Peter Mountford's Travels

This month's Ampersand contributor, Peter Mountford, has been all over the world, and his contribution "The Pig" is based on just one of many travel stories that inspired his upcoming novel A Young Man's Guide to Late Capitalism (April, Mariner Books), a fictionalized version of his experiences working for a DC-based think tank in Ecuador and his travels in Bolivia. 

Though he never took part in butchering a pig as in his piece, the true stories behind Mountford's novel reveal the complexities of third world life intertwined inextricably with the first world and the difficulties when writing from experience. 

Why did you decide to pick this section for Ampersand?
I just kind of like this passage—I’ve read in public before and I enjoy the humor of that scene in the kitchen. Also, I like the warmth of it—you know, Gabriel enters this place feeling defensive and wary, but he’s quickly seduced by Lenka’s family, even her affable and brawny ex-husband. To me, that’s a big part of the book, the persistent loneliness of Gabriel in spite of appealing opportunities to be not lonely.  

What inspired this particular story?
Many people who've read the book have asked me this same question about this passage, maybe because it’s so odd and specific that one assumes that it must come from some personal experience, but, in fact, it's just completely made up. I’ve never had an experience like that. Lenka’s house, however, is actually based loosely on a friend's house in Quito, Ecuador—it was enormous but austere and basic, a lot of cinder-blocks and windowless rooms. And they had the entire extended family living there. 

What started you on the road to the book?
I wanted to write a character-driven and realistic book about a person entering the world of hedge funds and the international finance and so on, because I know that world intimately, and I've never read a book that has literary aspirations and is personal, but grapples with this material in a realistic way. And I've always been absolutely enthralled by Bolivia, which is a gorgeous and insane country. Bolivia has the most surreal history; they got into a war with Chile over a tax on this special kind of bat shit, and that's how Bolivia ended up losing its coastline and becoming land-locked: over guano. So, I thought I’d put those elements together into a book. 

What experiences from your travels are in the book? 
I find it very hard to separate the real experiences from the made-up stuff. I think it was Nabakov who once talked about how he’d been pillaging his own life for material for so long that the original memories themselves became muddled with the fictionalizations of the same. Eventually, he couldn’t tell what was made-up and what wasn’t. I feel the same.

That said, I know that my time living in Ecuador in my early twenties was a big influence on the book. I spent two years there writing for a shady DC-based think tank. And then, in terms of research, I went to Bolivia a couple times while writing. The mini-plot of the first chapter, when Gabriel is hunting for the Article IV Report, is more or less exactly an experience that I had. I definitely stayed at Hotel Gloria, where Gabriel resides, while I was in Bolivia.

Why did you decide to write a novel, as opposed to a non-fiction account of your travels on this subject?
I've tried writing non-fiction, and I can’t do it. I wish I could, as I’ve been informed that people read more non-fiction than fiction, but when I try to write memoir I tend to get distracted by all the details that are important or interesting to me, personally, if somewhat beside the point. I find fiction very liberating, there's no need to be completely honest or dishonest, that whole question is just not there to distract you. And I find I’m better able to keep the story focused on what matters, rather than allowing myself to indulge some funny but irrelevant tangent.

You've been in both Latin America as well as Sri Lanka, is there a binding characteristic to different parts of the Third World?
Well, poverty, of course, and proximity to the equator. But those places have something else in common, too, and it's not easy to put your finger it. A kind of wildness, I guess, or capacity for mayhem. The rule of law just seems a bit more tenuous than in the more advanced economies. 

I lived in southern Mexico briefly and while there I once visited this town called San Juan de Chamula, which was the home base of the Zapatistas in the 1995 peasant uprising, and I noticed this room opening onto the town’s market. There was no door to this room, just a large metal gate and it was padlocked shut. There were a couple forlorn looking dudes inside. And it occurred to me that this room here was the town’s jail. It was basically just a storefront with a locked gate instead of a door. The prisoners could reach through and bum cigarettes from passersby—I remember they were trying to score a taco from me. It felt like I’d wandered into a different century.

How would you describe late capitalism? Was there a specific experience that made the issues of capitalism hit hard for you, or was it a growing awareness through your time?
These issues have been in my life for a long time. I grew up in DC, which is as class-divided a city as exists in this country, and I also lived in Sri Lanka as a child, which was then an extremely poor country. I ended up taking a lot of economics classes in college, and wrote about economics for a think tank after college. So I’ve been steeped in these issues for a long time.

In terms of late capitalism, the truth is I've always felt a little ambivalent about that term as I think that capitalism is, in fact, alive and well. But I like the sense of foreboding that's implied by that use of “late,” how it implies the movement of history, and that it hints at how the entire structure upon which the novel is taking place is profoundly unsteady. Because the novel takes place in 2005, which was a very specific and very precarious time in the life of the global pool of money. Maybe "pool" is too passive a term. Maybe it's better to say that the book takes place at what was the highest crest of a huge wave of capitalist fervor, it takes place just before that wave broke with spectacularly catastrophic consequences.

Do you believe that morality is inherently tied to economics, that when big money is at stake, morality will be as well?
Yes and no. Morality and power have a relationship, and power and money have a relationship, so morality and money are connected by the transitive property. But, strictly speaking, from an economics standpoint, they're decidedly unrelated. That Gordon Gekko line about greed being good crucially misstates the issue, because greed is neither good nor bad. In economics, there’s a variable for happiness or satisfaction, it’s called “utility” and is often represented by the letter “u” in mathematical formulas used by economists. However, there’s no variable for morality, because it can’t be measured, even in the abstract. So it literally doesn’t exist. Or, it’s beside the point. 

Look for Mountford's novel in April from Mariner books, and attend the book's launch party at the Richard Hugo House on April 11.