It could be said there are two types of stories. The first are those told by people inside the conflict, ie. children raised in group homes writing about state welfare, soldiers writing about war, Palestinians writing about demolished homes. These insider narratives, fiction or non-fiction, are told from the perspective of someone who knows one side of a situation intimately but is often unaware of the trials and tribulations of the other side.
The other side of the coin are outsider narratives. These narratives can have a broader perspective and the ability to evaluate a situation impartially, though without truly understanding the suffering of the participants. The great outsider narratives tend be written as non-fiction, ie. Joan Didion on El Salvador or Michael Herr on Vietnam. It's a genre that's been less successful in fiction, possibly because fiction writers will put their protagonists inside a situation, even if they've never been there themselves.
Brief Encounters With Che Guevara, the spectacular story collection by Ben Fountain, doesn't take that route. The protagonist of these stories is often an American in a country like Haiti, Sierra Leone, Columbia, or Myamar. Most of these stories live up to the very best creative non-fiction, but because they are fiction they're able to get deeper into the heart of a conflict. For example, in The Lion's Mouth, a wrenching story in which Jill, an aid worker in Sierra Leone, begins an affair with Starkey, a diamond smuggler. Starkey is a charismatic, possibly decent human being in an entirely indecent profession. Jill knows she is supposed to hate him, but can't. She has spent her life fighting for causes she has begun to look at as futile. She is a stranger in a strange and brutal place, but it's her interior monologue that rivets the story into place, like when she realizes she no longer likes her idealistic co-worker:
He had the lean, near-haggard body of a fanatic runner, and was good-looking in a nerdy sort of way, which was more or less Jill's type. His intelligence and contempt for authority made him her natural ally inside the system, and since he'd arrived in-country a year ago their friendship kept threatening to be something more. But their timing was off, their rhythm, the intangible whatever, ; all those late nights they'd sat up talking and drinking and he could never bring himself to make a pass. She knew he wasn't gay, so what did that make him? Barely relevant, that's how it struck her lately.
Similarly, in Near-Extinct Birds of the Central Cordillera, John Blair, a young student studying birds for his PH'd, is taken hostage by Colombian rebels. After a year in captivity, a time in which he comes to know and like many of his jailers, Blair learns the rebels are going to sell the lumbering rights to the mountains. The logging would guarantee the extinction of several species Blair has discovered while in captivity. When he protests the rebel leader sends Blair home with the visiting American delegation. Blair refuses to leave but the leader insists, saying otherwise Blair will be shot. On the way out of the jungle the businessmen ask how it feels to finally be going home:
They were rising, rising, they might never stop - Blair closed his eyes and let his head roll back, surrendering to the awful weightlessness. Like dying, he wanted to tell them, like death, and how grieved and utterly lost you'd feel as everything precious faded out. That ultimate grief which everyone saves for the end. Blair was spending it, burning through all his reserves as the helicopter bore him away.
In most of these stories of failed revolutionaries, dubious idealists, and casual onlookers trapped by political forces beyond their control, Fountain takes us to that most mystical place of experience- the shifting sands of human motivation. Motivation is almost impossible to write about in non-fiction. Most non-fiction writers, with the exception of editorialists, learn early there is no quicker way to be wrong about a person than to assign their motives. The best a writer can do is speculate. Motives are too complex for the serious writer to disclose honestly, and they work in tightly bundled percentages of greed, goodness, self-preservation, coincidence, guilt, mood, and other intangibles locked in a delicate dance leading to every consequential act. In fiction, as Fountain shows, one can explore and discuss these motivations. We can look into the unknowable like mathematicians playing with un-provable rules, calculating our way toward a greater truth.
All of that doesn't get anywhere near saying how good this book is. A brief disclaimer, I don't review books I don't like; I don't review books on assignment. I review books that inspire me to write something about them. Brief Encounters With Che Guevara is nothing short of a masterpiece. Certainly the best collection of stories by a first time author I have ever read. But that's not even the right way to look at a collection like this. The current system that favors first time authors is fundamentally flawed. It wouldn't matter if Fountain had published five books previously, this would still be a tremendous achievement.
The only disappointment I have upon finishing this book is learning Fountain is at work on a novel. Here I find myself, limited by the medium, speculating on a man's motivations. Fountain might be working on the novel because he wants to write a novel and feels done with the short story for a while, but too often writers are pushed from their strengths toward more "marketable" projects. They have success and sign contracts for books they haven't written yet and the result is sometimes mediocre and sometimes so paralyzing we never hear from them again. I hope that's not the case. Non-the-less I have the urge to beg, Please Mr. Fountain, more stories!
Stephen Elliott's seventh book, The Adderall Diaries: A Memoir of Moods, Masochism, and Murder, is forthcoming from Graywolf Press
