Hello! I’m Ben Fountain. Devil Makes Three is my fourth published book, and my second published novel. I’ve got a couple of novels in the drawer. On occasion I give a lecture titled “How To Get a Book Contract in Only 17 Years,” which people tend to take as stand-up comedy, and I suppose it is kind of funny, in a twisted way, that it took 17 years of writing before I finally placed my first book. Whatever.
Devil Makes Three is set in Haiti in the early 1990s, when Haiti was under the heel of the military regime that forced out President
Jean-Bertrand Aristide. The novel follows three main characters: Matt Amaker, an American expat who owns a dive shop in Haiti; Audrey O’Donnell, a rookie CIA case officer; and Misha Variel, a young Haitian-American who interrupts her PhD studies at
Brown University to return to Haiti because of a family crisis. What happens? A lot, I think.
The novel gets into scuba diving, treasure hunting, CIA skulduggery, geopolitical machinations, capitalism, the legacies of slavery and the global plantation economy (past and present incarnations), Vodou, the scholarship of the Black Atlantic, gun-running, drug-smuggling, medicine, and the NGO industrial complex, in addition to family, love, sex, death, and all the rest of it. I’ve made something like 50 trips to Haiti over the years, and have been a serious student of the country for over 30 years, so hopefully the book has something worthwhile to say about human experience as it’s lived in that place.
What Are You Reading?
Dark Days: Fugitive Essays by Roger Reeves
Reeves is one of the best poets around, and now he channels his formidable talents into prose explorations of America, racism, history, family, love, resistance… well, I could go on.
It’s an extraordinary book.
Books That Shaped Me
The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
I read The Sun Also Rises for the first time when I was 14 or 15, and that book snapped my eyes open like nothing I’d ever encountered. I hardly understood a bit of it, but something about the precision of the language, the concreteness of the experience being rendered, flipped a switch in my brain. I began to think about my life as opposed to just stumbling through it day to day. My relationship with Hemingway has gone through many ups and downs since then, but however I’m feeling and thinking about his work at any given time, the fact remains that The Sun Also Rises kicked into life whatever capacity I have to think and feel in a considered way.
Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez
I could say much the same thing about Love in the Time of Cholera, which I read for the first time when I was in my mid-30s. That book kicked something into life in me; call it the mid-life version of what The Sun Also Rises did to me as an adolescent. García Márquez opened the door for me to a new way of seeing and feeling and thinking.
More Good Stuff
Join me this fall and winter for a discussion of Devil Makes Three. I’ll be making appearances at several bookstores, libraries, book festivals, and more. You’ll find locations, dates and registration information for each discussion here.