Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk by Ben Fountain

The soldiers are treated well, limo’d, fed and beveraged. “You have given America back its pride,” says Norm, the Cowboys’ owner even as he accepts this praise, Billy thinks, “America? Really? The whole damn place?” That’s why they’re back in the U.S., heroes from a war in which little has gone right. Accompanying them is Albert Ratner, an award-winning Hollywood producer who promises them $100,000 each for the film rights to their story.īravo Squad fought bravely in a battle that was caught on video and went viral. If they’re lucky, they’ll brush up against Destiny’s Child, the halftime show’s star attraction. They have a full agenda: meet-and-greets with rich football fans, a news conference and a photo op with the cheerleaders. The day is Thanksgiving, and the eight Bravo Squad soldiers are being trucked out for a patriotic show during halftime at a Cowboys game. The novel takes place in one day, a compression of time that allows Fountain, who is in his 50s and previously published a collection of stories, to stretch Billy’s internal life to tragicomic proportions.

In Ben Fountain’s first novel, “Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk,” Billy and the other surviving members of Bravo Squad are home from Iraq, mid-war, on a victory tour. He is, by turns, all of the above what makes him special is what’s inside his head. But it’s also a bold announcement that Catch-22 is about to be updated for a new era … In Fountain’s razor-sharp, darkly comic novel the focus has shifted from bureaucracy to publicity, reflecting corresponding shifts in our culture … As they’re being shuttled from one staged event to another, Billy is subjected to the gauche iconography of the country he’s been fighting for: draft-dodging, platitude-mouthing millionaires and their trophy wives, holding court in owners’ skyboxes a scantily clad Beyonce entertaining football fans with a ridiculous military-themed halftime show the surreal presence of pom-pom-shaking Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders at a news conference in which Billy and the other Bravos are asked to describe the hell of war … There’s hardly a false note, or even a slightly off-pitch one, in Fountain’s sympathetic, damning and structurally ambitious novel.A casual observer might see in Billy Lynn a dutiful Iraq War soldier, a trash-talking 19-year-old popping a beer before noon, a muscled-up guy tussling with his buddy or a virgin falling for a Dallas Cowboys cheerleader.

The brief exchange between naive grunts and a grizzled veteran of Tinseltown is an obvious homage to Joseph Heller.

Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk by Ben Fountain