Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk by Ben FountainMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
I’d heard a lot of good things about this book, but it took my old student Alex Barbolish recommending it to get it to the front of my queue. I’m glad he did since this is the best book I’ve read in weeks, and it strikes me as one of the best mirrors of our moment that I’ve seen.
It’s hard not to think of this book in conversation with other American war novels, particularly Catch-22. Both of these are satires, even farces, yet there’s something much gentler about Billy Lynn. If Joseph Heller was trying to channel his fresh anger and outrage at the idea of war, Ben Fountain is dealing with a refrain: we all know war is stupid and, in a post-Vietnam era with a war founded on what many of us have come to see as Bush’s “lies” about the real threat of Saddam, it’s old news that governments risk young men’s lives for obscure purposes.
If the news is old, though, the story is always new. Billy has heroically come to the near rescue of one of his friends in an experience that seems more authentic on television than through his memory or his testimony. It’s been since Hemingway (and maybe even Crane) that we recognize how difficult it is to tell your own war story, but Bill has to discover that truth all over again.
Instead of going down the earnest path of, most notably, Tim O’Brien, though, Fountain explores the problem through absurdity. Here are Billy and his friends, a day before going back to Iraq, being celebrated by the Dallas Cowboys and weighed for participation in a major motion picture.
If Catch-22 puts its satire in neon, this is done in water color. Fountain has a great capacity for letting the absurd sneak up on us. His caricature of the Cowboys owner reveals itself only slowly. (And it’s all the funnier if you know, as most of us do, the original in Jerry Jones.) He nails the voice, the self-importance, and the blindness to hypocrisy, and the result is a gradual juxtaposition of a very silly, frighteningly influential man alongside the decency of a common soldier.
The sub-plot of the cheerleaders works brilliantly, too. Against all odds, one beautiful girl is “really into” Billy, and he has to toggle between such extraordinary good fortune and the realization that his commitment to the army will almost certainly take it away from him. She is a dream girl, but he begins to realize she is necessarily just that: a dream who can’t exist in real life, the real life of what the novel calls at one wonderful point, “the best of the bottom third of their generation.” (I may have that quote off a little, but the spirit is there.)
If all those details and that mastery of tone weren’t enough, Fountain also finds a thoroughly satisfying metaphor for the heart of this book. If the idea of a ‘long walk at half-time’ doesn’t quite nail what’s going on, the title does evoke the underlying insight of the book. We’re at a cultural moment when we simply don’t have the apparatus to appreciate the experience of people like Billy, ordinary, even small people who find themselves in the middle of great events they neither understand nor endorse. We’re all caught in spectacle, and the images of our experience threaten to drown out that experience itself.
I’ve only begun to scratch the surface of what makes this work so well. It’s a terrific book, and it will be good to see whether Fountain can deliver again next time.
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New review from 2020
ReplyDeleteI am re-reading this one as part of teaching it to a class that is, in these days of quarantine, suddenly on-line. I am glad to say I find it as clever, funny, and unsettling as the first time I read it.
The premise alone sells it for me. Billy Lynn and his Bravo company have been flown stateside from the war in Iraq. By strange chance, a Fox News crew was embedded with them when they were attacked. One was killed and another grievously wounded but, under intense fire, Billy tended to his dying comrade and took out several of the insurgents. All on TV.
The army brings these ready-made heroes home for a break, and the novel takes place over their final day, the heart of which takes place as they are feted at a Dallas Cowboys game.
The most memorable part of this, the part that distinguishes it as my favorite recent American war novel (ahead even of Phil Klay’s wonderful Redeployment) is that consistent surreal quality. The men are treated like celebrities, but it’s a fragile treatment. They’re allowed to be high-profile for the duration of the game, complete with attention from cheerleaders and the opportunity to stand next to Beyonce and Destiny’s Child, but they’re being shipped back that very evening.
I like that word “surreal,” though. Throughout the book, Fountain explores the concept. Billy looks constantly for something he calls “real.” More often he finds things that are either calculated façade – like television that looks so real it must be fake or a movie that a producer wants to make about them – or outright bullshit, “bullshit” in the sense of half-truths designed to confuse or console.
Part of the pleasure here is that while the book wears its distrust of the war (and, indeed, of all propaganda) on its sleeve, it also retains an innocence that seems distinctly American. Billy’s sergeant, Dime, is a John Kerry type, an upper-crust progressive who’s gone to war in part to protest its very existence. He’s Ivy-League educated and able to represent the men before the powerful voices they encounter.
Billy loves Dime, but he brings an innocence that balances Dime’s polish and cynicism. Billy wants badly to believe in something, and he routinely stops religious leaders, businessmen, veteran soldiers and officers, and anyone who seems wise to ask questions that boil down to a fundamental one: what faith will allow me to make sense of the horrors I’ve seen alongside the indifference of the world to them?
And then, of course, there comes the inspired romance that Billy has with a Cowboys cheerleader. Faison is as gorgeous as her sex-symbol status requires, but she’s also every bit as innocent as Billy. She declares herself a Christian as soon as she meets him, and it seems a potentially genuine claim. She, too, wants to believe in something – and that’s easier since she gets to see her own beauty reflected on the Jumbotron and can only try to imagine what it must be like for Billy to kill and see death.
As something of a [SPOILER:] there’s no clear resolution. Billy does not discover a faith that gives him particular comfort, nor does he seize on anything “real.” There’s a modest resolution in the way the men of Bravo unanimously refuse the $5500 they’re being offered for their movie rights (it was supposed to be $100,000 at the start of the day). As Billy declares, “sometimes nothing is better than something,” an observation that I read as something of a declaration of independence from bullshit, as a self-promise to keep looking for what’s real. (And, in fact, the final sentence of the novel has Billy trying to “think about nothing” as his bus pulls away from the stadium.)
So, what’s great here is that this is both a novel to make you reflect on the daily insanity we accept as Americans as well as a representation of the surreal it sends up. It is, at bottom, a fun novel that refuses to condemn entirely an America that stopped making much sense a long time ago.