Ben Fountain | Wednesday, June 10, 6:30 p.m. | Quail Ridge Books, Raleigh
I’d thought departing Durham at 8 would allow plenty of time to get to New Bern for an 11 a.m. interview with author Ben Fountain. But, of course, there is traffic on Highway 147 and Interstate 40, and it took more than an hour to get east of Raleigh, a 20-minute midnight drive. Have humans always measured distance with intervals of time? How can we know how far we’ve come unless we know how long it took to get here?
Fountain, 67, was born in Eastern North Carolina, spent his formative years in the Triangle, and has called both home ever since. His debut collection of short stories, Brief Encounters with Che Guevara, was published to widespread acclaim in 2006.
Three more books followed, including the novel Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction and was adapted into a movie directed by Ang Lee. His latest novel, political satire Rasputin Swims the Potomac, centers on a world champion professional wrestler with presidential ambitions. It releases in June.
Highways 42 and 70 take me into the Sandhills on my way to meet Fountain, and I imagine him as a 13-year-old boy traversing this route in reverse, on his way from Kinston to a new life in Cary.
“When I was growing up in North Carolina in the ’60s, there was dire poverty out in the countryside—I mean, tar-paper shacks and naked kids in the yard,” Fountain told me. “And if we aren’t careful, we’ll go right back to it.”
Fountain’s family made the move in the early ’70s after his father was elected to serve as president of the state’s community college system—the third largest in the nation—which thrived under governors like Terry Sanford.
“If you asked my dad what he did,” Fountain said, “he would say he was a school man. If you pushed him further, he would say he was trying to help poor people.”
After graduating from Cary High School, Fountain attended the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he majored in English and took classes from the likes of Doris Betts and Marianne Gingher. He then went on to Duke Law School, where he fell in love with Sharrie—his future wife—whom he would follow to Dallas, Texas, thereby escaping what he described, in a 2006 New York Times essay, as “the cumulative weight of family and history and place, a kind of endlessly repeating nostalgic fog.”
Fountain’s quitting his lucrative lawyering job five years later to become a writer—and the long, slogging road to success that culminated in the publication of his lauded debut collection of stories at age 48—has been well documented in Malcolm Gladwell’s famous essay “Late Bloomers” and repeated in almost every article about Fountain since.
“I went to law school,” Fountain explained, “because I was scared of writing.” There was no clear-cut path to the creative endeavor, failure seemed likely, and “nobody wants to waste their life.” But the monkey was riding his back well before he left the Old North State, and it was still hanging on when he returned more than 40 years later.
The telephone poles lining the exit ramp into New Bern are strung with American flags for Memorial Day. How appropriate, this mise-en-scène, for the conversation to follow. My own debut story collection pillorying the rhetoric of the Tea Party was published last year, though I drafted the stories well before Donald Trump took that infamous golden escalator ride toward the presidency. I was interested in speaking with Fountain because I see in him a model artist: a cultivator of the golden ear, a methodical experimenter, a fellow traveler who refuses to draw a line between art and protest. On Queen Street, I pass beneath a vinyl sign advertising a Knights of Columbus yard sale. And as I park, here comes Fountain loping down Middle Street, swinging his arms like a little kid.
The bells clang in the 200-year-old gothic Episcopal church across the street, and we sit down at a café less than a block from the birthplace of Pepsi-Cola to talk about education, the breaking of the social contract, the gutting of society, the obscene hoarding of wealth by a handful of evil people, about Maslow’s hierarchy and Bonhoeffer’s ethics and our mutual contempt for the political class; about the death of book reviewing, the rise of AI, and how every story needs a setting (would Kafka agree?).
We talk about Haiti as “the boiling point,” where the concentrated “legacies of capitalism, the slave trade, and the movement of Europeans into the New World” converged, about how far we’ve come and failed to come in the 500 years since the Old World crashed into the New, and about how there’s always something more to learn, how research—that is, reading, listening, and digging—becomes the muse for every late bloomer.
While Fountain visited Haiti more than 50 times in the process of writing two novels and several short stories about that island nation, his new novel is set in the United States and bears more in common with Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, in which the author was thinking, as he wrote in a 2017 Guardian essay, about “the fact that at some point in our recent history, fantasy made reality its bitch.”
Fountain cites Trump as a master at blurring the line between reality and fantasy, a job made easier by America’s addiction to screens. In the character Rasputin, he imagines a challenger for our current president—whose all-too-familiar name, it bears mentioning, is completely redacted from the text. (“Less for legal reasons,” Fountain explained, “than that I was simply tired of seeing it.”)
Rasputin takes kayfabe to the extreme by claiming—both in and out of the wrestling ring—to be the literal reincarnation of the historical Grigori Rasputin, with all the Russian mystic’s attendant faith-healing powers. In the novel, the Supreme Court has cleared Trump to run for a third term just as a mysterious weeping sickness plagues MAGA country. When Rasputin proves he can heal the afflicted at a wrestling match, he’s floated as a potential running mate for the president, before dark money begins pouring into a “Draft Rasputin for President” movement.
Fountain tells the story through the alternating perspectives of Clarence Thomas Jr., a retired political science professor-turned-journalist (who bears no relation to the Supreme Court justice), and Faith Spack, a former reality-TV child star now working as a White House communications staffer. The former, a man admittedly after the author’s “own heart,” struggles “not to be that dreary old head boring everybody to death with … living history monologues” and might well be read as Fountain’s warning to himself and the scant few other fiction writers who have dared to portray Donald Trump.
Such luminaries as Salman Rushdie and Dave Eggers have floundered in attempts to satirize the president, perhaps because they’ve not been able to imagine a reality more absurd than the present. (Cue Alec Baldwin’s puckered face on Saturday Night Live.) “What the late-night soi-disant satirists end up doing is ridiculing, not satirizing,” the writer Will Self wrote in a recent Harper’s article, “and that’s what you do to demagogues, not legitimately elected leaders.”
Had the plot of Fountain’s book remained focused on the machinations of the Trump campaign, rather than shifting to the nascent candidacy of the faith-healing professional wrestler, he, too, might have fallen into the trap that Clarence articulates. Instead, he uses comic exaggeration, to borrow Will Self’s definition of satire, “as a magnifying glass … through which to ridicule [and] catstrophize political reality.”
Clarence’s working definition of fascism, in the novel, beyond its defining characteristics (“white supremacy, Christian nationalism, and charismatic leadership”), is “Power over justice. Power as justice. Ultimate power as the justification of itself.”
It is this gross consolidation of power, exemplified by technocrats and billionaires, at whom Fountain directs his ire, refusing to punch down at individual Trump supporters—especially those like Faith, who is neither “Republican and conservative” nor “anti-Democrat and -woke” but simply an adherent to the “flesh and heat and voice and … force field of [Trump’s] aura.” Although the Draft Rasputin movement appears to be grassroots, Clarence follows the money to the Tea Party—“the same high-dollar folks who bankrolled a bunch of angry, confused, dress-up-playing white people.”
Here is the rub: In a world where weeping sickness spontaneously erupts in pockets across the U.S., where time stops cold—freezes—for all but our intrepid Clarence and Faith, where the spirit of Terry Southern guides a comatose character through the ethereal waiting room of heaven, in a world like this, how are readers to know, in the thunderous words of Faith, that “RASPUTIN IS NOT REAL”?
“Even as she insists on the irreality of Rasputin, she’s thinking he might be realer than anything. Healing the weepers, that’s real. Curing Clarence Thomas, real. The crowds, the poll numbers, the lights-out fundraising, real. The quaking lust he inspires in every woman in sight, definitely real. For this Faith offers herself as proof.”
From Rasputin Swims the potomac
by ben fountain
For “even as she insists on the irreality of Rasputin, she’s thinking he might be realer than anything. Healing the weepers, that’s real. Curing Clarence Thomas, real. The crowds, the poll numbers, the lights-out fundraising, real. The quaking lust he inspires in every woman in sight, definitely real. For this Faith offers herself as proof.”
And the reader believes Faith, just as the reader believes Clarence Thomas Jr., because the weeping, the time slippage, the Terry Southern visitation boggle them as they would boggle anyone, even as they narrate the familiar irreality of our own collective world.
Not unreality, not surreality, not magical realism (a genre born, by the way, in Haiti), not quite, but the nightmare into which we are all always waking. The novel builds like a Shepard tone, ending abruptly—its energy still building—before the bass drop of the Republican primary.
“It had to end this way,” said Fountain, “because we’re still in the middle of it.”
The interview now complete, I cross the Trent River on Highway 17 and think about the author in a January boat on the Potomac, researching the superhuman physical feat for which his new novel is named. Although the rural lushness of Fountain’s youth has largely given way to superhighway, factory farm, and suburban sprawl, I still sight dust devils spinning in the drought-riven fields.
Fountain and Sharrie long ago figured they would end up in the Triangle, but the traffic, he says, is as bad as in Dallas, where much of the new novel is set. I’m hoping to beat rush hour. The 250th anniversary of our nation is upon us. How far have we come? Part of the festivities in the capital will include a UFC cage fight on the White House lawn. Will Self may proclaim satire dead, but Ben Fountain—old master, visionary experimentalist, Tar Heel satirist extraordinaire—proves him wrong at every turn.
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