Let’s start with the red lightning, but that’s just part of it.
In Ben Fountain’s kinetic new novel “Rasputin Swims the Potomac,” published June 9, a president whose name is redacted has been approved by the Supreme Court to run for a third term. Then a “weeping sickness” sweeps the country, tanking a sputtering economy and his polls, all with a background of extreme and strange meteorological events.
When a pro wrestler known as Rasputin shows a knack for both calming the weeper-wailers and attracting adulation, the president chooses him for his running mate. But the gigantic Rasputin, who profoundly identifies with the mystical counsel to the last Russian Tsar (he even sports a fake Russian accent), gets a little too popular …
In a “get” as impressive as TACAW’s gift in hosting a free literary event, the author of this painfully salient satire is to visit the Roaring Fork Valley in the first week of his promotional tour. Ben Fountain (benfountain.com), multiple-award-winning author of five books including the hit “Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk,” will appear at TACAW on June 16 at 6:30 pm, doors to open at 5:30 (RSVP at tacaw.org).
The reason is another stellar arts resource of Basalt: Mitzi Rapkin, host of the live podcast “First Draft: A Dialogue on Writing,” who cranks out an episode a week as a “labor of love.” (She has a Patreon donation option at firstdraftwriters.com.)
A lifelong reader, Rapkin has, beginning in June 2013, archived 579 literary podcasts, with a total of over 600. The 66 entries in the A’s (authors are listed per first name) alone include four each of Ada Limón and Alice McDermott, also Abraham Verghese, Alexandra Fuller, Ann Patchett, Anne Lamott, Anthony Doerr, and Anuradha Roy. Rapkin follows book news and is now on many publicists’ lists.
“I read a lot of books, and though I like a lot, I love very few,” Rapkin says. “‘Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk’ is still in my top 20. It is moving, witty, sharp and beautiful writing.” She interviewed Fountain in 2015 and 2023, and he was up for another round.
“She’s a very smart, conscientious, diligent reader and interviewer,” Fountain says.
Rapkin says, “I hope people will come to this literary event. I hope they will consider it a present.” The new novel will be available for sale and signing onsite, from White River Books.
Last week, The Sopris Sun also interviewed the amiable, reflective Fountain about the book he has called “satirical magical realism,” in which we follow the action through the alternating viewpoints of Faith Spack, 26, a former teen country-music reality-show star, who is in the White House as a liaison for a reality show based therein; and a professor-turned-journalist, the middle-aged Covid widower Clarence Thomas Jr. (No relation.)
Excerpts from the interview, done from his home in North Carolina, are below. I had marveled at the ride that is the book, though also found it chilling; first laughed out loud on page 7, at the image of Faith and other junior comms aides in the White House watching the TV wall and “lashing” their phones (I circled dozens of other action-packed verbs throughout the book); and I turned the last 20 pages faster and faster.
To the question arising from page 1 of why the president’s name is redacted, when the identity is crystalline, Fountain says the reasons are not legal: “At some point in the second draft I just got really tired of seeing that name, and I feel like that name is too much with us anyway.”
The forthcoming interview with Fountain has been edited for brevity.
Sopris Sun: You’ll know that we are in a drought here and entering fire season. Your book has many references to crazy weather across the land. Is that influenced by living in North Carolina with its hurricanes? Or just modern weather events?
Fountain: Just the crazy weather in general in the last 25 years. It’s increasingly unpredictable, increasingly violent, increasingly destructive and to me it’s becoming part of the fabric of our collective life and our individual lives. If we are thinking individuals, if we are aware individuals, it becomes part of the complex of our anxieties and worries and frustration. It’s pretty clear to me that we’re being damn fools with regard to our glaring inaction, with respect to this very real and growing danger. Some drastic things have to be done, and they are not being done.
In high school I took a Russian history class, and of course we loved learning about Rasputin, the salacious mystic who survived being poisoned and shot, only to die, in our teacher’s version, of drowning.
Yeah, it’s a little bit murky but it’s clear that he was poisoned with major, major doses that would have killed any normal human being, and then he was shot three times and he seemed to have expired, but some of the reports say he wasn’t dead yet, so they threw him in the river — in December — and when his body was retrieved there was evidence that he was alive in the river. He was a superhuman specimen.
How did you choose Rasputin for the character’s persona?
I started writing this book in April 2023. I had the feeling that Trump had a really good shot of being re-elected in 2024, and I was thinking just how masterfully he has blurred the line between fantasy and reality throughout his career: in real estate, in reality TV and now in politics. I was thinking, if we continue on the same trajectory of politicians successfully blurring the line between reality and fantasy to their own benefit, what would be the next step?
The world of pro wrestling came to mind because that’s famously fake yet not fake … So I thought, how about a figure from pro wrestling who gets into politics? And there is precedent for that, Jesse Ventura in Minnesota, but he ran as himself … How about a wrestler who takes it one step further and runs as his persona and never breaks character? Then Rasputin sailed into my head.
[I found] uncanny similarities between his time and this time in the U.S. The last days of the czar was a time of collective hysteria in Russia. There were all kinds of quack religions springing up, all kinds of faith healing, all kinds of get-rich-quick schemes floating around, tremendous corruption in politics, political gridlock and a very dissatisfied and restless population.
Where does the healing touch come from? You’ve given him supernatural powers.
Yeah, the original Rasputin was alleged to have mystical healing powers. He was famous for saving the life of the son of the Tsar, a hemophiliac, a number of times. He did seem to have a special touch with people … When the Tsarevich was having a health crisis, everybody was in hysterics, and Rasputin would come in and calm everybody down. He would sit at the bedside of the Tsarevich, the young boy, hold his hand, murmur to him, ‘Everything’s going to be fine,’ and say some prayers …
In the book, this Rasputin [has the] ability to heal people who are affected by the weeping sickness and [effect] other miracle cures. I think they can all be explained in the same way. He’s capable of great gentleness and attentiveness towards other people, and that’s exactly what we all need in life, right?
Except he heals a traumatic brain injury.
Yeah, great point. It’s a mystery.
Why name Clarence Thomas, Clarence Thomas?
Well I’m not sure I can give a satisfactory answer to that, except that the idea came to me … He’s a Black man of a certain age, a comfortable age, and he’s a thinking person, a well-read person … who’s very much aware of the world and trying to understand what’s going on in the world. To put this burden on him of this name, the same name as a Supreme Court justice whose philosophy and judicial record are anathema to him, just puts an extra layer of friction in his life. In a way it raises the stakes for him. He’s never allowed to relax. In narrative terms, having that name allows him to get into places he might not otherwise get into.
Are you prescient and/or did you have a little luck in putting a pro wrestler / performer at the center of your book as the president is building an arena for a UFC mixed martial arts event, a cage match, at the same time your book comes out?
It’s coincidence and luck and maybe just having achieved some degree of accuracy in channeling the vibe of what Trump is, what kind of state the country is in, in this moment. I find it really a degrading sport to put two human beings in a cage and have them beat the snuff out of each other as a spectacle.
You seem to have guessed wrong with Marjorie Taylor Greene as VP, now that she has left MAGA.
Well, no, I think I got it exactly right. I turned in the first draft of the book in September 2024 when she was a wholehearted Trump supporter, and she continued that way well into 2025, by the time the book was done … I just figured, Trump, Marjorie Taylor Greene, sooner or later they’re going to have a falling out … When the book starts she’s the VP but she hasn’t been in the White House for months because they’re on the outs, and pretty quickly she announces that she’s running against him for the nomination.
Where else did you project, right or wrong?
Trump won. And we have seen a considerable upsurge in political violence in our streets. And he is using law enforcement as his personal enforcers … But that’s not really the point, trying to guess correctly. What I was after with this book is as much about us as Americans and America as it is about Trump. It was our electoral system that brought him to power, not once but twice. The question is, is this kind of thing going to keep happening? What is in us that allows these things to happen?
Is that your takeaway?
That’s certainly the question. My answer as to what the antidote would be to this kind of collective insanity that we’re mired in is we have got to school ourselves into better discernment: how to discern reality from fantasy, truth from falsehood, facts from fakeness. And we really as individuals and a society need to get our wits together and work very hard at discerning what the truth is and the correct course of action. That’s the takeaway. And that it’s hard.
There are many cultural references, from films to books. Did you get the attacking birds from Hitchcock (“The Birds”)?
Actually, yes, because I remember reading an interview with Hitchcock and somebody asked him what’s going on with these birds, and he said, well, it’s nature’s revenge.
The book reminded me of “Primary Colors” in my sense that the author seemed to have been in the room for many scenes. Did you use your experience of covering the 2016 election for The Guardian?
Oh, that’s a wonderful book, one of the great American political novels.
I got in the room to the extent that reporters got in the room, like for briefings and going to rallies and being in the press bleachers with everybody else. I didn’t get any inside track, and so to me creating a credible political world, the world of the book, was important. There were a couple books in particular that I went to school on. One was called “Weapons of Mass Delusion” by a very fine journalist named Robert Draper, and another one was “Frankly, We Did Win This Election,” by another good reporter, Michael Bender.
You realize when you sit down and try to write a novel there’s all these gaps in your knowledge, like what exactly are the titles of all these people who are hanging around the West Wing. Who’s that and who’s this and what is the layout and what is the layout of Air Force 1 … I had to know a certain degree about that world, the nuts and bolts of it, and then try to imagine my way into what was going on in those rooms, and in Air Force 1, and then you use your reading, your experience of life, your education, and try to imagine your way into that world.
I was a lawyer for a bunch of years, and I think I had some feel for what happens in rooms where people are pressing for advantage, whether for power or money, and just the dynamics and how they might play out.
Did you walk or boat the swim route on the Potomac River?
[Laughs] I really should have at least walked the Mount Vernon Trail or gotten my butt up there on a boat. I did not. I went online and used Google Earth and maps and tracked it out.
Tides and winds?
I just kind of let it rip. I wanted there to be a substantial degree of difficulty in that swim. And so I played God for a little while and would make the tides go in and out and make the winds blow.
How does Rasputin manage?
Well, he’s physically a very strong person, a person of great will, obviously of iron will. He had good handlers … I think human beings are capable of extraordinary feats when they put their minds to it.
So this book is not necessarily supernatural. Except maybe the red lightning.
Lots of uncanny things happen in the book, various mysterious things, but we’re surrounded in our daily lives by mysterious, uncanny things … As far as the red lightning I dreamed about it one night. Then the next day I was wondering did I see it or did I dream it? Because it seemed so real. [Laughs] I can’t explain the red lightning. But so much is being done to Mother Earth and the atmosphere and the weather, it wouldn’t surprise me.