In 2008, Malcolm Gladwell published an essay in the New Yorker about late-blooming geniuses who gather their powers incrementally. His prime example was Ben Fountain, a real estate lawyer in Dallas who decided, against all reason, that he wanted to be a writer. It took almost 20 years for Fountain’s first book, “Brief Encounters With Che Guevara,” to get published, but the response to this collection of stories was rapturous. “The ‘young’ writer from the provinces,” Gladwell joked, “took the literary world by storm at the age of forty-eight.”
Since that debut, Fountain has continued writing at a deliberate pace with similar success. His first novel, “Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk,” appeared in 2012 and won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. And now, more than a decade later at the age of 65, Fountain has published his next novel, “Devil Makes Three.” It’s a big, deeply humane political thriller that proves the flame of Graham Greene and John le Carré is still burning.
Informed by decades of travel to Haiti, “Devil Makes Three” takes place during those bloody months in 1991 after a coup d’état sent newly elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide into exile. Three decades may have dimmed many readers’ memories of that chaotic period when the world was fretting over the fate of Haiti’s fledgling democracy, but don’t let that intimidate you. Fountain deftly re-creates this geopolitical crisis without a hint of the lecturing tone that can make some works of historical fiction feel as lively as a 10th-grade textbook. Newsreel footage is spliced so seamlessly into the background of this multipronged story that you’ll barely register the shifts between fact and invention.
Advertisement
The scene opens in paradise, reflecting what Fountain calls Haiti’s “time-sodden beauty.” A handsome young man named Matt Amaker has come to Haiti with a modest inheritance and started a scuba business. His work partner, Alix, is the son of a wealthy local family. “Business was good, life was good and getting better all the time,” Matt thinks. “Haiti was becoming part of the world again, and here he was on the ground floor of the impending boom.” He’s tempted to imagine that the trouble in Port-au-Prince won’t affect his business.
“I’m in it for the long haul,” Matt says. “How about you?”
“I’m Haitian,” Alix says with a laugh. “I’ve got no choice.”
Matt has trouble fully comprehending that distinction, a blind spot that will confound him for months. Indeed, when some neighborhood children come running over with news of the coup, one of them asks if Matt is a member of Aristide’s party.
Advertisement
“I’m not anything,” he claims. “I’m a blan.”
That casual dismissal of his special status as a White person in Haiti is central to this tale — and Matt’s character. He’s that most challenging of modern-day protagonists: the genuinely nice guy whose guilelessness can look endearing or irritating depending on how it catches the light. He even feels guilty for worrying about the fate of his business. “It was pathetic,” he thinks, “obsessing over your bottom line in the midst of a national tragedy.” Sensitive, humble and honest to his own detriment, Matt is an innocent abroad, a white slate on which Fountain can record the challenges of Haitian life and the cynicism of American politics.
It’s not that Matt can pass through entirely unscathed — only that he can pass through without being beheaded, which makes all the difference in a country eating itself alive.
When military thugs confiscate Matt’s little scuba business, Alix convinces him they should switch to treasure hunting. It’s a fantastical endeavor — encrusted with barnacles of piracy and international plunder — but for the two young friends, it’s a lark, possibly a profitable one. Who knows what fortunes might still be lurking on the seabed off the coast of Haiti?
Although Matt and Alix are worried they won’t find anything, the opposite result is a much bigger problem, and they quickly find themselves in deeper water than they can handle. When an American billionaire hires them to go treasure hunting, Matt has a niggling suspicion that they’ve joined forces with the devil, but that slippery character takes many forms here. In the feverish climate of the military coup, rumors of treasure are even hotter than actual treasure. A tiny nation enduring a crippling embargo could use a new source of gold doubloons and would do anything to grab them. And what if they could find the symbolic mother lode of shipwrecks, Christopher Columbus’s Santa Maria? Just imagine how such a discovery would empower Haiti to recast the story of colonialism in the Americas.
Advertisement
But wait — this is all preposterous, isn’t it?
That’s the real triumph of “Devil Makes Three”: As Matt, the White American, becomes absorbed in a subplot of swelling political absurdity, a thicket of deadly atrocities spreads out across Haiti. And Fountain moves confidently to inhabit the lives of two very different women struggling to play an active role in the country’s crisis.
One is Alix’s sister, Misha, a fascinating character who has abandoned her PhD at Brown University to help her homeland any way she can. Although she has no medical training, she offers her services to a local hospital, which provides space for Fountain to write some of the most disturbing scenes of suffering I have ever read.
Stuck in a little fetid office digitizing patients’ records, Misha begins to put her graduate study of Foucault and Derrida to good use. The deeper she looks into the web of charities and pro-democracy organizations dribbling out funding to dying people, the more alarmed she becomes. Suddenly, the horror of the hospital — and Haiti’s pathological condition generally — is not an aberration but a direct product of a system that has chewed up Black bodies for centuries. “Just by existing,” she realizes, “nominally excess Haitians could be profited from, their data sold, resold, repackaged, and sold again like any other commodity. Call it the securitization of poverty, this packaging of human lives into hunger portfolios to be traded on the international aid market.”
Advertisement
While Haiti may look trapped in the past, underdeveloped and broken, Misha sees it as a terrifying vision of the future for what are now deemed “surplus people.” “The plantation had gotten an update,” she thinks. “This was the development part of the deal, modernity forging progress and prosperity in strict obedience to the logics of meticulously constructed free markets. Haitians should be grateful! Happy and grateful to dance to the tune of a couple of bucks a day.”
Misha’s bleakest suspicions are supercharged by her brother’s White girlfriend, Audrey, who claims to work at the embassy. As the only woman in a nest of CIA agents, Audrey endures a barrage of condescension from her colleagues, but she still imagines that her crafty plans for “democracy enhancement” will lift Haiti toward freedom. Alternately self-righteous and sympathetic, she’s one of Fountain’s least likable characters but also one of his most complex. She’s a fundamentally principled, concerned person, but in practice her idealism proves toxic to the very people she’s trying to help. When she announces, “We’ve got it under control,” you can almost hear the streets sparking into flames.
If there’s any flaw in “Devil Makes Three,” it stems, I suspect, from Fountain’s fundamental decency, a generosity of spirit that limits, in some detrimental way, the moral spectrum of his novel. Yes, horrific things happen in “Devil Makes Three” — plenty of them — but they’re prosecuted offstage, in the dark, by shadowy figures. To realize the full potential of a story this ambitious, the author needs to stare straight into the eyes of that third figure, that devil.
Advertisement
Still, this is a novel of ideas in the best sense. Fountain’s trenchant analysis of the geopolitical situation is not only subordinated to an intricate plot, it’s deeply embedded in the conflicted minds of these characters, who know and love this besieged place.
Nothing here captures the country’s dire plight and indomitable spirit better than when Fountain writes: “Haiti was dying. Haiti got up every morning and refused to be dead.”
Ron Charles reviews books and writes the Book Club newsletter for The Washington Post.
On Oct. 9 at 7 p.m., Ben Fountain will be in conversation with Marion Winik at Politics and Prose, 5015 Connecticut Ave. NW, Washington, D.C. 20008.
Devil Makes Three
By Ben Fountain
Flatiron. 531 pp. $31.99
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7uK3SoaCnn6Sku7G70q1lnKedZK%2Bwu8qsZmtoYmh8cYWOa2donJWrtq15zJqinqtdqbWzscRmmainm2K%2FpsLInq5o