DEVIL MAKES THREE

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.