07/24/2023

Fountain’s first novel since his bestselling Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk is a sprawling, fierce exploration of violence and corruption in the Caribbean. In 1991, when Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide is deposed by a military junta, American expat Matt Amaker and his Haitian partner, Alix Variel, see their scuba diving tourist business dry up and turn to recovering brass cannons from a shipwrecked conquistador galleon. Alix’s occasional lover, Audrey O’Donnell, is an undercover CIA agent helping to expedite the smuggling of arms into the country. Meanwhile, Matt’s lover, Misha (who is also Alix’s sister), forgoes her education at Brown in order to work as a clerk at an overburdened medical clinic in Port-au-Prince, which is short of drugs due to the American embargo. Matt and Alix are arrested by the new government as terrorists and thrown into jail. But corrupt Gen. Romeo Concers shows Matt a way out by underwriting his dive to locate the remains of Columbus’s flagship, the Santa Maria. With differing and often conflicting agendas, Matt, Audrey, and Misha end up on a collision course as personal morality collides with political expediency. Through these—and other—well-wrought characters, Fountain dramatically captures the ever-shifting nature of Haitian politics. The result reads like an update of Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not, with some of the moral heft of Robert Stone’s A Flag for Sunrise. Readers of international thrillers should pounce. (Sept.)

MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF 2023: Los Angeles Times, Associated Press, ABC News, Yahoo! Finance, Seattle Times, Lit Hub, The Chicago Tribune, and more!!!

"Ben Fountain writes in the great tradition of such predecessors as Joseph Conrad, Graham Green, Robert Stone and Russell Banks: richly detailed portraits of individuals whose public and private lives conjoin, often with tragic results. His work, like theirs, is fundamentally moral, even visionary; saturated with irony, yet not devoid of sympathy. Devil Makes Three is a monumental achievement spanning, not historical time, but the consequences of history impinging upon the present.” —Joyce Carol Oates

"The depth and the rapidity at which we become invested in these lives shows that it’s possible to write from any point of view as long as the writer is willing to do the hard work — the observation, the imagination, the selflessness — of getting a character right.... It takes courage to set an extremely complicated work of fiction in Haiti, to write across the lines of class, color, gender, ideology and nationality." —New York Times Book Review

"[A] big, deeply humane political thriller that proves the flame of Graham Greene and John le Carré is still burning." —The Washington Post

"[A] sprawling and sardonic work of geopolitical intrigue." —Wall Street Journal

"The book is packed with Haitian history and culture, politics and scenery. The writing is so vivid you can close your eyes and see the technicolor sunsets, smell the fetid air of Port-au-Prince. Woven throughout is a spy-thriller-worthy plot, complete with buried treasure, double-crosses, gun-running, drug-dealing and deadly factional feuds.... For anyone as invested in Haiti as the author — or deeply curious about the country — Devil Makes Three will be a rewarding read." —Dallas Morning News

"[A] bold tale... Fountain brings a Graham Greene-like approach to Haiti’s vagaries and wonders. This sweeping, bracing, and sobering exploration of the troubled island nation’s perennial, heartbreaking turmoil and geopolitical complications is topical yet timeless, elaborate and nuanced, laden with political intrigue and immersed in cultural rituals." —Booklist (starred review)

"A sprawling, fierce exploration of violence and corruption in the Caribbean... Readers of international thrillers should pounce." —Publishers Weekly

"Ben Fountain's powerfully written novel is many things at once—a spy thriller, a family saga, a love story, a treasure hunt, and a tale of brutal political repression, all set in the charged atmosphere of early 1990s Haiti. By succeeding at all of these, Devil Makes Three reminds us not only of the ways an ambitious, fully engaged novel can further our understanding of the world, but also of how pleasurable and satisfying reading such a novel can be." —Imbolo Mbue, New York Times bestselling author of Behold the Dreamers and How Beautiful We Were

"Ben Fountain portrays with precision the native and foreign devils of Haiti in this extremely well-constructed novel. All must endure the intractability of this complex country, an intractability…that sometimes yields in proportion to one's willingness to risk everything." —Yanick Lahens, author of Moonbath, winner of the Prix Femina

“Woven artfully into the fabric of Ben Fountain’s literary thriller Devil Makes Three is a scathing indictment…Reflective and prescient, stunning in its narrative complexity and nuanced characterization, the novel is at once timely and timeless, working double duty as a reminder of the sins of America’s past and a warning of those to come.” —John Vercher, author of Three-Fifths and After the Lights Go Out

“Devil Makes Three is the sort of expansive, heartbreaking, thrilling novel I didn't realize I was missing until it grabbed hold of me and wouldn't let go. Writing at the peak of his considerable powers, Ben Fountain makes a harrowing period in Haiti's recent history come wonderfully and tragically alive. This morally complex novel is why we read fiction." —Jess Walter, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Cold Millions and Beautiful Ruins

“Devil Makes Three brings the relentless intimacy of great literature to the quest to understand Haiti. In this sense, the novel is both an act of wild faith and an act of mad love and, finally, a triumph.” —Bob Shacochis, author of The Woman Who Lost Her Soul and The Immaculate Invasion

"Devil Makes Three is a fast and riveting read, a gripping thriller braided with a couple of credible love stories. This novel will pin your ears back with some of its hard-won truths." —Madison Smartt Bell, author of All Souls' Rising

Ron Butler's deft performance fully encompasses this expansive story of political and economic crisis in Haiti, based on true events in 1991. Matt is an American college dropout working at a scuba-diving business when President Aristide is overthrown, pushing the country close to turmoil. After business dries up, Matt partners with a crew to seek deep-sea treasure. As the threat of political upheaval looms, Matt becomes embroiled in mounting conflict with the country's political forces. Fountain's audiobook puts listeners in the events as they unfold, and Butler's voice skillfully captures the complex, intelligent characters and their local and global accents. Listeners hungry for multilayered political drama will find Butler's performance immensely satisfying. S.P.C. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2023, Portland, Maine

2023-06-21
Natives, expats, and interlopers navigate the aftermath of Haiti’s violent 1991 coup.

Fountain’s second novel, following the National Book Critics Circle Award–winning Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk (2012), opens shortly after the deposition of Jean-Bertrand Aristide by the Caribbean nation’s military leaders. Matt Amaker, an American running a scuba-diving business for tourists, hopes the matter will soon blow over; but Audrey O’Donnell, a CIA agent managing money funneled into Haiti by the U.S. government, has a better glimpse of how upended the country is, to the point of getting a perverse thrill from it (“here was the world in miniature, a hothouse geopolitical lab where trends, functions, and methods were stripped bare for the interested student to view”); and Misha, a native Haitian and sister of Matt’s business partner, becomes a witness to the depths of the coup’s violence when she works as a clerk in a hospital struggling to keep up with the flood of victims. Desperate to keep working, Matt pursues a treasure-hunting scheme, heading to a quiet shore to find some cannons and other potentially lucrative remnants of a Spanish galleon. In the process, he digs up further trouble—and a metaphor for the long history of colonialist abuses that, Fountain suggests, keep driving Haiti to the brink. Fountain has made dozens of trips to Haiti, which fueled half the stories in his superb 2006 debut, Brief Encounters With Che Guevara (and made him an exemplar of Malcolm Gladwell’s “10,000 hours” rule for mastery); his grasp of the country’s folklore and history is worked satisfyingly deep into this book’s pages. But the execution can be disappointingly flat in comparison to other white-man-in-a-foreign-land practitioners like Paul Theroux, Norman Rush, Graham Greene, and Russell Banks; not quite a thriller about treasure-seeking nor a study of spycraft nor realist historical fiction, the book displays Fountain’s smarts but also meanders and lectures.

A fine-grained, if at times overly upholstered tale of humanitarian and political tragedy.