The best novel I read in 2012 for idle diversion, as opposed to those I read to review (which included some gems), is Ben Fountain's Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk, a first novel that follows the author's justly acclaimed short-story collection, Brief Encounters with Che Guevara. The present book joins a growing body of novels about the screen age's dominant species of bad faith: the manufacture of "reality" as a consumer product and means of control. Put that way, it sounds joyless, knuckle-rapping, and 100 percent simple-minded, but the books I have in mind are exactly the reverse. They are acerbic black comedies and all the more ingeniously devastating for it. I am thinking of such novels as Max Barry's The Company, Jess Walter's The Zero and Beautiful Ruins (both of which I did review with pleasure), and, at a stretch, I might add this year's The Fear Index, a chilling, strangely underrated thriller by Robert Harris.
Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk is set in the now-demolished Texas Stadium during the presidency of George W. Bush. Nineteen- year-old Billy joined the Army right out of high school as an alternative to an ironclad felony charge for trashing the car of his sister's former fiancé and chasing the despicable would-be M.B.A. with a crowbar. He had his reasons. We meet him back from Iraq, at the end of a two-week "Victory Tour" with the eight surviving physically able members of his unit, a squad Fox News, in its branding wisdom, has dubbed Bravo Company. The network has anointed the soldiers heroes for a bloody action at a place called Al-Ansakar Canal; and, though the men were certainly brave — Billy foremost among them for trying to save his dying buddy — the crucial detail is that the battle was caught on film, footage now "viraling through the culture." Only two days away from returning to Iraq, Bravo is sharing with Beyoncé the role of halftime pièce de résistance for the Thanksgiving Day game between Cowboys and Bears. At the same time, the squad is party to a possible movie deal being drummed up by a Hollywood creature called Albert ("black cashmere overcoat and cashmere scarf, and sleek, dainty loafers that appear to be made of pliable chocolate bars").
Here I have to say that if I had not been assured and reassured by my very best friend that this novel was for me, I might have bailed out at page 39, the second time the format explodes into scattered words and phrases:
"terrRr
Eye-rack,
Eaaaar-rock,
Sod'm"
And so on, stutter-stepping down the page. Only a few more such eruptions occur, but why they do is a genuine mystery, because the rest of the book is simply, unimpeachably brilliant.
Let's start with Texas Stadium, rising hideously to swell to "Death Star proportions" as Bravo approaches it in a stretch Hummer. Though a Texan, Billy has never actually seen the place except "through the expurgating medium of TV." It is a horror, with greater horror underpinning the image: The stadium's inner spaces, even those carved out for owner and rich patrons, are cheerless and shoddy, "concrete walls and cheap all-weather carpet that wicks the cold up through the floor in a palpable draft." At night, the stadium plaza "is lit like a prison exercise yard, all glaring white lights and jabby shadows." And the immense compass of the stands is an existential nightmare: Climbing up the rows, Bill finds himself "fighting the pull of all that huge hollow empty stadium space, which is trying to suck him backward like an undertow." This dreadful place distills the truth of America media culture, the force that has transformed Bravo from insignificant human beings to a "floating hologram of context and cue," and that truth is that behind the veil of fantasy and wishful thinking lies a crude and ugly world.
Everything — or at least the idea of everything — is laid on for the heroes: turkey dinner, souvenir footballs, "personalized" photos of themselves with owner Norm Oglesby, introduction to the cheerleaders (bodies "firm as steel-belted radials"), and endless, burdensome adoration. The last comes in the shape of their own huge images on the Jumbotron, the pious, plucking hands of countless fans, and ecstasies of onanistic gratitude from people for whom emotion can be reality because they have nothing at stake, people, that is, who have never, and never will, set foot in a combat boot. For Billy: His ordeal becomes theirs and vice versa, some sort of mystical transference takes place?. They say thank you over and over and with growing fervor, they know they're being good when they think of the troops and their eyes shimmer with love for themselves and this tangible proof of their goodness. One woman bursts into tears, so shattering is her gratitude. Another asks if we are winning, and Billy says we're working hard. "You and your brother soldiers are preparing the way," one man murmurs, and Billy knows better than to ask the way to what. The next man points to, almost touches, Billy's Silver Star. "That's some serious hardware you got," he says gruffly, projecting a flinty, man-of-the- world affection. "Thanks," Billy says, although that never seems quite the right response. "I read the article in Time," the man continues, and now he does touch the medal, which seems nearly as lewd as if he'd reached down and stroked Billy's balls. "Be proud," the man tells him, "you earned this."
Rarely has a war been waged with such effortless, gaseous self- congratulation as this one, and Fountain is a virtuoso of its fulsome, self- regarding banalities, unctuous bromides, and the patter of the herd: every blatting note perfectly rendered. An oilman tells of his own steadfast commitment: "Some of my friends' kids are serving over there with you?. So it's a personal thing with me, boosting domestic production, lessening our dependence on foreign oil. I figure the better I do my job, the sooner we can bring you young men home."
Even though Billy is somewhat more articulate of thought than he might have been were he not a literary creation, he has a back-story that fleshes him out as a believable character. His are the eyes and the sensibility through which underlying reality is glimpsed, one whose animating force, he comes to see, is money. Life in the Army has been a crash course in the scale of the world, which is such that he finds himself in a constant state of wonder as to how things come to be. Stadiums, for example. Airports. The interstate highway system. Wars.? He imagines a shadowy, math-based parallel world that exists not just beside but amid the physical world, a transparent interlay of Matrix-style numbers through which flesh-and-blood humans move like fish through kelp. This is where the money lives, an inter-based realm of code and logic, geometric modules of cause and effect.? It seems the airiest thing there is and yet the realest, but how you enter that world he has no idea except by passage through that other foreign country called college.
Even if they survive their next tour of duty — and however many more the present "stop-loss" policy generates — Billy and his fellow grunts will never be part of that world. And just how little they are valued in fact — which is to say, in financial terms — is made increasingly clear in the darkly comic negotiations over the hoped-for movie option agreement, the proposed figure dwindling to peanuts. It is the bootless dickering over making the film, as well as Billy's unlikely romance with a cheerleader and some gratifyingly bad behavior on the part of Bravo that serve as the book's plot. Anything more complex would be wasted in the boisterous presence of the exceedingly funny, wickedly skewering set pieces, each lit up by Fountain's genius for metaphor and imagery. The book is effervescent with them as "players come jogging onto the field like rhinos on the plod," and Billy is gobbled up by "the medias" whose "cameras-click away like parakeets cracking seeds" and who "hoover up his words with sleek little recording gadgets that look like protein bars." One has to fight the urge to quote the whole book.
Throughout this marvelous novel, the truly fantastic sham represented by stadium and players, and the power of the money that engendered them grows: If only this were reality, the solution to the unraveling war in Iraq would be at hand: Send in the NFL! Strangely — or otherwise — when Billy invites the players to do just that, join the Army, one millionaire warrior snorts with astonishment: " 'We got jobs, Fah like, wha, three years? Break our contract an' all.' Hilarious. They're laughing. Little squeals and snuffling yips escape their mouths."
The whole glorious novel is an intoxicating mixture of flamboyance and deadpan, of high-caliber wit and perfectly measured bathos. This is media America at war. Mission accomplished.
Katherine A. Powers reviews books widely and has been a finalist for the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing from the National Book Critics Circle. Reviewer: Katherine A. Powers
Publishers Weekly
Unfolding over the course of one Thanksgiving Day, Fountain’s (Brief Encounters with Che Guevara) second novel follows Bravo Company, the eight survivors of a savage clash with Iraqi insurgents, on the last leg of their government-sponsored “Victory Tour” in this witty and ironic sendup of middle America, Fox News politics, and, of all things, football. One minute, the soldiers are drinking Jack and Cokes, mobbed by hordes of well-wishers demanding autographs and seeking “the truth” about what’s “really going on” over there; the next, they’re in the bowels of Texas Stadium, reluctantly hobnobbing with the Dallas Cowboys and their cheerleaders, brokering a movie deal with a smarmy Hollywood producer, and getting into a drunken scuffle with the stadium’s disgruntled road crew, all in a series of uncomfortable scenes that border on the farcical. Texan Billy Lynn is the 19-year-old hero who learns about life and himself on his visit home to his family, and the palpable camaraderie between soldiers ground the book. But despite much valid pontificating on what it means to be a soldier and the chasm that exists between the American public’s perception of the war and the blunt reality of it, the often campy writing style and canned dialogue (“We, like, we wanna do somethin’ like you. Extreme, you know, cap some Muslim freaks...”) prevents the message from being delivered effectively. Agent: Heather Schroder, ICM. (May)
Entertainment Weekly
The best book about the Iraq War and Destiny’s Child that you’ll ever read.
Texas Books in Review
To call Fountain’s work enjoyable would be an understatement because it quite simply is one of the best novels written in the past five years.
BookRiot
[A] wonderfully readable book [which] does something similar to Why Are We in Vietnam?, asking hard questions about the cultural short-sightedness that contributed to our involvement in Iraq. As a veteran myself, I can attest that it’s spot on.
Philadelphia City Paper
…wickedly affecting…Billy Lynn has courted some Catch-22 comparisons, and they’re well-earned. Fountain is a whiz at lining up plausible inanities and gut-twisting truths for the Bravos to suffer through.
Sacramento Bee
The chasm between the reality and the glorification of war hasn’t been this surreal since Joseph Heller’s Catch-22.
The Millions
Here is a novel that is deeply engaged with our contemporary world, timely and timeless at once. Plus, it’s such fun to read.
Malcolm Gladwell
So much of Fountain’s work...reads with an easy grace.... [S]ometimes genius is anything but rarefied; sometimes it’s just the thing that emerges after twenty years of working at your kitchen table.
Cleveland Plain Dealer
While Fountain undoubtedly knows his Graham Greene and Paul Theroux, his excursions into foreign infernos have an innocence all their own. In between his nihilistic descriptions, a boyishness keeps peeking out, cracking one-liners and admiring the amazing if benighted scenery.
Madison Smartt Bell
Ben Fountain’s Halftime is as close to the Great American Novel as anyone is likely to come these days—an extraordinary work that captures and releases the unquiet spirit of our age, and will probably be remembered as one of the important books of this decade.
Barbara's Picks
Fountain is the Pen/Hemingway Award winner of the bristly and satisfying Brief Encounters with Che Guevara, so I expect lots from this book.
Pat Conroy
Ben Fountain stormed to the front lines of American fiction when he published his astonishing...Brief Encounters with Che Guevara. His first novel will raise his stature and add to his splendid reputation. Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk is both hilarious and heartbreaking.
Karl Marlantes
[T]he Catch-22 of the Iraq War....Fountain applies the heat of his wicked sense of humor while you face the truth of who we have become. Live one day inside Billy Lynn’s head and you’ll never again see our soldiers or America in the same way.
Shelf Awareness
A truly wondrous first novel.
Margot Livesey
Passionate, irreverent, utterly relevant Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk offers an unforgettable portrait of a reluctant hero. Ben Fountain writes like a man inspired and his razor sharp exploration of our contemporary ironies will break your heart.
The Rumpus
[A] masterly . . . tightly structured book [with] a sprawling amount of drama and emotion.
Minneapolis Star Tribune
Fountain’s strength as a writer is that he not only can conjure up this all-too-realistic-sounding mob, but also the young believably innocent soul for our times, Specialist Billy Lynn. And from the first page I found myself rooting for him, often from the edge of my seat.
Los Angeles Times
Darkly comic…Rarely does such a ruminative novel close with such momentum.
Esquire
It’s a darkly humorous satire about the war at home, absurd and believable at the same time.
Tampa Bay Times
The Iraq war hasn’t yet had its Catch-22 or Slaughterhouse-Five, but Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk is a contender… A wicked sense of humor, wonderful writing and, beneath the anger and outrage, a generous heart.
Sports Illustrated
Seething, brutally funny…[Fountain] leaves readers with a fully realized band of brothers…Fountain’s readers will never look at an NFL Sunday, or at America, in quite the same way.
Nancy Pearl
A brilliantly conceived first novel . . . The irony, sorrow, anger and examples of cognitive dissonance that suffuse this novel make it one of the most moving and remarkable novels I’ve ever read.
Huffington Post
Ben Fountain combines blistering, beautiful language with razor-sharp insight…and has written a funny novel that provides skewering critiques of America’s obsession with sports, spectacle, and war.
The Daily Beast
Biting, thoughtful, and absolutely spot-on. . . . This postmodern swirl of inner substance, yellow ribbons, and good(ish) intentions is at the core of Ben Fountain’s brilliant Bush-era novel.
New York Times Book Review
Brilliantly done . . . grand, intimate, and joyous.
Harper's Magazine
Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk is a big one. This is the brush-clearing Bush book we’ve been waiting for.
The New Yorker
Fountain’s excellent first novel follows a group of soldiers at a Dallas Cowboys game on Thanksgiving Day…Through the eyes of the titular soldier, Fountain creates a minutely observed portrait of a society with woefully misplaced priorities. [Fountain has] a pitch-perfect ear for American talk…
Washington Post
A masterful echo of ‘Catch-22,’ with war in Iraq at the center. …a gut-punch of a debut novel…There’s hardly a false note, or even a slightly off-pitch one, in Fountain’s sympathetic, damning and structurally ambitious novel.
San Francisco Chronicle
Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk is not merely good; it’s Pulitzer Prize-quality good . . . A bracing, fearless and uproarious satire of how contemporary war is waged and sold to the American public.
New York Times
[An] inspired, blistering war novel…Though it covers only a few hours, the book is a gripping, eloquent provocation. Class, privilege, power, politics, sex, commerce and the life-or-death dynamics of battle all figure in Billy Lynn’s surreal game day experience.
Kirkus Reviews
Hailed as heroes on a stateside tour before returning to Iraq, Bravo Squad discovers just what it has been fighting for. Though the shell-shocked humor will likely conjure comparisons with Catch-22 and Slaughterhouse Five, the debut novel by Fountain (following his story collection, Brief Encounters with Che Guevara, 2006) focuses even more on the cross-promotional media monster that America has become than it does on the absurdities of war. The entire novel takes place over a single Thanksgiving Day, when the eight soldiers (with their memories of the two who didn't make it) find themselves at the promotional center of an all-American extravaganza, a nationally televised Dallas Cowboys football game. Providing the novel with its moral compass is protagonist Billy Lynn, a 19-year-old virgin from small-town Texas who has been inflated into some kind of cross between John Wayne and Audie Murphy for his role in a rescue mission documented by an embedded Fox News camera. In two days, the Pentagon-sponsored "Victory Tour" will end and Bravo will return to the business as usual of war. In the meantime, they are dealing with a producer trying to negotiate a film deal ("Think Rocky meets Platoon," though Hilary Swank is rumored to be attached), glad-handing with the corporate elite of Cowboy fandom (and ownership) and suffering collateral damage during a halftime spectacle with Beyoncé. Over the course of this long, alcohol-fueled day, Billy finds himself torn, as he falls in love (and lust) with a devout Christian cheerleader and listens to his sister try to persuade him that he has done his duty and should refuse to go back. As "Americans fight the war daily in their strenuous inner lives," Billy and his foxhole brethren discover treachery and betrayal beyond anything they've experienced on the battlefield. War is hell in this novel of inspired absurdity.
