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Loading... Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk (original 2012; edition 2012)by Ben Fountain
Work detailsBilly Lynn's Long Halftime Walk by Ben Fountain (2012)
2   jnwelch | May 6, 2013 |  Although it took me a chapter or two to get into the flow of this book, it is one of my favorite books I've read this year. Highly recommended. (  ) hchannell | Apr 27, 2013 | This book was SO GOOD, and didn't even think I would like it very much. A bunch of guys (the named-for-press-purposes "Bravo squad" come back from Iraq after a highly publicized (via Fox News) fire fight, and are trotted around on a "victory tour" that ends with a PR showcase at a Cowboys-Bears football game, after which they are being redeployed. At the onset, it's clear that the major theme of the book is the inability for Billy Lynn to communicate his war experience with anyone back in the States. Going into it, I was concerned about the ability of an author to write a book about not understanding something outside of shared experience if he didn't share in that experience ... that was getting a little meta and stressed me out. Oh, but then the writing sucked me in. It's so snappy and manages to be funny and troubling and sad all at the same time. Fountain also has a great ear for dialogue, I felt like he was extremely successful at capturing slangy and informal speech without making it sound forced or dorky. I felt like the last third got a little bogged down. The first parts went back and forth between the football game and the events leading up to Bravo's appearance at halftime, so when it catches up to itself, the change in the pace of the story struck me as a little off. Not really related to the book, but "Ben Fountain" sounds like the fakest fakey name ever to me. Can that really be someone's name? I feel like it's a pun that's going over my head. (  ) delphica | Apr 26, 2013 | The more I read this book, the more I loved it. The length of the book is over one day of a Victory tour for a group of soldiers who are on leave from Iraq. (  ) mawls | Apr 4, 2013 | A jingoist Texan comes up to a soldier on leave from Iraq, thanks him for his service and spouts a string of familiar lines about terrorism and the importance of the war. For his part, the soldier feels awkward about the praise, ambivalent about his involvement, and suspicious towards his thanker. If you would enjoy such an exchange, this book is for you--wherein it seems to be repeated about 400 times. I did enjoy the book's ending though, which I thought nicely encapsulated the country's true power structure (spoiler alert: it's money). (  ) numbernine | Apr 4, 2013 |
 Every two or three years, if I'm lucky, I get my hands on a novel that I simply can't shut up about, a novel I shout from my humble mountaintop to anyone who will listen, a novel that I hand-sell any time I have a literate audience of one or more. In many cases, I'll purchase this novel, over and over and over, and put it in the hands of readers....One novel this year blew the top of my head off like no other, and that was Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk by Ben Fountain.... No brow-beating, no navel gazing and no ranting. Just great storytelling, fully realized characters and sentences that crackle. In short, Fountain makes it look easy.  The novel is niftily postmodern, in that it deals with a heavily mediated reality. Bravo squad aren't even called Bravo squad, but that was what the "Fox embed" christened them. They hear their story being spun in real time: "Carl, what can I say?" says Albert, the movie producer, on the phone. "It's a war picture – not everybody gets out alive." The stadium is dominated by the huge "Jumbotron" screen; Billy wonders whether "maybe the game is just an ad for the ads". But Fountain, like better-known writers of his generation such as Jonathan Franzen and David Foster Wallace, has dragged this ironic, media-saturated style back in the direction of sincerity, with rich, sharply drawn characters that you care about. Beneath the dazzle, there's a story as old and simple as Kipling's poem "Tommy": "They sent me to the gallery or round the music-'alls, / But when it comes to fightin', Lord! they'll shove me in the stalls!" 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. There’s hardly a false note, or even a slightly off-pitch one, in Fountain’s sympathetic, damning and structurally ambitious novel. (The whole story, with the exception of a flashback or two, takes place during the course of a single afternoon.) Billy and the other Bravos are, for the most part, uneducated, but they possess a rare intelligence that allows them to see things as they really are, which is not exactly the way the pro-war meme generators want Americans to see them. By the novel’s end, we’re forced to reassess what it means to “support the troops.” Does it simply mean letting them know they’re in our prayers as we send them back into battle and go about our business? Does it mean turning them into gaudy celebrities? Or could there perhaps be a more honorable and appropriately humble way to commemorate their service? “Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk” asks us to consider the uncomfortable possibility that we don’t really know the answer anymore.
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Wikipedia in English
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Billy Lynn has been deeply affected by his tour of duty, losing a close mentor friend to the war, and maturing beyond his years. He stays humble despite the endless foofaraw; he observes, he questions, and through his eyes at Cowboy Stadium we see crassness, ignorance, celebrity lust, materialism, endless sucking up, and naive, ill-informed patriotism. Yet we also see a touching, unlikely romance develop, and Billy Lynn and his superior Dime ably dissect some of the more repugnant machinations around them. His squad members have been mentally and emotionally damaged by the war, and their bond to one another is, in this unlikely setting, realistically conveyed, with rough-edged humor its most important component. We learn about Billy Lynn's trailer park background, how he ended up where he is, and we watch him learning to transcend all of it, to stand on his own two feet and see clearly from the height of his experience.
This is a compulsive read, with characters to root for and villains by the pound. There's a bit of a Catch-22 flavor to it in its biting humor and satire. One of my top reads so far this year. (