Reviewed by Jon Baskin
4.24.07

For a certain class of well-educated Americans, it has become common knowledge that “experience” lies elsewhere. That is, there are places where things are happening, and these places are not affluent suburbs, manicured college greens, or even, yuppie-choked American cities. If you want something “authentic” in your life, the study abroad generation counsels, you’ve got to get out of this place.

The protagonists in Ben Fountain’s bracing short story collection, Brief Encounters With Che Guevara, have taken this advice to heart. They are college students, golfers and aimless ingénues who go abroad seeking seriousness and purpose. Sometimes they find it. But the horrors of the third world are finally no more nourishing to their souls than the excesses of the first. Nor are they completely separable from them. Time and again Fountain’s protagonists find they are useful to the natives only as go-betweens with the Western world they are trying to escape. John Blair, kidnapped by Colombian rebels while studying birds in the rainforest, is eventually released to American bankers as a “gesture of goodwill” in a timber deal. Jill works for a Protestant aid group in Sierra Leone, but finds herself an unlikely accomplice in a scheme to smuggle “blood diamonds” to the West. Sonny Grous, a hapless American golfer, is roped unwittingly into a shady corporate scheme to pay off government officials in Myanmar.

The longest and most affecting story in the collection is called “The Lion’s Mouth” and takes place in Sierra Leone. Jill, mentioned above, hails from “Connecticut’s gold coast,” but her biography bespeaks a far-ranging quest for purpose and meaning in lieu of a “congenital distrust of money and luxury.” She’s spent two years in Guatemala with the Peace Corps, followed by three years in Haiti with Save the Children. But even those stints failed to quench her vague but powerful thirst for hardship. She asks, explicitly, to be sent to “the hardest place…she wouldn’t be satisfied with anything but the very worst.” Which is how she ends up in Sierra Leone, known “for its top-quality kimberlite diamonds and the breathtaking cruelty of its civil war.”

In Sierra Leone, however, something unexpected happens: Jill falls in love with a wealthy diamond trader. Sleeping every night with one of the men responsible for the bloodshed and inequality in the country, Jill is forced to confront all the not-so-subtle hypocrisies that have governed her short career.

[S]he’d come to Salone determined to lead an authentic life and instead had discovered all the clichés in herself. She wanted to be stupid. She wanted to be rich. She wanted to be lazy, kept, indulged—this is where her fantasies took her lately, mental explorations of the guiltless life.

To Fountain’s credit, Jill is not an unsympathetic character. Part of her appeal comes from the fact that she recognizes her hypocrisy, and grapples with it honestly. Furthermore, Jill really does do good work in Sierra Leone. Besides being well intentioned, she is fearless, competent, and, as she proves during the humanitarian crisis that comprises the heart of the story, morally committed to the cause.

So are most of the other boys and girls in Brief Encounters With Che Guevara. Fountain has been compared to Graham Greene because he writes about Americans in the third world, but his protagonists have little in common with Greene’s self-conscious sophisticates. They share more with Nell Freudenberger’s conflicted Lucky Girls, driven by a genuine impulse to do good, but hampered by egoism, naiveté, and, in many cases, an endearing but ultimately misdirected idealism. Their situation is crystallized in “Rệve Haitien,” when a mulatto intellectual accuses the American aid worker, Mason, of intentionally losing at chess in his nightly contests with Haitian villagers:

“You are mocking us.”

“No, that’s not it at all. I just felt…” Mason struggled for a polite way to say it.

“You feel pity for us.”

“Something like that.”

“You want to help the Haitian people.”

“That’s true, I do.”

“Are you a good man? A brave man? A man of conviction?”

Mason, who had never been spoken to in such solemn terms, needed a second to process the question. “Well, sure,” he replied, and really meant it.

The reversal here consists in the fact that Mason, who has been treating the villagers like children, is exposed by the mulatto to be the most childish of all. Mason really does want to “help the Haitian people,” but his commitment—as we learn from the role the Mulatto convinces him to play in a futile weapons-running scheme—is a kind of child’s commitment, devoid of any sober consideration of the complexity and consequences of action.

Fountain’s collection is uneven. “The Good Ones are Already Taken,” about a soldier returning from Haiti to his wife in North Carolina, feels contrived in its attempt to convey the soldier’s newfound devotion to “voodoo.” “Bouki and the Cocaine,” about a Haitian fisherman getting mixed up in the cocaine trade, concludes with a whimper. And the collection ends with an affecting but incongruous story, “Fantasy for Eleven Fingers” about a 19th century piano player with an extra finger.

At his best, however, Fountain exploits his characters’ foreign adventures to probe at some of the looming sources of American discontent. He sees how the third world has become what the Wild West once was—the geographic frontier of American idealism. And he charts expertly his characters’ sense of depletion and loss when they are deprived the solace of that frontier. “How does it feel to be free?” asks Spasso, the American trader (based on former NYSE chairman Richard Grasso) as his helicopter lifts John Blair out of the jungle where he had been held captive. “Like dying,” Blair wants to respond. Then “everything precious faded out.”