On the banks of the Al-Ansakar canal in Iraq, Specialist William Lynn and the rest of his company did a brave thing: rescuing a stricken supply convoy under enemy fire, sustaining losses themselves, and securing victory after a bloody firefight with the Iraqi insurgency. A Fox News team was embedded with the unit, and their footage has gone viral. Billy Lynn is a national hero, and now, on an all-expenses-paid trip to the Thanksgiving Day football game, everybody wants to talk to him about the worst day of his life.
I missed this in hardback somehow, and only picked up the advance copy on chance. I’m glad I did. Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk was the most fun I've had in ages. That doesn't mean there's not a lot wrong with it, but I think that it's one of those rare books where the execution is justified by the concept. It is verbose, sometimes unsubtle, a little unbalanced, and to be honest these flaws work out great, seeing as it’s about America (‘Murica)’s relationship with the war in Iraq, and that relationship is occasionally all of those things.
It’s not really a war book. Or at least, it’s a war book in the same way Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried - or more recently Kevin Powers’s The Yellow Birds - is a war book, in that it’s about what war does, to the mind and spirit and national consciousness as well as the body. We never find out much about Billy Lynn and his unit actually did in Iraq; only that it was brave, and that Billy lost his friend and semi-mentor, the gnomic and sanguine Shroom.
The remembrance of combat is essentially a trope, and the men of Bravo, including Billy, are basically stereotypes, which again works, because the book is partly about the double-think required to operate multiple stereotypes. If anything the book needs more war in it, and I hate to say it, but I questioned the veracity of Fountain's prose in this area. I couldn't help but think that... well, Fountain never went to war, and that made me wonder, does the fact that O'Brien and Powers have seen combat add credence to their words? I had thought it was there already, even if you didn't know they served. BLLHW is missing some of that credence, although everything else about it rings true (ish).
Billy is a heart-sick teenager. It's been done, but it's also hard to argue that the majority of grunts in the US infantry might not be just like Billy Lynn - wide eyed teenager with no clout and no clue. He's stuck in the questionable clutches of Dime, his brilliant, charismatic but potentially unstable sergeant (the best character in the novel, the sort of walk-on part you wish someone would write a book about), and Albert, the slick and world-wise Hollywood producer with an option to produce a movie about Billy’s heroics. Again, Albert's a stereotype, but it all fits so neatly that I don't begrudge it. BLLHW is sort of like the third season opener of a slick TV show, maybe no new ground is broken, but it's all so well put together you just enjoy it.
Ben Fountain has a way with words, no doubt. He has a real gift for simile, especially visual comparisons, which work well with a doe-eyed protagonist of 19. Billy doesn’t know much about the world, so it helps that he apparently has a gimlet eye for metaphor all on his own, otherwise he'd be a puppet. Billy does occasionally feel like a wiser commentator than his years would allow, but then the narrative distance is never really established or adhered to and I think that’s a smart decision for a book with such a broad scope.
Fountain's prose gets in the way on occasion, partly because it's crammed in so tight. One main character has a ' mouth that seems winched a couple of screws too tight,' That's a perfectly workable simile (if you ask me), but it follows a description of the same guy as 'compelling and garish, like a sales lot for reconditioned carnival rides.' Is that the sort of thing someone thinks? Do they even have sales lots for reconditioned carnival rides?
So it’s sometimes unsubtle. Billy’s dad is a minor ex-rockstar who reinvents himself as a right-wing political musician and commentator (think Limbaugh with a gee-tar), only to have a stroke and end up haunting the house; mute, chain-smoking, driving a motorised rascal. That’s a hell of a thing for a man to be all at once, and it works, but it struggles to find adequate space in a book that’s also filled with rootin’ and ruthless Texas businessmen, a whole squad of beefed up, apex-human football players, a pit full of cheerleaders (one area where Billy’s excellent eye for detail – in this case almost pornographic detail – is probably justified), and the idiosyncrasies of Billy’s unit, of which there are many.
Billy Lynn feels crushed in the middle, and so the book’s weakness is also its best strength. Billy Lynn IS crushed in the middle, between his own wants and desires on one side (his desperate attempts to process what has happened to him during his downtime are discursive but poignant) and the full weight of the American military-industrial-media complex on the other. Fountain goes all out describing every sensual excess America has to offer: it’s breathless and unwieldy but it makes you feel for poor Billy.
The best scenes are told in flashback, and detail Billy’s time with his family. They’re well told and weighted, provide both a breather and a better perspective on the synaptic rush at the stadium. They also provide the book’s heart, without unnecessary schmaltz. It could come off as trite, but I think it works simply because it's plausible, for more plausible than everything else that occurs. This book is a tragedy, even though it’s not told like one, because its ending can only be tragic. Whatever happens to Billy Lynn over the course of the day, whatever magnificent or grotesque or poignant things occur, at the end of it all, he will return to Iraq, and we know not what after that. That provides a neater counterpoint than any other in the novel, and unlike the others it seems effortless.
Maybe only a good book, but a great read. I felt energised by it.
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