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Join us each episode for an exploration of story with a different author, as we go deep into the writing craft. The Epilogue...is an interview show that focuses on the art of writing with your favorite writers and storytellers. Writing is art. Writing is science.
Michael
00:00:01.120 - 00:00:54.860
There are a lot of decisions that go into your story. Who are your characters, where does it take place and what happens? Being the least of it.
One of the most fundamental aspects of your story is its voice. Your story's voice is one of the main things that can affect whether a reader will finish or even start your story.
It can affect tone, pacing, character theme. Readers fall in love with your story through its voice. How do you find that? How do you discover the right voice to tell your story?
Ben
00:00:57.590 - 00:00:57.830
Foreign.
Michael
00:01:03.110 - 00:02:31.170
Welcome to the epilogue, where everything makes sense. In retrospect, this is the. The show where we tend to go maybe a little bit too deep into craft and talk to a writer about how the.
The stories that they have written work the way that they do.
Today I'm joined by author Ben Fountain, critically acclaimed author and recipient of a Pushcart Prize, O. Henry Awards, Joyce Carroll Oat Prize, Thomas Wolf Prize, pen, Hemingway Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, and finalist for the National Book Award.
One of my favorite mentions I found actually on your website, a reviewer from New York Times Book Review and former aide to Senator Cruz wrote, at times I wished Fountain would dumb it down a bit. So I would love that one.
He's known for works containing complex themes of recent history, politics, war, American identity, including, notably, Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk, which has also been adapted into a movie.
His collection of short stories, Brief Encounters with Che Guevara, the nonfiction Beautiful Country, Burn Again, Democracy, Rebellion and Revolution. His most recent novel, D, Devil Makes Three. Ben, thank you for joining. I really appreciate your time today.
Ben
00:02:31.650 - 00:02:34.290
Michael, thank you for having me. I look forward to this.
Michael
00:02:34.850 - 00:03:06.740
I know that you're more than happy usually to jump into a discussion where people have strong opinions and your writing mirrors that. Many writers are afraid, though, of strong themes. They're. They're given the advice, don't let your work be preachy.
And as a result, I think they shy away from theme almost altogether, afraid that it's going to compromise the story itself in some way or the organic flow. Obviously, you don't have that problem.
Ben
00:03:07.780 - 00:07:02.370
Yeah, okay. It's a good question. It's a big question.
And I'll just start by saying, to do this kind of work, to have any chance of doing it properly, you need to follow your head and your heart where they lead you.
And if your head and your heart leads you to try to write a domestic novel set within a household where the parameters seem rather confined and small, that's a perfectly honorable thing to do. And actually, I think if you write that story properly, then all the big themes are going to be in there.
I mean, you know, take a book like Pride and Prejudice, which, I mean, when I first had to read it in eighth grade, I thought, what the. What is this shit? I mean, I do not care about all these parties, you know, going on in whatever era of England that was, you know, the 1830s, 1840s.
But as an adult, when I go back and read it, I realize, oh, she is dealing with the most fundamental things of life here.
She's dealing with economics, power, inequality, the patriarchy, and she's dealing with this group of young women trying to chart some degree of agency and self determination within this very confined and constricted society. And so it's really like the stakes are extremely high.
I mean, my head and my heart lead me to what ostensibly seems like maybe a wider playing field, but I think no more and no less important than, you know, what you might call the domestic playing field. I mean, it's all human experience and it all has layers and levels.
So, you know, so take a book like Billy Lynn, where, where as I was stalking it, you know, trying to figure out how am I going to approach this material, there were all these big things banging around in my head, you know, like war and economics and economic inequality, opportunity inequality, you know, the fact that the working and middle classes in this country are getting the shaft and, and just, you know, the complete obscenity of that war and the, you know, just tremendous damage was caused by it. I'm like, how am I going to do this? And the way I tried to approach it was just write the story from the inside out. Write the story of these people.
If you write Billy's story properly, like really trying to get into his skin, into his nerve endings, into, into his body and brain, if you do that properly, then all the other stuff will take care of itself. All those quote, big themes.
And, and so instead of like, hopefully, instead of plastering these big themes, you know, whatever message onto the narrative, hopefully all that stuff will come from the inside out. It'll be there, it'll be inherent in, in Billy's story and the story of the Bravos. And so don't sweat that stuff. Just write the story properly.
Just, I mean, you know, not easy. But if you. Easy part, yeah, if you write it properly, the themes will take care of themselves.
Michael
00:07:03.330 - 00:07:34.620
If you don't have themes, you don't have to Kill a Mockingbird. You're not picking easy subjects. You're jumping right into, obviously things that are important to examine.
How do you choose a character to hang this on Billy Lynn, for example, he is not in the center of a lot of stuff, but he looks in an awful lot of directions over the course of that day in that book.
Ben
00:07:35.340 - 00:11:41.340
Yeah, you know, we all have these things banging around in our heads, things that confuse us, make us angry, scare us, please us, delight us, entice us. And you know, that's the work of the writer, is to tune in to this mental slurry that we've got going on inside ourselves.
I can zero in on, you know, what is this, what's going on in my life. And you know, there's the individual level, but then there's the macro level and they're, I mean, it's all one thing.
I mean, because, you know, the big stuff happening out in the world, it determines so much of, of our lives and the parameters of our lives and you know, how we're going to live and, and whether we're resisting it or going with it, you know, whether we're using it or it's using us.
And so to me it's just a natural thing in the course of trying to write a character properly, to try to be alive to all of that, all the layers and levels of experience with Billy. I mean the germ of the book came from the 2004 Dallas Cowboys game halftime show, Thanksgiving Day.
And just watching all those soldiers out on the field in the middle of this absolutely mind bending extravaganza of Americana. And it's much, I mean the real life inspiration is much the way I write it in the book.
And I was just thinking, well, if you were a 19 year old soldier and you had been in combat and now you get brought back to the US and you're dropped into the middle of this, you know, highly artificial, highly produced, you know, situation, what would it do to your head? And how would you stay sane in the middle of it all? How would you process it all? How would you try to make sense of it all?
Because I think it's natural human impulse. We're always trying to make sense of our experience, what's happening to us, what's going on around us. I mean we're all doing it all the time.
And unless we're taking drugs, and that's one reason we take drugs, to get a vacation from all that. Not that I'm advocating. So again it's, it's, you know, it's like, okay, start with Billy. That's all you have to do right now.
Page one, just start with Billy and where he is, what's happening and just go from there and, and try to get as deeply into his skin as I can. And you know, for him, it's a very.
I mean, it's an unusual war novel, I suppose, because it takes place over the course of one day in an NFL football game that happens to be on Thanksgiving. There are some flashbacks, but for the most part it's over the course of those six, seven, eight hours.
But I thought, well, if you write it properly, you can do all the things you need to do.
You can get the war in there, you can get Billy's confusion and heartbreak and also the parts that are making him as a person, forming him for the better. You know, if you do it properly, you can get it all in there. But for me, what it takes is doing it line by line, like phrase by phrase.
Does this feel right? Does this feel genuine? Does that feel right? And just eking it out line by line, paragraph by paragraph, page by page.
Michael
00:11:42.860 - 00:13:17.870
There is a lot there. It's. It is one day is told, some of it in flashbacks, even some flash forwards.
And you have entire characters who are very important to the book who don't even show up on that day because of various reasons.
Speaking of the flash forwards and all of the flashbacks and I guess maybe a little bit craftiness here, Billy's voice in this book, this was sculpted Billy's. Nominally, it's a close third person. We follow Billy, we get his inner feelings and his thoughts, but you zoom in and you're zooming out.
We have a sense of the broader world.
Sometimes whenever we're zooming in, we're zooming in almost at a microscopic level into things that Billy is noticing that he probably wouldn't necessarily be articulating in this way.
Like the narrative voice riding his shoulder sometime is narrating with vocabulary he probably wouldn't put to it, even if he, even though he has it, even floats into flash forwards. And how. There's a lot of nuance in what effect this has not only to the story, but like how we appreciate other characters and everything.
How did you come upon this perspective?
Ben
00:13:18.110 - 00:19:34.710
Yeah, okay, that's. That was a real challenge in the book and I think it's worth talking about. I mean, there's two aspects to it.
I mean, number one, Billy is a 19 year old, poorly educated American male from a small town in Texas. Poorly educated because public education in Texas is, you know, it sucks.
And so he's 19 years old, hasn't been to college, but the ultimate life from death reality of combat has shocked him into Awareness. I mean, I think much of our culture encourages us to be numb and dumb.
The reason for that is it's easier to sell stuff to people who are numb and dumb. You can sell them products, you can sell them, you know, the image of a tickle, like, particular lifestyle.
You can sell them a political agenda, you can sell them a war. You can sell all kinds of stuff when people are just kind of sleepwalking through life and following the cues.
But Billy's been shocked into awareness and. And he's also had some help along the way from his two mentors. I mean, there's Sergeant Shroom, not his real name, but everybody knows him as Shroom.
And so he's been one mentor to Billy, and then the other mentor is Sergeant Dime. And so, I mean, these are two very aware, thinking, subversive cats that, you know, he has fallen under the wings of. And so there's that part of it.
And these guys, like, especially Shroom, he's like, okay, I'm giving you these books. You need these books like you're an unformed blob of human protoplasm. And if you're going to have any chance in life, you need to start reading.
You need to know stuff, and important stuff, spiritual stuff, practical stuff. He loses Shroom along the way, but Shroom has given him that good, strong push out into the current of knowledge, of wisdom, of trying to acquire.
So there's that.
I mean, so when Billy comes back to the US for this victory tour, I mean, he's really looking around, he's really thinking, he's trying to figure things out. Why are things the way they are? Why does the world work this way? How does it work? How do you build a stadium as basic as that?
Where does the money come from? Where does the money come from for airports, for interstate highways, for all this stuff?
I mean, it's a mystery to him, but he's really paying attention, trying to figure out why the world is the way it is. Because in a way, his life depends on it. It's like he's in the military. They're going to send me back to the war.
Are they going to keep sending me back? Are we going to keep having wars? I mean, it's. I mean, my life is at stake here, and I know that now. And so he's really like.
Even though he hasn't had much education, he's a pretty smart cat. And, like, he's really paying attention now. So there's that part of it, and then there's what I call the playing field.
And are you going to give yourself.
No, I'll just say I want to give myself as wide a playing field as possible so that I can cut and juke and jive and dodge wherever I need to go to serve the story. And so, you know, I mean, when I'm approaching this material, I'm thinking, okay, Billy, he's 19 years old.
You know, he is not going to have a PhD vocabulary. He's not, he's not going to have PhD levels of analysis. Even though, as I said, he's a pretty smart cat.
And yet I want to get as deeply as my brain and talent allow me into this material. And so how do I deal?
And so, you know, what I decided was when Billy speaks or when you get very direct thought stream from Billy, that's going to be in his idiom.
The idiom of a 19 year old white American male from a small town who's not stupid, but he has some certain limitations in that idiom, like ability to express himself.
But when you get into like the deeper thought stream, the deeper, like this very intense level of reality that we're always experiencing, like the level of the, you know, the deep conscious, the heart, the soul, the emotions, like how we're reacting, you know, what we're experiencing at any particular moment, I felt like, okay, at that level, the level of third person narration, I'm allowed to use whatever language will best express his experience at that moment. And so I can use 10 syllable words if I need to, not his direct thought stream.
But if you sat Billy down at any particular moment in the book and said, okay, Billy, going to spend the next two hours unpacking. What are you thinking? What are you feeling right now at this moment, these five seconds and you just start pulling it out of him.
You know, this would be the sum and substance of what you would get. But I've got to hit it hard and fast.
Michael
00:19:35.510 - 00:20:32.330
You mentioned the relationships that Billy has and obviously that has an impact on his voice, his perspective, his point of view.
I have noticed there seems to be a particular relationship that you revisit in the near extinct Birds of Central Cordillera the Devil Makes Three and Billy Lynn. There is this power balance, friendship relationship, a general and the nobody in some ways your point of view, character.
Often there's something particular that you're trying to examine with that. Is that just something that appeals to you? Is that intentional? Sometimes, you know, these things just emerge.
Ben
00:20:32.820 - 00:20:59.030
Well, yeah, they, yeah, they emerge. I mean you're trying to write the story properly and, and to do that, you've got to dig so deep into everything you've got.
I mean, I'm a desperate writer. I am barely hanging on by my fingernails all the time.
Michael
00:20:59.030 - 00:21:00.910
I think that's the common state. Yeah.
Ben
00:21:02.830 - 00:24:32.610
And so I'm desperate. I'm using whatever comes into my head that feels right, that feels like it'll get me to the next sentence.
And so, yeah, okay, so think about the short stories. Near extinct birds of the Central cordillera. You've got John Blair, the PhD grad student ornithologist who ends up being held hostage.
He's a captive of these very tough Marxist rebels in the, in the highland jungles of Colombia. And, and he's basically at the mercy of the Commandante Alberto. And so there's that power dynamic.
And, and in Billy Lynn, you've got, I mean, he's a private in the army. I mean, his, they own his carcass. I mean, they, whatever they tell him to do, he's. He's pretty much got to do it. In Devil Makes Three.
My goodness, we have another general. Yeah, we've got, we've got Matt Amaker, you know, the American scuba diver.
He's in Haiti and he ends up being the pet scuba diver, slash captive of General Concert, you know, who's, who's Lieutenant General in the Haitian army and head of the coup regime. And so, yeah, I've never thought about it that way.
But you've got peons and you've got literal generals, you know, and they're interacting with one another and this, you know, gross power disparity. And I guess that's just where my head is taking me.
I mean, and these are always from the point of view of the peon, you know, as I think about it further, and that's where most of us live.
We're trying to eke out some degree of agency, self determination while we're under the thumb of these, you know, huge societal structures, economic structures that are determining so much of our lives. But in these particular cases, it's very direct.
You know, there's a power of life and death that these literal generals have over the peons in the story.
I mean, in Haitian Creole there's a proverb, so bai couplier, that means the one who delivers the blow forgets, the one who carries the scar remembers. And so, I mean, that sums up, encapsulates so much of human power dynamics.
If you're the one delivering the hit, if you're the one getting the benefit of this power dynamic, it's just the Air you breathe, it just seems natural. Well, yeah, that's just the way it is.
But, but if you're the one who's bearing the brunt, you're extremely aware you're highly attuned to the power dynamic. I mean, of course you are, because you're bearing the brunt of it. You're bearing the literal scars of this power dynamic.
And so, yeah, I really appreciate that, Michael. It seems like it's a dynamic that's running throughout, you know, the stuff I've published.
Michael
00:24:33.250 - 00:25:17.270
But let's, let's, let's. Let's continue with Devil Makes Three a little bit. We'll bounce around because I was talking about point of view.
And Devil Makes Three has a multitude of points of view. You have. It's a. You have the three. Three main viewpoint characters.
How does having the multiple characters affect, especially with the way that you will examine a situation, the. The. The way that you will approach this? And what did that enable for you? What did that lock away from you?
Ben
00:25:17.510 - 00:27:45.250
Yeah, yeah. So Haiti is. Haiti's a complex place. All places are complex. To me, Haiti is more complex than most.
I mean, it's sort of like the boiling point for the past 500 years of history and the particular history of Europeans, you know, moving into the Western hemisphere and all the things that followed from that. And Haiti, like Haiti, has always been ground zero. If you look at the history. It's all always coming to a head in Haiti.
And anyway, so to take this particular situation, 1991, the coup d' etat that deposed democratically elected president Jean Bertrand Aristide, the priest, you know, from a very poor parish in the Port au Prince slums, elected in a landslide and then deposed seven months later in a military coup.
To do that particular chunk of human experience justice, I suppose I could have done it first person point of view or close third person point of view, but I wanted multiple points of view. I felt like I would have a better chance of writing the story properly if I did that.
And so there was always going to be Matt Amaker, the scuba diver, the American expat. And the whole. The whole idea for the novel came from this very simple thing. And that was the general who was head of the coup regime.
He's a scuba diver and like, he's a real scuba buff.
And part of his shtick, you know, during the coup years to the international press is I go out and look for treasure every weekend because there's all kinds of shipwrecks around Haiti, colonial shipwrecks, I mean, and there's, you know, lots and lots of stories and legends about billions of dollars worth of Spanish treasure, you know, just right out there, you know, 40 yards offshore.
Michael
00:27:45.890 - 00:27:47.170
It's the easy part, right?
Ben
00:27:47.410 - 00:31:21.910
Yeah, yeah. And so he. He says, I go out and look for treasure every weekend, and if I find any, it's all going for Haiti. I'm not keeping any for myself.
And I thought, well, what if you combine that with kind of this random American dude who shows up in Haiti, and he's trying to start a scuba business, and he ends up being sucked into this inner circle of power, which is a very dangerous place to be in all kinds of ways. And so he's got to negotiate, you know, this.
He's got to walk this tightrope, this international geopolitical tightrope, without getting himself killed. And so there's that part of it and so. Which gives you a window into the internal workings of the coup regime, which I really liked and wanted.
I want to see the guts of things, the internal workings. So there's that, and then there's Audrey, the rookie CIA case officer, who's a true believer. And that's a huge part of recent Haitian history.
I mean, it is. Is the geopolitical, covert, you know, machinations that have gone on in that country the last 60 or 70 years.
And, you know, which raises an interesting question. Is like, I've been asked before, why does the US Even care enough to meddle with Haiti?
It's like, it's this poor, weak, economically negligible country. Why do we care? Like it. It has very little, if anything, to do with our national security. It's like, okay, fair point. Yeah, yeah.
But it matters a great deal to the people who are involved in Haiti, to the American economic interest, to people who have business there who see some way to benefit economically from Haiti. It matters a lot to them. And believe me, they are trying to influence U.S. policy to the fullest extent to benefit themselves.
And so the American government has always been closely involved with Haiti, and the last 60 or 70 years is no. No exception. And, you know, as part of. Of this arm of power, the CIA has a long and. And sordid history in Haiti.
And I really wanted to dig into that and also into, you know, the story of what kind of person gets into that kind of work? What are the moral hazards of that kind of work? How do they deal with those moral hazards?
And, I mean, believe me, some of those people are sociopaths. The moral hazard never occurs to them, which doesn't interest me. So Much.
I'm much more interested in the moral dilemma, you know, the moral hazard part. Someone who. Who is alive and aware to those parts of it. How do they justify, how do they rationalize that? And so there's Audrey and.
And then the third point of view, this is a long answer, but that's.
Michael
00:31:21.910 - 00:31:23.110
We love long answers.
Ben
00:31:23.510 - 00:34:48.820
But. But the third point of view is Misha Variel, and she's Haitian American.
She's getting her PhD in francophone literature of the Caribbean at Brown University. And this is back when Caribbean literature, Francophone literature, was hardly a thing, academically speaking.
I mean, now, thanks to Paul Gilroy, and now a second generation of scholars, you know, we are much more attuned to the culture and the importance of the Black Atlantic and the literature of the Black Atlantic. But Misha, at this point in time, 1991, 1992, she's at the very cutting edge of that, and she's trying to forge a path for herself.
She is an academic, she's a scholar. And in my feeling is that got worked out through Misha is scholarship is a really important thing in the world.
This deep learning and this deep study can illuminate a great deal about our experience, both individual and the macro experience. And so Misha, this is the way she sees the world through her scholarship. I mean, she's a trained scholar. She's a scholar in formation.
This is how she thinks and sees.
And so she ends up back in Haiti, takes a leave of absence from her PhD studies and gets involved in the medical field and starts to figure out one particular CIA caper, thanks to her scholarly chops. I mean, this deep thinking, this deep analytical critical thinking that she's capable of, she cracks the case.
I mean, the nerd, you know, blows open the CIA caper. And to me, it's as natural as breathing. Of course she could. She's smart. She's got the critical thinking chops. She knows how to get information.
And she's just bringing her chops to bear on a different, you know, segment of human experience. And. But she's seeing the situation, you know, through the lens of all the learning she has acquired in the course of her studies.
To me, that's a very natural, you know, thing for her to do. And I just felt like going in. Misha can do a lot of work for us. She can illuminate a lot about this particular experience if I write her properly.
And so if she's the third point of view, then there's sort of a half. Half of a point of view. And That's Alex, Misha's brother, who is Matt, business partner in the scuba business.
We never get his direct, you know, point of view, but he's very much a part of the, you know, internal story. And so I would say there's three and a half main characters in the story, and Alex is very much.
We get a lot of Alex, you know, through his actions and dialogue. So, anyway, three and a half is all I could handle.
Michael
00:34:49.860 - 00:35:18.829
It's an interesting question that brings up. From a mechanics standpoint, there's often a understanding or statement that you have to have a main.
Even in an ensemble piece, there has to be a main. Main character. Misha dilutes that a little bit for me. How important is that, to have a main character?
Ben
00:35:19.629 - 00:36:19.910
That's a really good question and interesting to think about. Probably a useful thing to think with. We probably can't come to a definitive answer ever. Probably, nor would we want to.
But certainly in the beginning, it was Matt. I mean, the book begins with him. This is the prime mover situation. The scuba shop that he and Alex have that they're trying to make a go of.
And the coup d' etat just, you know, kills the tourist industry, and so they've got to figure out another way to make money. So that's that thing that kicks everything into gear. And then you've got Audrey of the CIA. You know, that was always going to be part of it.
But, you know, in terms of that duo, I don't think there's any question Matt is. Is. Is stands out more.
Michael
00:36:20.790 - 00:36:21.190
Yeah.
Ben
00:36:21.190 - 00:37:57.940
I mean, he's the straw that's stirring that drink. Misha. Misha. I mean, she doesn't directly appear until a hundred pages in the book, and. But as the book goes on, she.
She takes up more and more space, and that wasn't planned, but. And she really made me work.
I mean, once she started taking up all this space, I realized I'm going to have to learn a significant amount about the scholarship of the Black Atlantic. I'm going to have to learn about a significant amount about healthcare in Haiti, the delivery of health care. For the whole CIA caper.
I had to dig into public health records and patient records within the context of Haitian healthcare, which is sure to sell millions of copies of books. But I had to do it to do justice to the story. So Misha really made me work.
And by the end of the book, I think it's an open question as to if you're going to have to pick a main. Main character. Is it Matt or is it Misha, because the book ends with Misha. She's the one still there standing on site.
Michael
00:37:59.230 - 00:38:45.290
And I'm sure that the standard answer would probably still be Matt, just because that's where we start riding somebody's shoulder. So Bravo Squad got their movie after all.
There's something ironic about, you know, the searching for the movie deal in the middle of the book in as more of a meta narrative. Looking down.
I'm not going to go too much into the movie adaptation from, from a craft standpoint, but let's talk just practically for the writers listening who might be working on draft one or draft 100 and still have, maybe have books on the shelf. But what was it like though, having a movie adaptation made?
Ben
00:38:46.730 - 00:41:23.940
Well, you know, it was a great ride. It was a life experience. I met a lot of good people, I got to spend time with a lot of good people.
Everybody involved in the movie was working very hard in, in good faith to make a good movie. There were no hacks on this movie, you know, just a bunch of first rate people. And, and you know, I didn't have anything to do with the movie.
Just had, you know, a few meals with some people, got to spend one day on the set, got to go to the premiere and a little bit of the press junket. So it was a nice ride, it was fun and it was a life experience that I felt like, you know, going in, it's like, well, what can I learn from it?
And also, let's enjoy it. You know, my attitude always was the book is the book and whatever the movie is, the book is still going to be the book.
It's still going to be the same book. And so you make your peace with that.
You know, I really did love the way that there was this meta aspect and the way the movie deal played out and the fact that at one point the producers in the studio came to me and they said, look, if we're going to hit the budget, we've got to ask you to defer a big chunk of the money that you're owed. And the head of Sony Studios actually said, I can't believe I'm doing this.
He said, I'm asking you to do the same thing that they asked the soldiers in the book to do. He said, I can't believe I'm doing it, but I'm doing it. And to me that was confirmation that I got it right.
That man, I hit a home run, you know, my antenna was dead on, on that. And, and so just being right was almost worth the price of Losing that big chunk of money, which I ended up losing. Never got it, and which hurts.
But there's a consolation of damn. It's pretty cool, actually, that it came full circle.
Michael
00:41:23.940 - 00:41:27.820
That's. Wow, that's a great story.
Ben
00:41:28.380 - 00:41:28.860
Thanks.
Michael
00:41:28.940 - 00:41:31.660
That was worth the price of the interview alone, so thank you.
Ben
00:41:33.880 - 00:41:34.200
Yeah.
Michael
00:41:34.840 - 00:41:55.880
Okay, back to Beautiful Country Burn Again at the time it was published, right after the 2016 election. We're now looking back on that after the 2024. Is there more to it now, or is there another story to be worked out of it?
Ben
00:41:56.600 - 00:47:07.010
Yeah, okay. Yeah.
That book, The basis for it, was written in 2016 in the heat of the moment, although hopefully with a certain degree of historical context and thought applied. And then, you know, the next two and a half years developing these pieces, trying to go deeper, trying to think harder.
And also, you know, three or four of the chapters in Beautiful Country Burn, Again were not written in 2016. They came after. And, You know, basically, Michael, this is a record of me trying to figure out what the hell is going on.
I'm trying to educate myself. I'm trying to find some answers for myself because it feels important to me. These are things that affect my life and affect my soul.
These are important things to me. I'm an American. I want to know what's going on in this country for practical reasons and metaphysical reasons.
And so this is me trying to dig as deeply as I can into why this country is the way it is, why things are happening the way they are. So the book came out in 2018. I don't think it's any less relevant now. I think the analysis that was applied, I think it holds up.
One thing I did miss is the basic, fundamental misogyny of mainstream American culture.
I thought it was particular to Hillary Clinton, and I think there is, you know, a particularly venomous strain of misogyny, American misogyny, that has been brought to bear on her for whatever reason. But it really came home to me in 2018.
I was doing the book tour, and I happened to be in Washington, D.C. i was going to speak at Politics and Prose on the evening of the day of the Christine Blasey Ford testimony in the confirmation hearings for Brett Kavanaugh to be Supreme Court Justice. And I'm looking at that and just all the stuff surrounding that, and I'm thinking this is a really more so than I thought misogynistic country.
And, my God, you can see it playing out here. And it's not particular to Hillary Clinton. It is across the board. And so, you know, get to the reading that night, and people are staggering in.
I mean, this is Washington D.C. so everybody's been glued to their TV all day. They're staggering in. Kind of glassy eyed and in shell shock, like, what did I just see on TV today? You know, trying to make sense of this.
So I think that's a shortcoming in the book, a glaring shortcoming, which I acknowledge.
But the general analysis of Trump and the oligarchy and the Republican Party and the Democratic Party and the currents of American history and culture that have brought us to this point, I think those are still very much relevant, and I would just say only more so, because it's more. Everything is more, always more. I mean, Trump is more Trump. The Republican Party is more that party.
The Democratic Party, the feckless, hapless, clueless establishment Democratic Party is more so than ever. And the oligarchs are richer and more powerful than ever. And the scam continues. I mean, cryptocurrency and AI, you know, being the latest iterations.
And, you know, so the Great Depression, I talk about, you know, in beautiful country, burned again, and the economic crash of 2008, well, baby, fasten your seatbelts because there's another one coming.
And the society that the New Deal built, the society that was responsible for so much prosperity, you know, over 50 or 60 years, that was so successful that it became invisible. And we just took all these structures for granted, you know, are being degraded and done away with.
Michael
00:47:07.890 - 00:47:44.680
Is it getting harder or easier to write satire? You have some figures who can be considered kind of satirical in, and there is an absurdism running loose in the world.
Is it easier to make satire believable or is it harder to reach out and even satirize something at all?
Ben
00:47:45.320 - 00:49:24.900
Yeah, it's probably easy to write easy satire because it's, man, is it low hanging fruit.
It's just there for the picking to write satire that really digs into the guts of things and also that digs into the human heart, the emotional life of what's going on. I mean, that's as hard as ever, I think. I mean, that's. I find it hard.
And so the easy satire, yeah, you can just roll out of bed in the morning and, you know, that wouldn't be so hard.
But to really make it do some work, to keep peeling back the layers, to look at the cost of, you know, the absurdity, you know, of our national life, I mean, that's a different proposition. And that's the goal I set myself for. I mean, Michael, I think that I just write realism, straight up American realism.
I mean, I really don't think Billy Lynn is satire. Maybe just a, maybe a few things are pushed a little bit, you know, into hyperbole.
But so much that has happened in American life before the publication of that book and certainly after the publication of that book, it doesn't seem exaggerated to me. And I've got a novel coming out next year called Rasputin Swims the Potomac. Good.
Michael
00:49:24.900 - 00:49:26.100
I was going to ask what's next.
Ben
00:49:26.860 - 00:49:50.860
Yeah, it's very much of the here and now and deals with politics and Trump running for a third term. And it's an absolute batshit crazy book. And I guess you could read it as satire, but I just consider it straight up realism.
So maybe there's a point where satire, a certain kind of satire is just realism.
Michael
00:49:52.070 - 00:50:27.140
I don't think that I would require it to be something that I hadn't heard from somebody, like out of somebody's mouth. I think just maybe the juxtaposition, the situational juxtaposition of things in some way can lend that.
But yeah, there's definitely nothing that I had not heard from people in Billy Lynn. So Rasputin Swims the Potomac. That one's coming up next. That's a yearish out or so.
Ben
00:50:27.620 - 00:50:31.620
It's late April or early May of 2026.
Michael
00:50:32.500 - 00:50:33.140
Okay.
Ben
00:50:33.460 - 00:50:44.420
So it's like in the publication pipeline. And so I'm starting to stalk the next one and I'm writing some short stories while I'm doing that.
Michael
00:50:45.500 - 00:50:49.340
If people wanted to find you online, where would you like them to look for you?
Ben
00:50:50.540 - 00:51:09.660
Well, I actually have a website now, www. Benfountain.com and so it's your basic website. Not a whole lot of bells and whistles, but it conveys the information.
Michael
00:51:11.190 - 00:51:53.090
We're going to be putting some links in the show notes to obviously all of your works for those who following the bouncing ball at home. If you really do like reading lists, one thing we didn't kind of mention in this interview, Ben likes to add reading lists to his, to his book.
So if you want to, if you like book recommendations, you know, follow the show notes. You get a book and then read Read Billy Lynn or read Devil Makes Three. You'll. You'll get lists of other books to explore and satisfy your appetite.
So anyway, thank you so much again. It's been great having you.
Ben
00:51:53.570 - 00:51:56.770
Thank you, Michael. It's been a real pleasure. I do appreciate it.
Michael
00:51:58.770 - 00:53:16.040
Your story has a voice. A voice can move, make or break your story for your readers. It's an invisible but almost fundamental part.
There are no rules to find it other than the rules your story sets for itself. It just needs to fit. Find the voice that fits your story, your characters, your theme, and your readers.
I would like to say thank you once again to Ben Fountain for taking the time to talk writing craft with me. If you'd like to read more of Ben's work, you can visit benfountain.com you can also find links to his books in the show notes.
Those links go to bookshop.org and to Libro FM in order to support independent bookstores. Clicking those links may also support this show in a small way.
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