[A] highly entertaining novel ... The glue holding it all together is Fountain’s indefatigable prose, which fizzes with a Dickensian color that makes the novel a blast to read.
It lacks the anger and outrage that animated Fountain’s political reporting. It’s actually a magic realist fantasia ... I’m afraid I’m making Rasputin Swims the Potomac sound like more fun than it is ... The energetic prose of Fountain’s nonfiction gets noisy in a novel ... As a feat of novelizing, Rasputin consistently does better with setup than follow-through.
As a zany critique of authoritarian cults, the novel is superficially relevant. But one is constantly pulled up by the wrongness of the details ... Bizarrely, Mr. Fountain has cleaned up Mr. Trump’s well-documented foul mouth. The president in this book never curses, even when throwing backroom tantrums. What kind of satire does so much sanitizing?
[Fountain's] absurd new novel, Rasputin Swims the Potomac, is so timely it should win a Pulitzer Prize for Clairvoyance ... This is Fountain working in a broader, more outlandish register than fans will remember ... He demonstrates a remarkable fidelity to the toxic mix of comedy and cruelty that’s defined our era. The gags sometimes come almost too fast to register ... But like our presidential campaigns, Rasputin Swims the Potomac runs on too long. Satire thrives on brevity ... As zany as Rasputin Swims the Potomac is — Trump vs. a Russian Mystic! — it doesn’t deflate like a whoopee cushion.
A withering satire ... Timely and terrifying, Fountain’s version of the current and potentially future state of American politics and culture is simultaneously wild and absurd yet eerily plausible.
If anti-Trumpers went to the beach, instead of staying home with their social media and podcasts, Rasputin Swims the Potomac would provide many pages of slice and dice entertainment that won’t require a lot of close attention in the sun ... Much as I enjoy seeing Trump mocked, Fountain is sometimes predictable, occasionally repetitive, and his dialogue has a lot of 'how you doing?' filler. Fountain uses Rasputin as an occasion to investigate the roots of Trump-adjacent fascism and Trump’s admiration for that holy Russian tyrant Putin, but I think Fountain relies too much on slow-moving suspense.
