AS FAR AS I knew, Ben Fountain was a fiction writer, and an extremely good one (see LLL, April 26, 2014), but someone at the Guardian apparently figured out he had some wicked journalist chops as well, and he got the gig of covering the 2016 U.S. presidential election for one of England's premier newspapers. This book collects nine of them and adds three more essay/articles, as well as a series of passages called "Book of Days," one for each month of 2016, compiling what was in the news at the time.
Occasionally helpful though they are, and yielding the odd juicy juxtaposition, the "Book of Days" sections began to wear on me. The Guardian articles, however, still pack a punch, and remarkably all the more so for our knowing the grisly conclusion coming up ahead.
Just on the strength of the writing, I would say Beautiful Country Burn Again is the best campaign writing I have come across since Hunter S. Thompson's 1972 dispatches for Rolling Stone, later published as Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail. Thompson gets a nice shout-out in the piece titled "Cheerleaders of the Star-Spangled Apocalypse," and justly so, but I would go so far as to say that I found Fountain's work a bit better suited to my current sensibilities. Much as I enjoyed, at the age of eighteen, the hallucinatory passages Thompson wove into his reportage, I did not much miss them at age sixty-four, and Fountain's general political outlook is (thankfully) a bit less anarcho-libertarian, a bit more principled social-democratic, than Thompson's.
If you have already read the Guardian pieces, the book is still worth picking up for a couple of a long pieces: the ninety-page "Iowa 2016: Riding the Roadkill Express," on the ever-lengthier, ever-more-intense, ever-more-dubious first stage of our presidential politics, and the fifty-page "Hillary Doesn't Live Here Anymore," a disquieting analysis of the depth of Senator Clinton's connections to Wall Street.
(I wonder if the Hillary piece did not appear in the Guardian out of some sense that the fall of 2016 was the wrong time to be jumping on Clinton--if that is the case, one can be grateful to Fountain for his tact, damning though the piece is.)
The book's final piece, "A Familiar Spirit," about the persistence of militant white supremacy in our politics, is also new and also worth having.
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