Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk
Billy Lynn is one of Bravo Company, who performed a heroic deed in the Iraq War. The men are treated to a whirlwind of activity, celebrated everywhere and, of course, used as political pawns. This culminates on Thanksgiving Day, as they attend a Dallas Cowboys game. They will get to meet the owner, the players, and be part of the half-time show, which features Beyonce.
Also during this day they will be squired by a Hollywood guy, who is trying to turn their story into a movie, though there are a few bumps--Hilary Swank is interested, and she wants to play Billy. But they've been promised $100,000 each. Billy is inclined to follow the lead of his no-nonsense Sergeant Dime, and also thinks of what his fallen comrade, Shroom, would do. Shroom died during the event, but acts as an unseen conscience for Billy.
This book is both penetratingly sociological and hysterically funny. Fountain writes so many pearls of wisdom that I can't hope to share them all here, but he certainly has his finger on the pulse of America during the Bush years--what could be more representative than a Cowboys game? Fountain fictionalizes the owner--there's no Jerry Jones here, at least not named--as well as the players. He also introduces a cheerleader, Faison, who falls for Billy. She's an evangelical, but she isn't such a prude that she doesn't stop from letting Billy dry hump her.
The use of military heroes to bolster a country's sinking morale is nothing new, but it is always shameless. As Fountain notes: "Desperation's just part of being human, so when relief comes in whatever form, as knights in shining armor, say, or digitized eagles swooping down on the flaming slopes of Mordor, or the U.S. cavalry charging out of yonder blue, that's a powerful trigger in the human psyche. Validation, redemption, life snatched from the jaws of death, all very powerful stuff. Powerful."
But I was constantly snickering at the observations of life in America these days, the land of consumers. "Billy thinks about this as he eyes the fast food outlets that line the stadium concourse, your Taco Bells, your Subways, your Pizza Huts and Papa John's, clouds of hot meaty gases waft from these places and surely it speaks to the genius of American cooking that they all smell pretty much the same. It dawns on him that Texas Stadium is basically a shit hole. It's cold, gritty, drafty, dirty, in general possessed of all the charm of an industrial warehouse where people pee in the corners. Urine, the faint reek of it, pervades the place."
The novel will build to two decisions--will the Bravos take the deal of the Cowboys owner, a bumptious blowhard, to make their movie, and will Billy heed the advice of his sister and go AWOL (despite their heroism, Bravo company have to deploy after the game) and run off with his cheerleader? Though the ending didn't quite match the build-up, it was satisfying nonetheless, as Dime facing off against the owner is classic.
Fountain also attacks some American institutions, such as the game of football itself: "And if it was just this, Billy thinks, just the rude mindless headbanging game of it, then football would be an excellent sport and not the bloated, sanctified, self-important beast it became once the culture got its clammy hands on it. Rules. There are hundreds, and every year they make more, an insidious and particularly gross distortion of the concept of 'play,' and then are the meat-brain coaches with their sadistic drills and team prayers and dyslexia-inducing diagrams, the control-freak refs running around like little Hitlers, the time-outs, the deadening pauses for incompletes, the pontifical ceremony of instant-replay reviews, plus huddles, playbooks, pads, audibles, and all the other manner of stupefactive device when the truth of the matter is that boys just want to run around and knock the shit out of each other."
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