Ben Fountain thinks that the election of Donald J. Trump has led to a crisis as calamitous as the Civil War and the Great Depression. This, of course, is a stretch. That's the point. Fountain's mission with his forceful new essay collection, “Beautiful Country Burn Again,” is to pull readers out of their shortsighted social media stupor to consider the state of social and economic justice in America.
Not that he tells you so easily. Fountain doesn't offer a neat, tidy story about the rise of Trump and the implications of his presidency. “Beautiful Country Burn Again” is a whirling journey centered on a knotty, academic equation that Fountain believes is both the cause of America's tensions and the impetus for constant reinvention: “Profit proportionate to freedom; plunder correlative to subjugation.” If that seems hard to understand, it's because it is. At times, I wished Fountain would dumb it down a bit, but the man Malcolm Gladwell labeled a “genius” refuses.
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