Poured Over Double Shot: Nathan Hill and Ben Fountain

By Jenna Seery / September 19, 2023 at 6:00 am

Wellness by Nathan Hill follows a marriage over decades through a variety of successes, challenges and surprises. Hill joins us to talk about how long it took him to write his novel, describing a realistic marriage, the power of algorithms and more.

Ben Fountain’s Devil Make Three brings readers to Haiti in 1991 with a cast of characters ranging from divers looking for shipwrecked treasure to CIA agents navigating a country in the midst of political unrest. Fountain joins us to talk about his connection to Haiti and the research he has done, the unique historical events that provide the backdrop for the novel, his influences and more.

Listen in as these authors speak separately with Miwa Messer, host of Poured Over.

This episode of Poured Over was hosted by Miwa Messer and mixed by Harry Liang.          

Featured Books (Episode):
Wellness by Nathan Hill
Devil Makes Three by Ben Fountain
The Nix by Nathan Hill
A Swim in a Pond in the Rain by George Saunders
Sixty Stories by Donald Barthelme
Forty Stories by Donald Barthelme
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk by Ben Fountain
Brief Encounters with Che Guevara by Ben Fountain
Beautiful Country Burn Again by Ben Fountain
The Immaculate Invasion by Bob Shacochis

Full Episode Transcript

Miwa Messer

I’m Miwa Messer, I’m the producer and host of Poured Over and I’ve been so looking forward to this interview and it’s 1200 pages of reading. And by that, I mean, Nathan Hill tends to write, you know, roughly around 600 pages. But these are big hearted, broad shouldered, amazingly funny coming of age stories. The Nix was 2016. So good. Alright, and now we’ve got Wellness. And second novels are, you know, kind of notoriously difficult to bring out into the world for some of us, and you took a little less time to write a little less time. But I’m curious, did you think this was gonna be a short book too, because notoriously, you thought all 620 pages of The Nix was going to be a short story at first.

Nathan Hill

I did, I did. First of all, thank you for inviting me on the show, I’m so happy to be talking to you, I thought The Nix was going to be a short book. And that just goes to the fact that I’m a bad planner, you know, like, I’m just not very, you know, I put up an outline in notecards on a cork board on my wall, and I think, Oh, I’ve got this and then, you know, you sit down with a page. And things happen on the page that I didn’t expect. And I always find more vitality in those moments that I just kind of let myself pursue on the page than I do in an outline. So I’m very bad outliner, a very bad planner. But I feel like I have a lot of fun in the chair. So that’s, that’s kind of what happens. And this book, no, I kind of knew that this was going to be a longer one. And it’s funny that people are talking about how long it took to bring it out compared to the last one. And it’s been seven years, I think, I guess, and I’ve been lurking a little bit on some of the places where people write about these things. And like, people are like, Oh, I thought he was gonna, you know, pull a Harper Lee and like, like, only publish one. And to me, I’m just like, I don’t know, that’s just how long it takes, you know, like I was I was on I was on tour for The Nix for like two and a half years, because I honestly was just so shocked that anybody liked it that I was like I said, yes to every invitation. And then and then I got back home. And it was I was exhausted and happy to be home and wanting to stay there for a while. And then in a kind of case of be careful what you wish for a lockdown and pandemic happened. And, and yeah, and so I wrote this book, mostly during that time, and finished it about a year ago. And here I am. So to me, it doesn’t feel like it’s been that long, but everybody else seems to seems to make a fuss about it.

Yeah, but you write these great openings. I remember the first time I read The Nix, which was quite some time ago, because it was a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers pick back in the day. And the opening, where mom is leaving, and she’s slowly taking one photo at a time and one plate at a time. And it was, I think the line you use is there was a burglary happening in slow motion. And then finally her son and her husband noticed that maybe some stuff is missing. Maybe among the mom, but and then there’s that line about mom being the packer attacker. And if you don’t know what I’m referring to please just go read The Nix. It’s very, very funny. It’s completely worth it. But the jokes hold. I mean, 10 years later, almost 10 years later, the jokes hold. And here we are in Chicago, you open in ‘93. And we meet this couple that is not yet a couple, Jack and Elizabeth and the first and second chapters of Wellness. You need to start there because they’re great. And they’re so smart. And they’re so funny. And they’re so kind of weird. And when did you get those chapter like, are we just sitting down, and stuff is coming to you fully formed are you noodling for a while because you hinted at this book…

That’s so gratifying to hear because the time between writing those two chapters was literally about 20 years. I’m not kidding. So yeah, so I wrote the first chapter as a short story in I think it was 2004, I had just moved to moved to New York City after finishing grad school. This is now a bit of a well-known story, but all my stuff got stolen out of my car. And so I was you know, I was in this little tiny studio apartment in Queens. And I would look out my window and see other windows were very, very close to mine across an alley and I was like feeling very lonely and depressed. And I just wrote this like little three-page story about two people who are kind of watching each other through windows very much like mine, and slowly falling in love. And that was it. It was a three-page story and I was like that is fabulously romantic and kind of moved on with my life and didn’t think about it again until I started working on Wellness for a variety reasons I think we’ll probably get into later. I was kind of looking at this place we were in a culture you know, where people were, like, you know, kind of living in their own strange realities and my reality seem to be very different from someone else’s reality and I remember the story I wrote, you know, in my 20s, about these two people who are kind of fantasizing about each other. And, and in my 20s I thought that’s really, really romantic. And then in my 40s, like, happily married for like many years, I’m like, no, it’s not romantic, it’s naive like those two people, like, I have no idea what it takes to like build an actual real loving relationship. And so, it just, I was looking for a container, I was looking for a container for these ideas I was having about delusion and fantasy, and make believe. And that just seemed to be an interesting container. So I went back to that story, like many years later and decided, well, okay, like they were they were doing that they were they were falling in love way back, then what would have happened to them, you know, if this if this story fast forward, what would have happened, as the world got very weird. And, and that’s what I came up with.

I think marriage is such a great container too because you can come at it from so many different directions. And you know, they’re the people who believe in it until, you know, someone dies, and then they’re the people who are like it is the worst invention ever. And then like no one, I really don’t feel like we have a consensus on marriage. And I don’t think we should have a consensus on marriage. To be perfectly honest. I think it’s one of those things where it can work for some people, and that’s great. And for others. Yeah, not so much. Yeah. I mean, you know, if you’re on marriage number four, you might want to consider why.

I also like the idea of the evolution of like, the marriage story where like, you know, once upon a time, it was about like, whether or not they’ll get married. And now this book is like, should we even have marriage? Like, should that even exist?

I think it’s a legitimate question. I think it’s a really legitimate question. I mean, at one point, I have a note, and this is sort of early in the book, I have a note that says Jack is fully unprepared for Elizabeth. And it’s I mean, it’s really, it’s probably around chapter four or five. And this dude has no idea. No idea what is barreling down, and I love Elizabeth’s character, please don’t misunderstand me. But this dude is fully unprepared. And, you know, we find out lots of things about both of them. But so you’ve got the container, you’ve got this idea of marriage, which, you know, again, talk about the pulse of the 20th and 21st century, right, like, we could take our culture’s pulse, you know, a based on how we view marriage and family and all of these other things, right? And then you give us these two characters who are really, they’re messy, but they’re wonderful. And thank you. When did they show up? How did they show up? How did we get here?

Well, they’re both sort of different versions of me, I guess. I mean, Jack comes from kind of the hinterlands of the plains states, and kind of longs to go to the big city, because he wants to kind of be this avatar of this, like, you know, I don’t know, fancy, artsy guy that he wishes he was, you know, and so he thinks like, well, if I go to the big city and go to go to art school, that’ll kind of create, create the person I want to be, you know, and he’s kind of embarrassed of this, like, rural background that he has, and I, you know, I grew up in the Midwest, all, you know, we moved around a lot, but mostly, you know, lived in the suburban and rural kind of parts of the Midwest, and my extended family are all you know, Iowa farm families, you know, that was definitely kind of inside me, I felt like this pull to like, move to Chicago, move to New York City. And, and so you know, that those, those kinds of qualities, and especially this kind of like this, you know, kind of juvenile and naive qualities, you know, that I recognize now in myself, and for my teenage years, kind of I gave to Jack and Jack’s also kind of the guy I am when I’m feeling a little insecure, like, and maybe get a little clingy, you know, like, I gave that to Jack. And then Elizabeth is kind of the version of me when I’m feeling overwhelmed. And I need to kind of back off, you know, and I need to need some alone time, you know, and, and, and she’s the person who loves research loves learning, you know, loves reading. And, and that’s also me, as you can plainly tell from the bibliography in this book. And, and so, you know, I kind of just kind of divided them up a little bit. And in this way that I thought they would play off each other really interestingly, that their relationship would fall into patterns that that almost they couldn’t even help.

And it didn’t feel forced. I mean, sometimes I worry too, like, if I’m getting deep into like, the whole, you know, marriage thing. Sometimes stuff doesn’t feel as organic as maybe it might, in real life. And again, that’s partially craft. That’s partially, you know, what the reader is bringing to it. It’s a million different things, right. But in this case, I was like, Yeah, this weirdo couple totally would have ended up together, like, just the way you set it up. And that come with a moment. I’m not gonna, I’m just gonna leave that hanging in the air because that’s just what a terrific way to set up what actually becomes a complicated relationship yet they’re both so naive. They have no idea what it takes to actually be the adults in the room.

Right. But I wanted to create this like this opening fanfare that’s like what 30 pages, 35 pages part one that would that is so romantic, that that it would be sort of the Eden that they always longed to get back to, you know, it would it would turn into a kind of fantasy, a kind of story that they would tell repeatedly and come to define that, like, I was almost thinking about like, what like, what if Romeo and Juliet didn’t die at the end of the play? Like, whatever, you know, they moved away and had a family and like Juliet, like didn’t really like motherhood and like Romeo didn’t like his job, and they would look back and they’re like, We’re freaking Romeo and Juliet. And at some point, like that story about them would become constricting to them, because they couldn’t grow out of it. And that’s sort of my thought for Jack and Elizabeth, that they, they have the story that they tell about themselves that they’re having trouble then evolving out of.

I think every couple has that story, though. We meet other couples throughout this book, there are a couple of different zingers. Everyone has the story that they tell themselves and that they want to present to the world. And it’s that collision, obviously, that makes the novel Interesting. Yeah, I mean, separate master bedrooms, okay, fine, do whatever you need, but separate entrances in case the marriage goes pear shaped, and you still need to share space, because you’re broke. It’s just the way you talk about money and class and access and gentrification. You do it through the lens of this marriage in ways that are really kind of clever. I mean, Jack does have this moment where he’s really young, and he’s going to have a great success. And then he kind of, well, let’s say, he doesn’t make the most of the opportunity. And he just kind of muddles his way through and Elizabeth is off being Elizabeth and everything else. But the structure of this novel, again, you’ve got these really tight chapters, I cannot believe I’m describing a 600-page book as a page turner. But I really did want to see what was going to happen to these two, I really did want to see it because you put them in some scrapes. May you know, that put a frog in a pot of water and yeah, right. They don’t read your notes, but they don’t know. So you have a tendency to let yourself go down rabbit holes, which is great. But how do you control the work? And how do you keep it because you could have gone in 17 other directions? Or already covering art, the theory of art, real estate, gentrification, marriage, we will get to the book’s title. But I mean, you’re covering a lot of ground parenthood. I mean, how do you keep it from going off the rails?

It’s a real headache producer, for sure. And I knew the structure of this book was going to be tricky, because when when I set out to write it, I knew I wanted to write about, basically write about a couple that have three main characters, a husband, a wife, and time. And I wanted to tell a story that was flexible with time so that we could get to know these characters sort of in the same way we get to know the important people in our lives, which is backwards and forwards. At the same time, you know, you, you know, you meet someone, you date them, you spend your days with them, you get to meet them in this forward way. But then you also see where they grew up and meet their parents and their old friends. And you hear the old stories, and you kind of figure out who they were before you met them, and you kind of synthesize who they really are. And I wanted the reader to have the same experience with Jack and Elizabeth, you get to know them forwards and backwards simultaneously. And that was that was not easy. I don’t know how many times I whined to my wife that I should just like be like telling this chronologically because this was too hard. But mostly, it was just trial and error. I had note cards up on my wall. And you know, I would be writing towards that. And then something would happen on the page or something wouldn’t work. And I would have to revise and then you know, what was happening on the page would influence the outline, and then vice versa. And those two things would kind of speak to each other. And eventually, like I came to, you know, the structure that’s in the book now and then of course, had to rewrite the whole thing with that. It was really, really difficult to do, but I liked I liked the effect of it. I liked. I liked that, you know, I wanted there to I wanted it to feel like you’re not really having a flashback. Instead you’re it’s the story is still moving forward, even though suddenly you’re 20 years before if that makes sense.

Yeah, it’s a really propulsive storytelling device. And again, 600 pages, and I really don’t want people to be freaked out by the length of it because the chapters are surprisingly tight in a way that when they bring them together as a whole, right, like we’re, we’re in Chicago, we’re in New England. At one point, we’re out in Kansas on the like prairie. I mean, you’re sending us around in lots of different spaces in lots of different time periods. I mean, really, were either in sort of 93, 2014 and then it feels like the 70s 80s kind of thing. So you’re covering a lot of ground, I get counterbalancing, Kansas with Chicago, and then pulling in the New England thing. But I, you know, even on the West Coast, we do this a little bit where it’s like, you’re still kind of comparing yourself to the East Coast. And I’m like, Well, yeah, but you are your own thing, right? Like, and I’ve Chicago too. And it’s like, you really are your own thing. It doesn’t always have to be like the Huntington in Pasadena has like a whole, you know, building full of like, stuff that I would have seen in upstate New York or New England growing up, and I’m like, Oh, I can’t even I’m 3000 miles away. And it’s all the pointing, you know, it was really flat. You know, the flat, creepy children paintings were just like, Oh, God, yeah. Right. But I want to talk about moving around in space. I mean, you talked about time being a character in this book, but balancing where you need to be and when, and making sure that everyone sort of gets their turn, because both Jack and Elizabeth have really complicated family stories.

Yeah, yeah, they do. And, and for a setting to qualify to be in the book, I think, you know, it had to it had to be speaking to the to the other parts of the book, the other parts of the story, in certain important ways, like they needed to be obvious ligatures. And this is a book about how our worlds are constructed by the stories we believe in about, sometimes those stories can be constricting— the prairie, for example, showed up not only because I was writing during the lockdown, and I felt very claustrophobic and like, and in my life, the place that I’ve most associated with openness is the Flint Hills of Kansas, I went to high school in Wichita, and I went to undergrad in Iowa, and I would drive between them, you know, several times a year and the Flint, you drove through the Flint Hills, and I don’t know if you’ve ever done that, but it’s a very, it’s a very special place. And, you know, it’s easy to look at that place and say, there’s, there’s nothing there. But that’s kind of the point. It’s just like gentle hills and grass forever. And it’s, I find it, I find extraordinarily, extraordinarily beautiful. The kind of personal reason it showed up, is because I was longing for wide open spaces, but then somatically it seemed to work because, you know, everybody has a as an opinion about the plains. And it’s, it’s playing, you know, and, and the way it’s depicted in art is not, not accurate. It’s famously very difficult to do a two dimensional drawing or painting or photograph of the plains, because you just can’t understand the scope. It looks like a Rothko, you know, and so, so the story we told about it is different from its reality. And so I was like, okay, thematically this is working for any setting to qualify to be in the book, it had to kind of work with that theme. And I could, it’s sort of variations on that theme, the Connecticut wilderness and Elizabeth’s family, and especially the house and how it was built, and the money that built it kind of same thing, like there is a story that they tell about how that wealth was created. But then there’s the reality of it. And, and so I thought, well, it’s very different places and very different times. But if underneath it all, there’s this like solid spine of this theme that I keep on messing with, then hopefully, a reader will understand why it’s all there.

And made perfect sense to this reader. I slingshot it around. But I’m gonna riff off of planes for a second because Jack has a moment he’s teaching. He’s an adjunct professor. And he’s had this moment where his art looked like it was going to take off. And it’s obviously very sort of directed at the planes and some of his previous experiences. But he has a moment with the head of his school who says, Dude, your impact score is not that great. Like, people don’t know who you are, you’re not bringing anything to the table. They’ve hired a director of the school who’s basically a marketing guy who sounds like it comes from like J & J or Procter and Gamble, or something, instead of like an academic institution. And he’s looking at you, and he’s like, hey, you know, I really like you. But this is not going to work. And Jack stands in front of his class and says, You know what, this is, you don’t even get to see artists don’t get to choose. They’re making, they have to sort of bend a knee as it were to whoever’s paying for the art itself. And the kids don’t know what to make of this. He doesn’t really know what to make of this. But you do this great riff on algorithms. There’s a whole chapter, the needy users of drama and algorithms. It’s very smart, but it’s also a little heartbreaking. Jack. You know, Jack is going through it in this book. He’s really, he’s a little less directed than Elizabeth is and his dad he’s left his dad behind, obviously, in the plains, and it’s rough, but this is where we get into the whole emotion that men are allowed to express or not express and Jack is carrying a lot of is around and he doesn’t have a lot of language. And his dad certainly does not have language. But when you were referring to sort of the same reality of this moment that we live in, right, where people are doing the research for themselves, which in some cases leads them down rabbit holes that they’re not fully prepared to counter. Let’s put it that way. Let’s talk about Jack and his dad for a second.

Yeah, it’s just been really, I’m so happy that you that you like that section. I know, when I told friends of mine that I was writing an entire section, probably a 60-page sequence that was told basically, from the point of view of algorithms there, they just kind of like gave me that pinch face look like okay, dude.

Sorry, they’re wrong.

So that section was… Well, before I get to, to Jack and his dad, I’ll just mention that because it’s interesting, and I had fun with it, but, but it’s a lot of a lot of stuff about Facebook, and how the Facebook algorithm works. And of course, Facebook’s very closed off about that, but they do have, they do have patent applications, like if Facebook wants to patent anything, they have to apply for it. And those applications are public documents, you don’t get the math, obviously, but you get the reasons why this patent is important. And I must have read hundreds of pages of very dry Facebook patent applications to kind of get an understanding of kind of what they were doing. And I did it because again, this kind of the more emotional reason for it, I did it because I don’t know about you, but I lost friends down Facebook, rabbit holes, you know, like people who I was actually very close to, and now can’t speak to because of their behavior on Facebook. And, and one in particular, I think of when you know, that he was, you know, he’s going through, it was going through a lot, you know, his dad whom he idolized was dying. He was lonely, the woman that he thought he might kind of marry was suddenly arrested. And he you know, in this whole scheme that he knew nothing about, and he was just lonely. And suddenly he found Facebook and, and, and wow, he went down rabbit holes. And my sense was that it gave him a sense of control over a life that felt out of control. And I think you’re exactly right, that he was an older dude who just could not express himself, you know, the tenets of masculinity means that you can’t express weakness, and he and so instead, he created this sort of comical avatar of strength. And he believed all the conspiracies, and so I really mourn those people that I lost because of Facebook. And so that was that that whole section was sort of this attempt to kind of understand it and try to see it from their point of view.

It’s also a really great irony. If you think about it, I mean, here’s this thing that’s theoretically designed to bring people closer together, and yet, we’re really easily manipulated, right? Like your average human being thinks they’re really smart. Like, that’s something, it’s really rare to meet someone who’s like, I’m an idiot. It is really, I mean, I went to college with a couple of dudes who were like, yeah, maybe, like, not so much because you’re here, but okay, you know, in that kind of jokey sort of, you know, ask the peanuts, I have to remember to feed myself kind of way and, but at the same time, like, I don’t know, a single person who would very seriously say, oh, yeah, I’m a complete idiot. And so this idea that we’re smarter than the machine, which, in theory, yes, we should be smarter than machines. But if the machine manipulates emotion, and you don’t actually have language for emotion, you’re already behind.

We are right, that’s interesting.

Yeah, even and I feel like we’re having all of these conversations about disinformation among other things, where people don’t really understand what they’re even fighting or how they’re being manipulated.

What made it interesting to me it was that, that conspiracies and and certain, you know, like fake wellness products, you know, and plus and placebos all of them I think are about not at not about the thing itself, but the need the thing meets, you know, the it allows you to tell a story that you need for some reason, you know, so like, I don’t know, like a juice cleanse itself is ethically neutral, I think. But if the story around the juice cleanse is that you know, that the oh, I don’t know that your body is filled with toxins and the world where you live is dangerous and the government is lying to you and the mainstream media is lying to you and nothing in the grocery store is safe, the doctor doesn’t know wants you to know the truth and you’re, everyone’s in the pocket of Big Pharma. If that’s the story around the juice cleanse, then think that story is affecting you more than the cleanse you know, and that’s the that’s the dangerous part. I thought all of these things they were they were very similar to me and that they were all almost medications treating some underlying condition and it’s the underlying condition. that loneliness, that inability to express ourselves that fear of uncertainty, that feeling of precarity the feeling that, that we’re not in control of our lives that maybe we’re one hardship away from ruin that’s underneath a lot of these things. And so that’s why they all felt connected to me why I wanted to talk about all of them in one book.

I have to say, when I saw the title, I was like, well, this is gonna go one of two ways. Either this is going to be epically great or this is going to be really weird and luckily, luckily, great. Well, I mean, honestly, Wellness, though. I mean, think about a lot of folks did get radicalized during lockdown. And there’s, there’s a whole community of folks who feel very voraciously and like to share their opinions about stuff or like, Uh huh. Okay, I’m going to unfollow you now. Thank you very much, because this is very weird. But I do think you’re right. I think when you feel like your life is completely out of control, or you’re in deep pain and don’t have the language to describe what that deep pain feels like, then of course, you want the thing that promises you less discomfort, right? There’s I mean, there’s nothing wrong with not wanting to be in pain. It’s what do you decide to do to not be and that’s where we get into this whole other piece of suburban life and as a person who will probably not move back to the suburbs anytime soon. city dweller was often the burbs, but I’m a city person, you do some very fun stuff with folks who, you know, have simply told their doctors that in fact, they are not diabetic, thank you very much, because they just believe it to be true. Or you know, someone who says, Well, of course, my wife is coming back to me, Well, where does she live now? Well with some other dude. But yes, she’s coming back. So it’s this idea that you can tell yourself a story, right? And sometimes it’s just really sad. And the folks who are telling the story don’t see it?

Yeah, it’s this idea that you put thoughts out into the universe and the universe will make them true. You know, I mean, one of the things that the book is trying to caution against if there’s any kind of moral at all is that is that, like any, even good ideas held too rigidly, held too ideologically held to inflexibly, well, will calcify into errer eventually. And so you know, the stuff about, you know, putting good thoughts out in the universe, I think it’s perfectly supported that if you feel directed and confident, you know, and that good things will happen. If you think good thoughts, and you have positivity, that good things more, maybe more likely to happen, but where that calcifies into error was when you start believing that it’s actually a universal law, and then that can lead to all sorts of harmful behaviors, like I shouldn’t get insurance, because if I thinking about insurance, then makes me think about bad things that might happen. And that’s going to make those things happen. So I shouldn’t do that, you know, and it’s also very easy to then say, Well, anybody who’s got a problem, it must be their own bad thoughts that did it, you know, and, and, and sort of ignore the suffering in the world because of it. So yeah, so you’ve got these people in this suburb, this very affluent suburb, who have decided they’re there because, you know, they deserve it, because they’ve put those good thoughts out into the universe, and they deserve it, and then has all sorts of consequences about how they run their town.

Well, and also, I mean, one of the things they want to do is stop a develop a very fancy upscale condo development, because of low vibration people. They don’t want low vibration people in the community. And, you know, sometimes you hear another person, say a thing, or sometimes you even hear it come out of your own mouth, and you’re like, wow, yeah,

I’m not talking about any specific suburban into Chicago here. But I am, you know, kind of reacting to, like a generalized, you know, pulling up the drawbridge in certain affluent places, you know, like, you hear stories about places that declare themselves like a wildlife habitat for some wolf that hasn’t been seen there a long time, just so they won’t have to have affordable housing built, you know, that’s happening all over the place. And, and so that’s, that’s sort of where I’m, where I’m riffing from for that.

Yeah. No, I mean, yes. We’ve talked about the plains, and we’ve talked about, but there’s a universality to the details of these characters lives. I mean, difficult parents, or coming of age, like there are pieces that echo a little bit of what you’ve done in the neck. Certainly, I mean, to a lesser extent, I mean, I can see Jack and Samuel hanging out. Maybe not always willingly, but I could fit in in the same bar, maybe near nursing a beer. Yeah, staring at the wall kind of thing. I mean, we’re in a similar orbit, right, like the idea, right? That the placebo effect actually, and work. I mean, we know how powerful stories are right? Like, it’s how you organize politically. It’s how you raise your kids. It’s how you get through your day or do your job like we need to take story more seriously right? Like, this isn’t just an escapist thing, like stories are really serious tool for being human.

I think you need to be as concerned about the stories entering your, your mind as the chemicals entering your body.

Why not? I mean, again, I mean, I live in two cities where the air is maybe, you know, it’s not Delhi, but…

Alright, so the placebo effect is just, it’s a physiological response to some volunteers. And it’s the, it’s the body’s response to finding meaning, which is why some researchers call it the meaning effect instead of the placebo effect, which I actually, I prefer because it’s, it’s you’re not responding to the placebo itself; you’re responding to the story around the placebo. And one of the most interesting, you know, studies I’ve seen on this is, is on acupuncture, you know, if you get, you get real acupuncture or fake acupuncture where the practitioner just pokes you lightly with toothpicks, without your knowledge, it has generally the same effect. But in an interesting follow up study, if you get fake acupuncture from someone who is warm and caring, it works better than if you get fake acupuncture from someone who’s doing it in a kind of cold, distant and robotic way. And what that what that sort of tells me is, I think that the headline shouldn’t be, acupuncture is a sham the headline should be people need to feel taken care of, you know, and I think it goes without saying that we have like a healthcare system and an economic order that does not let people feel that way. Like, well, the last time I was at the doctor, I had to fill out paperwork in triplicate, even though I’d already done it online beforehand. And then, you know, I unexpectedly had to wait an hour longer than then they said I’d have to wait and then got into with the doctor for eight minutes and she couldn’t remember what we had done two months ago and gave me all the same stuff. And then I got charged $200 and I had to fight my health insurance company to pay for it. And that’s just normal. That’s like a normal interaction, you know, and, and I’m thinking okay, well, in this in this space, like in given that reality, of course, like you want someone to listen to you, you want to feel heard you want to feel taken care of, and like a lot of wellness stuff, and a lot of placebos will like come in and take that space for you and a lot of grifters are happy to come in and do that job. And, and yeah, so I don’t blame people for believing what they believe, you know, but I’m very, I feel a lot of compassion for it. But at the same time, I think we need to, like take these things and really give them a wash and critical, critical analysis and really look at what’s underneath it. Like why? Why do I need that? Why do I need naps in the salt cave? You know, what, what about my life is leading me there?

Yeah, it’s like, we need to address the fear, you know, the underlying fear. Right? And that’s, that’s hard work. Yeah, it’s really hard work. It is literally scary. It is the thing that no one wants to do, because who wants to be that uncomfortable? If as a culture and a society, we don’t start looking at this stuff, like, you know, the escalation and the places the escalation can take us are pretty alarming. I mean, you know, we’ve, we’ve not that long ago had a major measles outbreak in New York, because people were like, I’m not vaccinating my kid against… and it’s like, actually, you know, smallpox doesn’t exist anymore, because we vaccinated people, right? And it’s, again, folks are feeling you know, on the edge of all sorts of practice precipices and feeling really pulled and stressed and all of these kinds of things, which does open us up for this desire to find a solution but what is the solution really?

Well, I mean, I feel like managing information is a big part of it, you know, like, I think people can be led astray as easily by true information as false information like in this book, Jack is kind of a victim of misinformation because he’s listening to all these like health bros on the internet who have no idea what they’re talking about. Lawrence is a victim of disinformation like he’s, he’s going down political rabbit holes, and, and sort of believing people who are actively trying to manipulate and harm him. But then there’s Elizabeth, who is sort of a victim of what we might call information overload. You know, when you have, when we have access now, which we do to any information at all times, if you’ve got the world’s knowledge in your pocket, if you approach that without context and wisdom, it will drive you crazy. Like it’s like it’s driving Elizabeth crazy in that in that section that I call The Unraveling, I think that’s, a big, big part of it. A big part of the education here needs to be about contextualizing information, you know, and it always, always drives me crazy when you know, some click-baity story shows up about some new health study that had like, I don’t know 30 participants in it, it found some interesting thing about some new molecule now everybody’s eating like, I don’t know nine Brazil nuts every day, you know, or what have you. You know, it’s just like, that’s not how this is supposed to work. It’s all supposed to be very incremental, and we shouldn’t make you know, big judgments off of small studies. But that’s just not how our information ecosystem works well.

And also, there are no absolute bad guys in this novel which I really appreciate because it would have been very, there are a couple of people who come immediately to mind where I’m like you could have, you could have and really gotten away with it. But I don’t think that’s who you are. As a writer, I think there’s too much of an understanding that people are in pain and that they are honestly just trying to mitigate pain and what are we doing on the outside right to help people through their messy? Yeah, difficult moments, some of which get dragged out.

There’s a sense in this book and in The Nix as well as you know, like, of, of the of the many selves as a single person can be, you know, and that if I can get a little pointy headed about it for a second in ancient Greek, there are two words that we translate as time one was Kronos, which we understand from chronology kind of linear time, but the other one was Kairos. And Kairos. Is a more kind of felt sense of time. A sense of, of times colliding and overlapping with each other. And, and, you know, so for example, I walked down gentrified Wicker Park now and it’s an encounter with Kairos, you see the building, that was a turn of the century, sweatshop turned into a warehouse turned into an abandoned shooting gallery turned into the set for The Real World turned into a gym, you know, and all these times all these are layered on top of each other, when you walk through a place that’s changed as dynamically as that plays as, and I kind of think we ourselves are chaotic creatures. You know, like, when I’m having a fight with my wife. I’m not only responding to like a local condition, but I’m also in some ways, I’m also like that like scared four year old who was injured in a, in a certain memorable way and kind of told myself a story that would that I thought would prevent that, that that harm from ever happening again, like and I think all of those all these beings sort of overlap on top of each other. I think that’s inevitable; I think that’s fine. But if you’re not aware of it, then you can accidentally nourish some of these older selves that maybe you shouldn’t be nourishing anymore.

Yeah, I mean, there’s some moments there’s a character, one of our Suburban moms Brandi with an “I”. She says some stuff, but they’re sort of scrapping over, you know, mental states, right. And I’m gonna preface this by saying sometimes lipstick on a pig is just lipstick on a pig. But it’s clear that she genuinely believes what she’s saying. And she is organizing her life and her family’s lives around these principles. And in the grand scheme of things, she just wants to have a nice life for her children, and herself, and possibly her husband. But, you know, at the same time, there are moments in the book where I’m like, are we done with you? And that’s on me, that’s not on the character. That is, that is just me saying, okay, but I absolutely believe where she’s coming from, I believe where Lawrence is coming from, there’s a couple of other characters that we haven’t even mentioned that I absolutely understand where they fit into this world, and how they approach it. And I think, you know, you’re remarkably not cynical for someone who’s also writing about tech, and gaming. I mean, gaming from the next obviously, and algorithms are one and how we can well manipulate ourselves with story. How do you end up not being cynical in this day? Seriously, dude, how?

I should probably reveal that, like, my first drafts are often cynical, and I become a better person on the page through revision. I think George Saunders talks about this really brilliantly in, in his book about writing and craft and in Russian short stories, you know, about somewhere on the shelf. Yeah, it’s back here to there. It is A Swim in the Pond in the Rain. And I love what he says, about, you know, when you’re writing you, you’re trying to bring your best self forth, and that best self has never present in one draft. But in a second, third, fourth, when you fiddled with the words 100 times, suddenly, all of those best selves have, you know, kind of appear on the page. And I liked that self and like that self is, like, more generous and funnier than I am in real life, but it’s aspirational. I just find it a more comfortable place to view the world is to try to find the stories that are lurking, somebody’s a jerk, but like, you know, how are they just trying to avoid some injury that happened to them long ago? Like that’s, I don’t know, and just kind of more interesting to me.

Yeah, it’s, you know, when I was thinking about The Nix and Wellness together, it’s sort of like The Nix is more about the absence, right, that they, the people we become when something is missing, right, whether it’s a person or place or thing and Wellness is much more about what happens when we stay.

I hadn’t thought about that, but I love it.

But if you see what I’m saying, I mean, it’s 100 pages of a continuum. I also am a little spoiled because I got to reread The Nix right as I was going into Wellness, because I knew we would be having this conversation. I was like, let’s do it all in one go. But it’s really interesting to see your development. I’m also assuming Wellness was not 1000 page manuscript.

Wellness came in, I mean, about where you see it. That’s about where the draft came in.

Because one of the really interesting things you said, when you were writing, The Nix was that you were trying to write your way into the story, and it felt like Wellness, okay, yeah, you’re doing stuff at time, you’ve got this larger cast of characters, in a way, it felt like you knew much more what you were doing this, the joy is still there, like, clearly the joy in the story, and the rabbit holes, and the characters and everything else that is consistent, but it does sort of feel like you were a little more confident going in.

Yeah, or maybe experience, there’s gotta be some benefit to like, you know, like flailing away for 1000 pages, you know, for 10 years, like, maybe I learned a thing or two. And then of course, working with my editor and my agent were very, very good at working on The Nix. And so when I approached Wellness, I think I had a better idea of what I was doing. I had spent a little time in, in Hollywood, talking to screenwriters out there. And learning from their craft and that was pretty interesting, and how quickly they get into story and sort of just breaking down a story beat by beat was super interesting and helpful for me. And yeah, so I think, maybe I was a little bit better. I remember a review of The Nix that came out in August 2016. It was like a very good review. And I was very grateful. But at the end of it, it was just like, this is just the beginning, you know, have a great career. And I was like, this is the best I can do. I mean, this is the beginning.

Okay, well, we can parse words for a second and just be like, well, technically, it is your debut. I mean, I saw that review, I know exactly which review you’re talking about that made me laugh, because the thing about reviews too. I mean, the ones that can put a work into whether it’s fiction or nonfiction, whatever, but into a greater context are the ones that get my attention much more than the ones that are like, Hi, I’m gonna give you the Cliff Notes. Like, I don’t need plot points, the plot is not going to sell me I just need to understand where this fits into a larger stage. And, you know, the idea that and I said this to you before we started taping, but I mean, I had a minute when we were in Chicago in the early 90s. And I was like, Dude, get out of my head. I mean, I lived in a different neighborhood, but at the same time, like that, sort of youthful exuberance, that naivete that whole sort of like, I’m going to create a new sort of territory for myself, right. And, and Chicago was in a really interesting place, sort of in the mid 90s, and sort of coming out of a little bit of a weird slump but hadn’t yet become sort of what we think of Chicago now. Yeah. was a really interesting time to be there. And I was not there for a very long couple of years.

But I mostly missed it. I mean, I was in college at that time. And in Iowa City, and of course, Chicago is the closest city. So we would go there occasionally. I went to Wicker Park and went to a bar too, but before I knew what I was looking for, it was just mostly like people who knew culture better than me. So this place is cool. And I was like, Okay, I was still a sort of, like very green kid from the suburbs. And I was just like, this place is scary, you know. And, and so like, yeah, it was, but then I started in 2003. I think I started going to Chicago every summer. So my wife is a classical musician. And she played for 15 years with Grant Park symphony, which is a summer orchestra in Chicago, the place downtown if anybody out there lives in Chicago and doesn’t know about it, go to the summer, you know, classical music concerts at Millennium Park. They’re gorgeous. And you can sit on the lawn and have a picnic and a bottle of wine and listen to these like world class musicians. It’s fabulous. Anyway, so like every summer we would pack up and go to Chicago and so every summer I would go back to Wicker Park among the many neighborhoods I like to visit every summer and it was interesting watching you know, like, you know, like, oh, that that cafe is is now a you know, a Doc Martens or and like, you know, like that, that that restaurant is now a Bank of America or whatever, you know, like every bit but year by year bit by bit over 15 years, suddenly the neighborhood was completely changed, you know, and I thought of that when I was you know, writing the story about these, this couple that changes over time and I was like what a great place to set that story. You know, in Wicker Park this this place that has this like such a dynamic history like, you know, the neighborhood changes as they change, you know, and, and the two can speak to each other just felt very, I don’t know, elegant.

It is. Yeah, actually that is a really good way to describe those opening sections and that piece of Jack and Elizabeth’s story. Before I let you go, though, I realized sort of late in the game, as I was researching for the show, though, that you, I would have thought that David Foster Wallace was more of an influence on you, but you came to him sort of very late with A Pale Rider and then sort of worked backwards through his catalogue. And obviously, you’ve been compared to John Irving, and he compared you to Charles Dickens, famously. And you know, Jeffery Eugenides, there is some overlap with some, you know, a certain kind of American writer, but I want to talk about your influences for a second because I feel like they’re probably a little more varied than the obvious comparisons that I just used.

Yeah, well, well, I love all those comparisons, because I love all those writers right there. I mean, John Irving especially, was very important to me when I was when I was like a beginning. You know, young writer. I didn’t start reading Wallace until after he died, but then went back and really, really, really loved his work. But the stuff that really got me, you know, that I feel are influences I think, I think Donald Barthelme is a huge influence on me. I you know, I remember when I was thinking about changing my major from engineering to English when I was at Iowa, I yeah, I took a creative writing class from a novelist named Chris Adrian. Yeah, he is fabulous. So I was I was his student when he was a grad student at the Writers Workshop. And, and I don’t even know if he knows that, but it was now. Yeah, right. But, but he, he brought in these Donald Barthelme stories, and I just thought they were hilarious. And if you don’t know who this is, just go get two books, two thin books called the Sixty Stories and Forty Stories. You know, I’ve 100 stories from Donald Barthelme that will just they’re just, they’re zany. They’re smart. And I was just like, Oh, I didn’t know you could be funny. I didn’t know in literature; you’re allowed to be funny. I’ve never read a book in an English class that was funny. And suddenly here was here was Donald Barthelme being funny. Here’s John Irving being funny, you know, and, and so that was that he was a big, you know, Barthelme was a big influence on me. Irving was a big influence on me and then Virginia Woolf, like I read Mrs. Dalloway, and how she can make, you know, the experience of being in someone else’s brain come alive like that, like it’s the closest we can get to being someone else. Just, I was like, Oh, this is this is it? I love this. And so I you know, I write in a very, very close third person, and that’s entirely because of, of Virginia Woolf impact on me.

I mean, the novel is a perfect container for human story, right? There’s nothing better. I mean, no disrespect to people who work on the screen, but novel, really, you can do stuff on the page that you actually can’t do on the screen or any other way.

Yeah. Yeah, it’s true. Really

Kind of amazing. All right, that actually seems like a really great place to wrap. So Nathan Hill, thank you so much. The Nix obviously is out in paperback. If you haven’t read it, go get it. Wellness is out now. And really do not miss this book. Just do not miss this book. Thank you again. It was great to meet you.

Thank you for the conversation. I loved it.

Miwa Messer

I’m Miwa Messer the producer and host of Poured Over and it is my great good fortune to hang out with a dude that I’m very fond of Ben Fountain, National Book Award finalist for Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk also previous winner of our own Discover Award for Brief Encounters with Che Guevara, which is a pretty great story collection if you haven’t read it yet, and also work of nonfiction. And I have to always look at the title because it’s a beautiful title. But I don’t want to bring it up Beautiful Country Burn Again. And now there’s a new novel, Devil Makes Three. And Ben, it’s so good to see you. But also, Haiti, we have to start with Haiti. We have to start with Haiti. When did you start going to Haiti? Why did you start going to Haiti? When did you learn to speak Creole?

Ben Fountain

Well, the first trip I made to Haiti was May of 1991. I had been writing for a couple of years, then off five years at a big law firm in Dallas, and I quit at the age of 30 to start writing, and wrote short stories, and just started to get drawn into Haiti. I can’t give you an entirely rational explanation. It drew me in it seemed like politics was constantly on boil there. And it seemed like such an intractable place. Why can that country seem never to get its legs underneath it? And also it seems so different. I mean, French speaking, you know, in the Caribbean, which is mostly Spanish and English, and you know, the slave revolution, First Black Republic in the history of the world, first successful slave revolution. And the more I looked at it, the more it seemed like it was, it was the paradigm for a lot of things that were happening in the world and in the early 1990s, but also, the way the world had gone for the last 500 years of just the legacies of slavery and, and white supremacy and racism, and, and racialized capitalism. And I just felt like, things are happening there. And if I want to be the kind of writer, I think I might want to be just engaged, like trying to get a handle on the world, why it is the way it is, why it works the way it does, how it affects us, as individuals, as we try to chart a bit of autonomy and self determination in our lives. I felt like, I want to write about it. I have to go. I’ve never been out of the country before. I’m very conventional. I didn’t know anybody there. I had a little bit of French leftover from college. And so my wife gave me permission to go for a week. And so I went, I didn’t know anybody I knew to get a cab to the Olafson Hotel, which is, that was the model for the hotel in Graham Greene’s The Comedians, and it’s where everybody hangs out, you know, all the, the writers, the journalists, the pimps, the drug dealers, the you can lump them all in the same in the same basket. But that’s where you go to meet people and get into the life of the place. And so I went there and just kept going.

And Haiti too at one point. It’s a destination, right, the way sort of Cuba had its nightclubs and everything else, and parts of the Dominican Republic as well. Like it was a very chic sort of celebrity filled escape.

In the 1940s and 50s, it was a hip place. It was a bit off the beaten path. You had all the glamour celebrities of the day. You know, they went through Haiti, and you know, everybody from your Cole Porters and Errol Flynn’s and partners to the Kennedy family, they were involved in Haiti, and a lot of Texans going to Haiti, rich Texans, you know, for various reasons.

I didn’t know that part.

Oh, yes. And so anyway, it was a happening place. It was a hoppin’ place that changed a couple of years into François Duvalier’s first term when he became this madman dictator. And it really, that killed the tourist industry that ended that particular era. And in the 70s, and 80s, it became it became a sex destination, different kinds of tourism. But, yeah, I mean, it’s had its, you know, periods of kind of a loose glamour type of tourism.

You start going to Haiti in May of 91. There’s a coup in September of 91, where the President Aristide is deposed by members of military, which is how Devil Makes Three opens. I am, we’re gonna stay spoiler free in this conversation, because there’s a lot that happens there’s, I’m smiling thinking about this. It’s a very sort of 70s style conspiracy theory. Bad guys, good guys. But then everyone’s sort of moving in the gray areas right? It was this was not quite the book I was expecting from you. And yet at the same time, it’s very you and we’re gonna go digging around at some of your back list so I can prove my point. But let’s sit for a second with the idea that one more spoiler for you because a lot happens we’re totally spoiler free. So if we sound like we’re dancing around stuff we are, but there are four main characters. Okay. There’s Matt, the American who runs the dive camp. There’s his business partner, Alex, who is Haitian Creole from a very comfortable family and he’s got a sister called Misha who’s getting a PhD at Brown but sticks around and decides to stay home after the coup happens, and then we have another American called Audrey. And we’re gonna stick to these four there’s a lot I have to say I do quite like Alex’s parents, Alex and Misha’s parents, but these are sort of the core four, and you actually started writing Devil Makes Three 2013 ish.

13. Yeah, yeah.

Did you start with this cast? Or did you start with Matt and Alex and then other folks sort of rolled in, like, how did we get to this foursome?

I started with Matt and Alex. I knew I didn’t want my protagonist to be a journalist. I wanted somebody engaged in the life of the country in a very basic way, like, I’m in business and trying to make money. And you’ve got Matt, the expat American. And Alex, who’s your Haitian, educated in the US, he’s very forward thinking. He says, there’s going to be this new era in Haiti, we’ve got democracy now. There is a renaissance happening in this country. And Matt, I want you to be my partner, we’re gonna strike this dive shop, and we’re gonna get the ground floor, and we’re going to become the dive czars of Haiti. Gonna make a lot of money, and we’re going to do good for Haiti, we’re going to put it on the dive map, you know, and bring people to Haiti to show what a great place Haiti is. And so the dive shop starts January in 1991. And it’s building momentum. And then the coup happens at the end of September 91. An international embargo starts shortly thereafter. And so the dive shop is dead. And Matt’s not ready to leave Haiti. I mean, he feels like he’s found his place. Alex doesn’t want him to leave. And so they’re stuck there with a dead business, no way to make money. But two young guys with a lot of energy, and, and, you know, a lot of brass. And so. So can I say that, that they decide they’re going to hunt for treasure?

Yeah, I think that’s, that’s, that doesn’t feel so much like a spoiler as a plot point, because we’re gonna leave out some of what happens, but it’s a great idea. It is a great idea to drive the story forward.

Well, you know, I wanted to write a book where things happen, right. And I wanted part of it to just be a damn good story. And I felt like the dive shop, exploring colonial shipwrecks, looking for treasure. There is that’s very fertile ground for getting into. I mean, a lot of ripping yarn stuff for one thing, but also getting into some very heavy stuff, right? Like colonialism, the legacy of history lives in the past how how these things are not dead. They are living forces in our present lives. And everybody in one way or another, ends up confronting these things, in the most serious kinds of ways over the course of the board.

And Alex and Misha are the kind of people you would like to have come back to a country like Haiti after they’ve been educated overseas. I mean, this isn’t the only place where people like Alex and Misha exist. But yeah, typically you leave, you go to school in Europe, you go to school in the States, and you don’t necessarily go home to rebuild you either stay where you are, you move somewhere, you know, equally is kind of exotic compared to where you came from.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there was a great brain drain out of Haiti in the 1960s, because the Duvalier regime was so draconian and repressive and murderous. And, and so so many educated, talented, energetic Haitians, a lot of them went to Africa, went to the US, Canada, Europe, and it was really devastating for the country. And that continued through 60s 70s and into the 80s. One of the wonderful things about the fall of the Duvalier regime in the 86. And then especially when, you know, Aristides was elected at the end of 1990 was you had a brain immigration, right, came back, they wanted to come back, they said finally we can start to rebuild our country. It was quite a thing. I mean, you had all these exiles returning to Haiti after 20 years away, 25 years like, and they were ready to go to work. And it was an extremely hopeful, optimistic time in Haiti. That’s one of the tragedies of the last 30 years. One of the tragedies.

But also hope is such I mean, those are high stakes, right when you’re talking about the hope of an entire generation.

Yeah, I mean, they came back, tried to rebuild and their knees kept getting chopped off, you know, by geopolitical forces that are much bigger than any one individual. I mean, in the election of 87. And then again, in the election of 91, you had a lot of talented people running, a lot of people who, you know, had the experience, had the smarts and the savvy, and they could have really done something. You know, I think they could have accomplished a lot. And the election of 87 was aborted because of military violence. And you had coup in 1991, which was led by the military, with a lot of outside help complete.

And that’s exactly, we, the Americans we did have a legacy in Haiti that we haven’t really addressed. I mean, 1915 was sort of the first time we sent forces to Haiti, and we were there for what, 20 years ish?

Yeah, we occupied beginning in 1915, and stayed until 1934.

Okay, so almost 20 years, that we were there. And, you know, the way the deal was structured after the uprising, that there were reparations payments made to France that Haiti, frankly, can’t afford. And that was kind of a wild decision.

Well that was the 1820s. And Haiti achieved its independence in 1804. In the mid 1820s, France, sent an Armada, had it off the coast of Haiti, and said, If you don’t pay us reparations for the loss of our property, in other words, enslaved people taking their freedom by force. If you don’t pay us reparations for that, we are going to bomb Haiti to smithereens. And so Haiti agreed to the to pay that indemnity as, quote, reparations, at the point of a gun, right? It was duress, coercion, about anything finished paying off that debt until the late 1940s, early 1950s. A tremendous amount of wealth went out of the country,

It’s really hard to build a country, it’s really hard to build systems, when you are forced to make payments that were not benefiting you or your people in any way. So this is the backdrop against which Devil Makes Three happens. And again, it’s 91. So we don’t have a lot of cell phones, there is no Google, there is a satphone that someone who’s quite wealthy owns that Matt gets to us very briefly. But we’re really, in an era where you have to scramble a little bit, you have to be clever. You have to do things a little differently than what we’re used to. And that’s part of the fun of this book. And yeah, you are dealing with big themes, and there is a lot of complication. That happens, but it is still an adventure story.

Yeah, that’s certainly one aspect of it in in very intentionally, so. But, you know, I was hoping I was thinking, if I can write this correctly, all the big things, doing proper justice to the legacy of all the things we’ve been talking about colonialism, racialized capitalism. If I tell the story properly, those will be intrinsic in the material. They will be part of the story without me having to layer and layer the tone in this very clumsy, polemical way. And, and the way you do that I found writing Billy Lynn, the way you try to do it is build it from the inside out. You’ve got to have characters in which these things are alive and present. And if you write them correctly, of those larger things will take care of themselves. You tell the story of the people and in the situation, and all the big stuff should take care of itself.

I know I mentioned this to you before we started taping, but Matt sent me back to one of the early stories in Brief Encounters with Che Guevara and there’s a character called Mason. This is in Rêve Haitien, which is if I’m correct, Haitian dream is sort of the translation of the title. So Mason’s, an American who is trying to do good in Haiti, and he ends up as sort of part of a scheme to fund rebellion using paintings. And Mason has kind of an eye-opening experience in the course of the story. But Matt and Mason seem to sit on a direct line on a continuum of sort of well-intentioned Americans who really don’t understand what’s happening around them.

Well, they’re definitely over their heads. He’s part of a, he’s an observer with an international group uttering human rights. He’s a lawyer by training, he specifically goes to do good. And he’s got some education and training and all this it, whereas Matt is kind of a random American dude, who shows up in Haiti. And he’s a dive guy. He’s a college dropout, he’s been, you know, doing scuba diving for the last, you know, eight years of his life. He’s, he’s 26, 27. And he’s kind of like, what, yeah, whatever, you know, let’s start a dive shop. And, and, and he, I mean, there’s an encounter early in the book, where a tourist is asking him, what’s gonna save Haiti is I don’t know, you know, and she says, What are you doing here, and he’s, I’m a businessman, I’m trying to make money, I hope to do some good along the way. But I don’t know, I’m just, I’m just a businessman. I’m just a scuba guy. But there are certain factors that, that activate his wish for deeper understanding, that activate a political consciousness and, and one of those is the coup. And what it does to the country. The other is this torch he’s carrying for Misha. It’s sort of like a way of proving his love and devotion by trying to make his brain bigger. Like trying to be smarter, you know, trying to have some awareness of the world around him. If he’s like, he’s going to read his way into her heart.

It’s charming. That’s really all I’m gonna say, love will make you do crazy things. You know, they’re worse things than reading French philosophers and French literature if you’re trying to make a point with someone you’d like to date, but you’re talking about working from the inside out, which obviously, for anyone who’s read Billy Lynn, that is just so clearly how that very compressed story of Billy and Bravo Company halftime show at the Superbowl, and Beyonce is headlining, and that book, though, happens in the span of an afternoon. I mean, yeah, there’s some flashbacks and everything, but the bulk of that book happens over the course of what five hours, six hours, it’s an afternoon. This book sprawls a little more, it moves, I don’t want anyone to have the idea that this I mean, this, it moves, but structurally, you set yourself up for really different writing experience. So of course, we start with the characters. But how do we get the book that becomes Devil Makes Three.

It was a long and heavy lift. I set out not knowing where it was going to go. Okay. I set out not knowing who exactly would come in along the way, and who we would lose along the way. And there were a couple of plotlines that had to be cut. It just got too complicated. And, and, you know, I was making it up as I was going along. I mean, me when I’m a desperate writer, what do you mean, by my fingertips the whole way? Hope hoping that. I mean, I’m going by feel does this feel right? Okay. You’re right. There’s a certain amount of psychological stress that goes along with that. But there’s also, I mean, tremendous pleasure. I mean, it’s an exploration. You’re kind of living at your nerve endings, you know, for seven years writing this. Like, is it gonna work? I don’t know. I don’t know. It feels alright. I think some days, some weeks, some months. You know, so I didn’t know. It was a process of figuring out the story as I’m writing it.

I’m laughing though, as you say, desperate writer holding on by the fingertips. You sort of famously, were featured in this Malcolm Gladwell piece from the New Yorker in ’08, Late Bloomers. Which part of me thinks well, of late bloomers, but I okay, so this piece, your career sort of jumpstarts when you’re just shy of 50. You’ve got this great collection of stories. Everyone’s kind of like, well, who is this guy? And this is there’s a little bit of Hemingway happening here. And there’s a little bit of Didion happening here. There’s some Norman Mailer happening here, like who is this guy? And you know, you win the PEN Hemingway, and you get the Discover Award and the reviews and everyone’s sort of rapturous about it. And you have a really great sense of humor in some of the stories and other stories, you know. That’s the fun of story collection. Right? You don’t have to maintain the tone throughout. And then here comes Billy Lynn. Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk is what 2012. And at some point, you’d been writing a novel about Texas that never it’s in a drawer somewhere, maybe we’ll see it, maybe we won’t.

It’s called the Texas itch.

But it does exist. I’m not I’m not misremembering this.

This does exist, okay. Maybe someday I’ll go back to it. I think it’s an okay book. So we’ll see. But I’m more interested in the next thing right now.

Okay. Here’s a novel, you start in 2013. There’s the nonfiction book that lands in ‘18, based on some reporting you did about America in 2016 and 2017. Right. And I see the through line between all four of these books. I mean, there’s the concern with American imperialism and democracy, and what it means to actually be able to choose your own path, right. And then certainly celebrity in all of the messy ways that capitalism doesn’t necessarily work. And it feels like you’ve been sort of picking at the same big theme for a while. Right?

I think you’re right. And it’s not exactly part of the master plan. It’s me feeling my way along trying to get some understanding, some understanding for myself, why is the world the way it is? You know, why does it work the way it does? Who wins? Who loses? Who suffers? Who gets the pleasure? You know, who gets the goodies? Who bears the brunt? To me, these are urgent questions. I mean, you know, from my own moral sense of how to try to live a decent life. So, I will say this, I mean, I worked for Devil Makes Three, for two and a half years, and it wasn’t going well. Then the Guardian called in late 2015, and said, Do you want to cover the election for us in 2016? And so I said, Yes, I jumped on it. Because, okay, I had this, you know, pile of junk over here, on the garage floor, and I thought, Oh, I’ll jump in, go for the shiny new thing. I ended up spending three years, you know, a year working for The Guardian, and then using that, that work as the basis for Beautiful Country Burned Again. And so when I went back to Devil Makes Three in 2019. I don’t know, I felt stronger. I felt like their muscles, my brain had been exercised and in, buffed up. In a way I didn’t expect to, to work over in the fiction realm. But I felt like I learned a lot about politics and political animals writing Beautiful Country Burned Again. And when I went back to Devil Makes Three. And I really don’t know if I could have written Devil Makes Three in a way that might be successful if I hadn’t done Beautiful Country Burned Againbefore that.

I mean, I would argue that American imperialism, some of us have applied it to parts of our own country. And, you know, sometimes it’s easier for us to see our footprint when we’re looking outside of the States. And we’re looking to places like Haiti, or, you know, certainly the American footprint in Asia or Central America or Latin America, like we have legacies there and decisions that we made that had deep, deep impacts on communities that probably would have preferred that we stayed home. And certainly the Middle East. I mean, we American imperialism is not a small thing, right. And there are going to be people who argue, of course, we’re doing it to keep everyone safe. And but we have also made financial decisions that have not benefited the majority. Let’s put it that way. That that a very small minority has done quite well.

Yeah. When people question America’s motives in Haiti, for example, and, you know, the establishment argument, the Foreign Service argument is, look, why would we mess around with Haiti, we don’t need Haiti. You know, Haiti is not a national security threat, we are really trying to do good. And that is certainly true of, of a number of individuals have come across over the years, their hearts are in the right place. Even though we don’t need Haiti, we can certainly find uses for Haiti. But even it can be a profit center, or such a poor country, you can make a ton of money. And hey, you can make it. You know, through garment factories, you can make it through making baseballs, you can do it through agribusiness. I mean, over the generations, a lot of Americans had have made a lot of money in Haiti and exerted tremendous influence over the domestic politics of the country, to the detriment of Haitians, and to the great benefit of their own profit interests. So that happens over and over again.

I mean, America invaded Haiti in 1994.

There are a lot of good reasons for that. And that election, did, you know bring Aristides back for the short remainder of his of his term, and there was a fair election that followed that. I think that was a well-intentioned, you know, intervention. I mean, these things are always so touchy and problematic. But um, that was one case where it worked for a while.

For a while being I mean, isn’t that sort of what we’re doing with all of this? I mean, and that’s kind of the beauty of fiction, right? Like, you can do a — Bob Shacochis has written a really terrific book about the 94 US action, however you want to describe it. But if you want the nonfiction account, Robert Shachocis has written this really, you should go check that out. And we’ll put the title in the show notes. And part of why I’m sort of poking at this is you have a freedom in fiction, to let your characters talk about whatever they need to talk about to keep the story moving, and not necessarily hold a position or stick to the actual. I mean, there’s some there’s some really stressful moments for your characters, because you ratchet up the tension. For all good story, all good storytelling purposes. Let’s put it that way. It’s not simple. You have not a single simple answer anywhere in this book, and that’s part of you know, it’s kind of a little bit like watching you know, one of those 70s conspiracy movies like Day of the Condor you know, those Robert Redford movies from like, the early 70s kind of thing. And I’m just wondering some of the influences. Can we talk about your influences for this book? Because, obviously, you’re working with history, and you’re working with tons and tons of research and experience in country and all of these things. But there’s also some style stuff that’s happening that comes from other writers, and I think some of it may come from film as well.

Yeah, I think that’s a good point. And a fair point. You know, I was thinking a lot about Robert Stone, writing this book. I mean, that’s a great American writer.

1:18:15

Right, Flag for Sunrise…

He went to some very dark places. Yeah, I was thinking about Joan Didion. A lot of thinking about Garcia Marquez.

Okay, wait, wait. Garcia Marquez, because you’re not what exactly are you pulling from him? Because I mean…

Hopefully a largeness of vision or, hopefully an emotional range. He can talk about tragic things and joyous things in the course of a sentence. You pack it all in and in a way that feels authentic and real and earned. And I hope there’s a lot of emotional register, valid emotional range in Devil Makes Three. Yeah, that’s certainly my experience of Haiti. It’s my experience of, you know, life, human existence. I mean, as far as the movies go, I mean, the great heyday of you know, the 70s American filmmaking and they just the energy and the wildness of Robert Altman and Friedkin, and Ashby. I mean, those guys you know, Coppola, they just can’t, they just let it fly. And so, I wanted to get that energy in here too. And, and again, you know, just try to write a damn good story that hopefully does a good amount of work along the way.

I mean, I’ve always believed that our art should reflect what we’re thinking about. Who we are, where we want to go. I mean, I’m not sure I’ve ever really believed that art for art’s sake is enough for me as a, as a person who consumes art, whether that’s reading or watching films or listening to music or whatnot, I just always feel like there needs to be some sort of context. And we’re the context. Right, like the world that we’ve made is the context. And we should challenge some of that we should be able to say, I mean, part of what’s heartbreaking about Devil Makes Three is Alex just really believes democracy is going to fix everything. And he’s so hopeful, and he’s building all like he’s built a factory and he’s done all of these things.

Well, a lot of people did back then, the gospel was democracy plus capitalism, a certain kind of capitalism, free markets, open trade globalism, it’s going to it’s going to create worldwide prosperity. That was and I actually put it in a formula. At one point in the book, Audrey, the CIA case officer, this is the way she articulates it to herself. The form of this mental equation, you know, the last 30 years have shown it, it just it doesn’t work that way. It’s a lot more complicated. And for certain groups, deadly. Deadly, I mean, literally lethal for many people across the globe.

You know, also what you were just saying made me think to have the opening story in Brief Encounters. Where that college student, he birds? He is mistaken for a spy. Yeah, Near Extinct Birds of the Central Cordillera. Again, I can just I can see the roots of Devil Makes Three in Brief Encounters.

Yeah. It’s like culture, clash, worlds colliding. I mean, here, he has a PhD student in ornithology, he gets mixed up in Colombian politics. And so you put these two things together, and just see the sparks fly, there can be a lot of energy in those situations, you know, a lot of fertile ground. And that’s happening all over Devil Makes Three.

Yeah. Who’s the spy, who’s not a spy, who can be trusted, who can’t be trusted. There’s some minor characters who are absolutely fascinating, who could hold their own. And then they play the part that, you know, they’re meant to play in this book. It’s a big cast. Ultimately, I know, I started with the core four. And they really are the drivers of the story. But we meet a lot of very interesting, smart people who have a lot to say.

Yeah, I mean, it’s kind of a wild book. It’s not what I especially intended to write. But it seemed to me to follow these threads and develop them properly. These were the places I had to go. I mean, I didn’t expect to get into the scholarship of the Black Atlantic. I didn’t expect to get into health care in Haiti, I didn’t expect to get into the NGO industrial complex and voodoo. I knew there would be voodoo he should do in the book. But, I wasn’t sure exactly how that would play out. You know, how it would come in. But I mean, that’s, that’s just such a part of life in Haiti. And I’ve rarely seen it portrayed in a way that satisfied me either overly sexualized, exotic defied, made this thing of mystery and mystification. And, and, you know, horror or titillation. And, and it’s really a much more basic thing than that is serves very specific purposes in people’s lives, to help them live to help them survive. And, and I wanted to try to get the ground level as close to the ground level truth of that. Is that could and all the experiences in that book, step for one come from firsthand experience?

I mean, you spend a lot of time when you’re in Haiti. I mean, yeah, you are the white guy, but at the same time, and I think you said this in an earlier interview to someone else, you’re just like, well, I’m some people’s white guy.

Yeah. And, you know, in a lot of contexts, I mean, you’re a bit of a novelty walking in, and then nobody gives a damn. I mean, they’re, they’re doing their own thing. I’ve been to a lot of voodoo ceremonies where I am the only white guy I mean, 500 people probably from miles around, and there’s a little bit of a stir when I come in and then nobody gives a damn. It’s like, no, we’re going about our business and, and you know, there’s the block over there, whatever, you know, it’s just, it’s no big deal.

You dedicate this book to a couple of folks. And I’m wondering if you’re willing to tell us the story because I didn’t recognize their names. So I just I assumed it was personal to you. And I’m hoping you’ll share.

Right. Well, the dedication is to my wife, Sherry, and to my friend, he’s a physician in Haiti. I mean, he’s Haitian, one of his ancestors signed the Haitian constitution. He’s got an illustrious family history. And he’s a very hardworking doctor in Haiti, and, and treats most of his patients for free. He’s also a brilliant art critic. He ran for the Haitian Senate in 2006 and was elected but had the election stolen from him. He is a fearless force for good in Haiti, we’re brothers. And then there’s a memorial page in the book. And there’s two people, One who I mentioned is a man named jazz near Pierre. He was the first person I met when I went to Haiti. And he was my guide, just one of the finest men I’ve ever known. He died in 2006. And then my friend Gary Downey, he was an American expat went to Haiti with the Peace Corps in his in his 40s, he had had it with corporate America, marrying a Haitian woman staying there. And he was a dear friend, a wild man. And he passed away in 2014. So people who I love very much,

And all part of the story and all part of the context for you being able to write this book

Very much, very much. I mean, you know, it’s not so much research as just the way you’re living your life, right. And the people you meet along the way, and you have relationships with them, you come to love them, care about them. And you’re connected, and you aren’t going to walk away. I mean, that’s, I couldn’t imagine doing that. So, throughout, I’ve been very aware throughout the writing of this book that I mean, am I appropriating? You know, am I transgressing? Do I have the right to write this book? I think that those are all live issues. And, and I thought about them every day while I was writing this book, and I continue to think about them. And I’m quite eager to have conversations about these things. Do I have the right to write a book like this? You could flip that question. Having seen what I’ve seen, having gone where I’ve gone? Do I have the right not to write about it? I mean, I can’t think of anything more important than what’s going on in this book. I mean, the legacies of, of racial capitalism, slavery, economics, geopolitics, as they play out, in our own time, and how they affect lives of individuals to me. I mean, if I wasn’t gonna write about these things, you know, then I’ll go write about China patterns or something. I mean, yeah. You know, I mean, you know, something esoteric, like, you know, fifth century Byzantine coins? I don’t know. I mean, it’s, I can’t imagine writing anything else.

I think I’ve also been reading you for so long that I can’t imagine you writing about anything else. I mean, again, this goes back to the stories for me, in Brief Encounters with Che Guevara that, that all of these ideas have been here since you quit your corporate law job to write. I mean, you did the thing that so many people talk about doing and I still love this idea that Sherry was like, Yeah, you can go for a week. Let’s see what happens. Let’s do this. But she also said, hey, 10 years seems like a reasonable amount of time to put into this, and you sort of got in under the wire. And then there were some years where things didn’t quite work, but you’ve really this has been your thing since what?

88? It’s embarrassing.

No, no embarrassing is not the word we want.

I should have so many more books out. I mean, I’ve made my peace with it, it is what it is. But you know, I’ve had a lot of failure. But there’s my writing life, perhaps those were necessary failures. Ultimately, it is what it is, you know.

I look at the collective body of work that we now have with these four books. Okay, one, it’s, I’m looking at a lot of pages here. Because also, I mean, Devil Makes Three is a little bit longer than Billy Lynn. Yeah, it doesn’t. It doesn’t read like it’s longer. I don’t want people to think Oh, no, what is this woman getting us into? But I was a little surprised when the galley landed on my desk. I was like, Oh, okay. This is how much to it’s awfully, okay.

It’s awfully thick. I mean, is as I was writing the book, I kept thinking, I need to cut I need to cut. But there was this impulse it compulsion or sense of let it be what it needs to be right. And, and we’ll see what happens.

I do think it needed the space; I think partially too, its being set in the Caribbean. And there is a slightly different sense of time. And, you know, we have this idea when we’re in sort of on the mainland of the States where everything has to happen, sort of very quickly, or certainly like your New Yorker, and you go out into America, it’s like, oh, right, time is different. It’s completely wild. So it sounds like you just kept surprising yourself, as you worked.

I was absolutely surprising myself and then and then having to work a lot to fulfill the surprise. I mean, when Misha started becoming who she was, she really made me work to try to do her justice. But it was a pleasure. I mean, it was a lot of work. And it was angst and all that. But in uncertainty like can I do this, but it was tremendous pleasure to I mean, and that’s, that’s a big reason. I think why we do these things we write, to try to figure things out to explore. I mean, we never know enough. I don’t know about most writers, but this writer always feels like he needs to learn more, know more.

Yeah, I can see that. Okay, listen, we’re, of course, coming up on time. But I wasn’t necessarily going to mention this. And now I kind of have to because when you and I were chatting before we started this conversation I mentioned, I really don’t like Audrey, and I understand why she is the way she is. And I understand why she does what she did. But, I mean, you made her, can we talk about this woman for a second before I let you go because I get it, I get it. And it works for the story. But oh man, there were times where I just she made me itch.

Well, she makes herself itch for one, she’s a rookie case officer. And she is into being a case officer of the CIA, she’s eager, she’s hungry. She’s got tremendous energy; she wants the world. She wants mastery. I mean, to prove herself, and, and she wants to be at the top of this game. And it’s not all, you know, personal achievement, she feels she has a very strong patriotic bit. She talks about her father a lot and his military service and then his public service as a judge. And she is sincerely motivated by love of country. She sees herself, she’s quite aware of the moral ambiguity of certain things she does and involves herself in and perpetrates. And that is, okay. You know, what is the moral stance of some of yourself when you are doing next to worst things, in order to prevent the worst, you’re getting your hands dirty, you are consciously painting yourself for what you perceive as the greater good. You’re taking that burden on yourself. And, and she’s very aware of this. She’s like, okay, this is what I signed on for. There is some really unsavory stuff I’m getting involved in, but it’s for the greater good. I’m making this conscious decision. And not only that, she goes out and sees the consequences she’s doing and she experiences a fair amount of conflict and she challenges her coworkers. Can we please tell them to lay off the atrocities for a few weeks. It’s really disgusting what our people are doing out there. In. So within her realm, she’s trying to hold the line. But I mean, she developed in ways I didn’t expect, but the moral ambiguity and her awareness of it and how she deals with it.

So I’m fine with the moral ambiguity part. I just think that her decision about what the greater good actually looks like, is so limited, and she has no idea how limited it is. And that’s the piece where I’m just like, listen, listen. But again, that’s part of the fun of this book. And you know, I’m not making light in any way of, of the situation or the context of Devil Makes Three. But at the same time, like we have to be able to look with clarity with open eyes, whatever metaphor you want to use, we need to be able to look at people’s choices and their behaviors and their idea of context. And that’s where this book sits for me.

Then Misha gets under her skin. Yeah. Perhaps. You know, through Alex, Misha to her exasperation keeps getting thrown together with Audrey. Right? And, and Misha, you know, gives it to her. Misha is the one person who really gets under Audrey’s skin. I’ll leave it at that.

I cannot wait, then I cannot wait. Cannot wait for readers to get their hands on Devil Makes Three and meet these four people that we’ve been talking about and the supporting cast, and have their own feelings about who’s doing right and who’s doing wrong and who’s making decisions that you may or may not agree with? Because that is the beauty of a really good book. Right. Thank you, Ben. It’s so good to see you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you devil makes three is out now. And if you haven’t somehow read Brief Encounters with Che Guevara or Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk or Beautiful Country Burn Again. Well, go find those too.

Thank you, Miwa. It was a real pleasure.