Ben Fountain

Entertaining novel about a team of soldiers returning from Iraq for 2 weeks to be feted as heroes after being involved in a televised skirmish with insurgents. Most of the novel takes place at a Dallas Cowboys game where they are being honoured at half-time. It's a fairly black comedy, although contrary to the quotes it is no Catch-22.

The main characters are well defined, although there seems (to this bleeding-heart liberal) a left-wing bias (i.e., most of the sympathetic characters have some liberal leanings). I liked the charismatic sergeant characters, though questioned whether a single team would have two such iconoclasts - stretched my credulity a bit.

Fountain plays around with some experimental techniques - structured layout of text, word-cloud-type constructions - and tries to convey the actual mental state of the soldiers, and what effect war and death has on a young person. Good attempts without being revolutionary.

Overall, it's enjoyable, but maybe less than the sum of its parts (and the title doesn't really work). This would be a 3.5, but I'll bump up.… (mehr)

DEVIL MAKES THREE by Ben Fountain
I very much disliked this book. It was too long by at least 100 pages. It was too disjointed as time, place, and characters jumped from page to page, even paragraph to paragraph with not even a line break to give the reader a clue to the jump. There was too much incomprehensible talk among the characters about Haitian politics and too many untranslated French words, phrases and sentences for this German speaking American. I knew little about Haitian politics before I read this book and I am still in the dark. I often felt I needed to stop reading and consult Wikipedia’s version of Haitian history.
Parts of the book were interesting and well written. One blurb writer called this book “a fast, riveting read. A gripping thriller…” he must have read a different book. This book was a struggle to get through the first hundred pages before the characters and plot started to become clear. I would have enjoyed a 300 page book of Matt and Alix’s treasure hunting adventures much more.
I found Audrey/Shelly simply too confusing to like or dislike or to follow her part in the story. Matt had an interesting ethical dilemma. Alix apparently had no problems in the ethical field at all. His sister chose and was in that way my favorite character.
4 stars for the writing: 3 stars for the plot and length.… (mehr)