Brief Encounters with Che Guevara

May 8, 2006
Six of these eight debut short stories feature Americans abroad, on modified grand tours stopping in Colombia, Haiti, Myanmar and Sierra Leone. As aid workers, soldiers and hangers-on, they grapple with some of the darkest circumstances in the contemporary world, their struggles made absurd by the ease with which they can and do return home. A few are honorably conflicted, including the NGO worker who betrays her diamond-smuggling lover. Others, including an indolent golfer who sells his soul along with his game, and a writer nursing an obsession with Che Guevara, draw less sympathy. Fountain seems to see both travel and introspection as amoral indulgences, which means there's serious writerly self-hatred here, since those indulgences feed his tales. The stories that avoid moral writhings for postmodern fable are his most memorable. When a Haitian fisherman discovers a drug runners' drop-off and tries to alert the police, only to find them driving shiny new SUVs, he turns next to the village's voodoo revelers—who have better ideas about what to do with the dope. Lively work, with much to detest and much to enjoy.

August 15, 2006
Many a protagonist in this solid, aptly titled debut collection from Fountain (fiction editor, "Southwest Review") seems to carry a deep guilt about privilege. Whether a graduate student kidnapped by guerrillas while doing fieldwork on a rare species of bird in Colombia or a relief worker in Sierra Leone caught up with a diamond smuggler, these characters navigate the moral minefield of doing good deeds while being very human. Fountain quietly builds a story so that the cultural reality of its setting seeps into the most mundane love affairs, golf tournaments, or fishing trips (the excellent -Bouki and the Cocaine -). Despite their various international settings and plots, the stories are not overweeningly ambitious and are rarely emotional or enlightening. If anything, they fall away from conclusions or epiphanies, which may be their most potent aspect. Only one story, the anomalous and well-paced -Fantasy for Eleven Fingers, - about a piano prodigy in fin-de-siè cle Vienna, strives for a Roald Dahl finale. Recommended for most fiction collections." - Prudence Peiffer, Cambridge, MA"

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