2 Books Like A Map of Future Ruins

Has Ben Fountain lived in Haiti? I don’t know, but I was utterly convinced by every detail of this novel set in the aftermath of the coup that deposed Haitian President Aristide. Fountain is great at limning the gray areas such as the compromises his Haitian characters – including the most idealistic - must make to survive. His American characters include a young man with a plan (that had not seemed insane at the outset), to start a scuba business on the Haitian coast, Embassy and CIA officers most of whom are both cynical and ignorant as they try to put in power someone who’ll be aligned with the US and not too much of a violent criminal. One CIA officer held my attention most. Of all the Americans, she cares the most about Haiti and its people, goes deeply into the culture, respects and even loves the Haitians she… show more.

His first novel, There There, made a strong impression on me. This one is more powerful still. Even if you have learned about the Sand Creek Massacre, the forced assimilation of Native Americans including the horrors at Indian boarding schools, and even if you’re familiar with the concept of intergenerational trauma, such “knowledge” hardly prepares you for the emotional wallop of this novel.

Orange offers vitally alive characters, starting with 19th-century Cheyenne survivor Jude Star and continuing to his present day descendants of the Red Feather/Bear Shield families as they persist through disaster, resilience, joy, and bafflement.

Through the author’s language and vision the reader can recognize the wounds of culture loss and dislocation while the characters themselves often struggle to understand where the hurt lies. Orange illuminates what could be abstract concepts, like identity, but his poetic prose and in-depth characterizations make the book sing and breathe.