Like muscle cars and bomber jackets, they don’t make them like Philip Caputo anymore.
“I actually learned to fly over Saudi Arabia many, many years ago,” says the 63-year-old novelist, beginning yet another tantalizing tale from his den in Norwalk, Conn. Caputo is talking about the research he did to write his new novel, “Acts of Faith,” a Conradian tale about Westerners smuggling aid (and sometimes guns) into southern Sudan in the mid-1990s.
“Someone gave me the controls of a little plane, and I flew it for 400 miles. But that’s a long story and for another day,” he adds.
Unlike his novels, which often end with a bang, if not a boom, many of Caputo’s oral stories peter out this way, as if the hour is simply young and the setting too provincial to break out the hard stuff. Whatever he leaves out of speech, however, Caputo has funneled into fiction. Over the years, he has published five novels, expanding, exaggerating and stretching his experience as a war correspondent, traveler and soldier into some of the most interesting adventure-driven tales written in the past two decades.
“Acts of Faith” might be his most ambitious book yet. Like Norman Rush’s “Mating” and “Mortals,” it casts the romantic and interpersonal wrangling of a cast of Westerners against the turmoil of Africa. If Jane Austen and Botswana were Rush’s inspirations, Conrad and the United Nations’ failures in northern Africa are on the table here.
“Acts of Faith” unfolds before the backdrop of Sudan’s grueling and costly civil war, which reached a peak in the 1990s, when the Khartoum- backed Muslim government bombed parts of the Christian, or animist, south. The U.N. was not effective at relieving this humanitarian crisis, given its fear of intervention and troop loss, not to mention America’s boondoggle in Somalia.
Into this breach step characters like Douglas Braithwaite, a swaggering American aviator who claims to have flown in the first Gulf War and wants to bring that expertise to bear on the current quagmire. His idea is to create an airline that will fly humanitarian aid to starving rebels and into regions where the U.N. won’t go – and make money at it, of course.
Caputo came across such mercenary pilots when he was in Sudan several years ago, but as happens in his novel, their cargo was not usually strictly aid.
“I did fly with some relief flights, and I flew with a guy who was delivering khat into Somalia. But most of what I saw was video,” he says. “They took footage of their trips like they were tourists, which was weird because they had these clips of people grinning before piles of rocket launchers and rocket-propelled grenades.”
Caputo’s cast of characters begins with nearly pure intentions, but they quickly get complicated, both romantically and politically. One of Braithwaite’s partners, a multiethnic former Kenyan soccer star named Fitzhugh Martin, falls in love with an Anglo Kenyan whose family’s money backs the whole enterprise. An evangelical from Iowa named Quinette Hardin falls in love with and marries a leader from the People’s Liberation Army and becomes a passionate believer in armed resistance. Suddenly, to Quinette and to others, shipments of food and medical supplies don’t feel like enough.
This question of what is enough intervention, and what visitation rights Westerners assume around the world, is something Caputo has been chewing on for three decades. The concern first came to him (as it did to much of the American left) through Vietnam, which Caputo signed up for willingly in a boyhood quest for danger. Over three years of service, however, Caputo watched himself transform from an ardent believer into a ruthless killer, an evolution he chronicles in his classic memoir of Vietnam, “A Rumor of War.”
After he left the Marines, Caputo channeled his urgency into reporting, becoming one of the Chicago Tribune’s star correspondents in Afghanistan, Beirut and Jerusalem. He won an Overseas Press Club Award for his experience of being captured by Palestinian guerrillas and a Pulitzer for a story about election fraud in Chicago.
Caputo described these adventures in his 1991 “imagined” memoir, “Means of Escape,” but in person, like many men of his generation, he does not tell these war stories readily. Judging by the pictures on the walls, there are some scorchers. One depicts a bearded, much younger Caputo standing between two gunmen on a mountaintop in Afghanistan. In another, Caputo lies in a hospital stretcher, face grimaced in agony, looking at an X-ray of his ankle with a white-coated doctor. About the tamest thing in the room are some close-up pictures of lions in the wild, which he later explains were made by his third wife, Leslie, an editor for Consumer Reports, who brews us two joltingly strong cups of coffee and disappears.
In fact, it seems that to Caputo, his novels – rather than memory – are the connection to that time. And they are his passport to exploring the moral ambiguity that he witnessed. “I am not interested in special-effects novels,” says Caputo, explaining his appreciation for straightforward storytelling. “I am very interested in character and what happens to ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances.”
It’s what he has been thinking about for several decades now, what drives him out of the house in the morning, across his back lawn and into his study. There, beneath century-old pines and Norway maple, he finds his wormhole to Africa.
John Freeman is a writer in New York.
Acts of Faith
By Philip Caputo
Knopf, 688 pages, $26.95
