety that keeps many of us awake at night, some readers might think: The last thing I need right now is a novel about a crisis that has worsened over time in one of the world’s poorest nations. I understand the sentiment, but I was grateful for the old-fashioned pleasure of immersion in a long book with engaging characters, a sense of history and place, and a multifaceted vision of people trying to figure out what to do when the world around them is changing.
DEVIL MAKES THREE | By Ben Fountain | 531 pp. | Flatiron Books | $31.99
