Yesterday I read Brief Encounters with Che Guevara (published in 2008), by Ben Fountain.  His stories bring us to Haiti, Sierra Leone, 19th century Vienna, and the American south: each place and its people are fully drawn through exact yet nuanced observations, making for excellent reading. The stories are genuine, true, and captivating. His prose is perfectly created and yet very fluid and natural.  I did not feel I was reading the works of someone trained by a writers’ workshop but rather the words of a true writer.  Fountain is talented and disciplined; he is also obviously  sincere about sharing true stories of humanity, and a master at using fiction as his vehicle for conveying truth.  There is not a character that rings untrue in any of his stories, (except for the last story in the collection, “Fantasy for Eleven Fingers”, that I think is supposed to read as some kind of monstrous fairy tale).

Every story is different (and wonderful), in viewpoint and narrator, and yet the same basic truths are presented: humans do survive and cope and even flourish briefly, in the face of often crushing, or numbing, or repetitive, reality. Set in scenarios where utter grimness and hopelessness would seem appropriate (and would be so easy to portray), Fountain instead shows us a realistic optimism, which is, after all, the mechanism for survival.  To achieve the touch of optimism in stories that are so real and so sad is a gift, and Fountain is beautifully gifted.