This column ran in my BookLovers column in The Standard-Times on Saturday. I’d like to share it here, but please check out my BookLovers site:
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Every once in a while, you read a book that is just about perfect.
The writing pops. It sparkles.
The characters are so real that you feel you know them; the way they speak is so authentic you feel you’ve met them.
There is truth on every page, and it’s a sad truth but it also makes you laugh, so cleverly is that truth written.
Every once in a while, you finish a book and say out loud to yourself: “Wow.”
One such book is “Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk,” by Ben Fountain (2012.)
This New York Times best-seller was also a National Book Award finalist in 2012, and it is as close to a “Catch-22” treatment as the Iraq War could get.
This novel is brilliant.
The entire story takes place in the course of one day, at a Dallas Cowboys football game on Thanksgiving Day, 2004.
After an embedded FOX News team captured a wild firefight with Iraqi insurgents, the footage of the Bravo Squad was everywhere—glorified on CNN and YouTube alike.
The George W. Bush administration used it as propaganda footage and paraded the eight remaining young members of Bravo around the nation like prize dogs after a fight, flying them around the U.S. on a “Victory Tour” to build public support for the war.
Now, on this chilly and rainy Thanksgiving, the Bravos are guests of “America’s Team,” the Dallas Cowboys, slated to be part of the halftime show alongside the superstar pop group Destiny’s Child. Right after the game, of course, the government will wash their hands of them, and send the boys straight back to Iraq.
And they are boys—Billy Lynn is 19 years old, the average age of a solider in Iraq, author Ben Fountain told me.
I called Fountain this week at his home in Texas. Fountain grew up in North Carolina, went to law school at Duke University and practiced law for five years in Dallas, Texas before giving it up to write.
“I realized I would never have peace in myself if I never made a serious attempt to write fiction,” he told me.
This is Fountain’s first novel, but his short stories have not gone unnoticed: He’s received the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Barnes & Noble Discover Award for Fiction, a Whiting Writers Award, an O. Henry Prize, two Pushcart Prizes, and two Texas Institute of Letters Short Story Awards, among other awards.
Fountain’s descriptions of Army life are so detailed, and Billy Lynn so real, that I was shocked to find that Fountain has never served in the military.
“I just talked to every soldier who was willing to talk to me, upwards of 30. I developed relationship with a couple. I just tried to immerse myself in that world; I felt I had to earn a right to write a book like this, and the only way I would earn that right was to get all the details of military life correct,” he told me.
As vivid as his characters are, none were based on any interviews.
“In writing fiction, you’re always taking bits and pieces from your own experience. All those characters are an amalgamation of different things from real life,” he said.
“Billy was created whole-cloth. I came across a statistic that said the average age of a solider fighting in Iraq is 19 years old. I thought, ‘My God. They’re children.’ That’s where Billy came from.”
The men of Bravo know they’re being used as puppets by the Masters of War, of course, but they’re more peeved that the American people don’t seem to notice. Fountain writes:
“Billy has noticed that audiences don’t seem to mind anyway. All the fakeness just rolls right off them, maybe because the nonstop sales job of American life has instilled in them exceptionally high thresholds for sham, puff, spin, bull, and outright lies, in other words for advertising in all its forms.”
As a character, Billy struck me as very Holden Caulfield-esque.
Throughout the book, we see Billy’s affection for innocent kids—he gives his autographed football to a skinny kid with a cheap winter coat—and naïve romanticism—he falls head-over-heels in love with a Cowboys cheerleader, whom, he dreams, he might marry and live with forever in a cabin in the woods.
But when I mentioned the Holden similarities to Fountain, he seemed taken aback.
“Wow, that’s funny; I never thought of him in those terms. And I love ‘Catcher in the Rye,’ too,” he told me. “Someone told me Huck Finn, and Holden is the urban version of Huck Finn—these American individuals who find themselves caught in systems and who are trying to carve out spaces for their own integrity. So I can see that.”
Billy’s foil is Cowboys team owner Norm Oglesby—a good ol’ boy in cowboy boots, who talks with pride about the “war on Terr” and about revenge for 9/11, or “nina leven.” He’s richer than rich, name-checks Dick Cheney, and, almost on whim, decides to create a film company to make a movie about the Bravo firefight.
“Oglesby is taken from various elements of my own experiences in Texas and maybe a little bit on sports club owners, in any sport,” Fountain told me with a laugh. “Club owners tend to be people with big egos and big desires.”
The NFL is perfect stage for a novel like this.
It is, as Fountain writes, everything Big and Commercial about America— a glorified ad venue for CEOs to sell cars, beer, sex and pizza for three hours during 11 minutes of live-ball playing time. He writes:
“Could it be that advertising is the main thing? And maybe the game is just an ad for the ads?… Somewhere along the way America became a giant mall with a country attached.”
He told me: “The germ of the novel came from me watching a halftime show on Thanksgiving Day and it happened pretty much the way I wrote it in the book…Destiny’s Child performing, and marching bands and fireworks…. I thought, ‘This is the most insane thing I’ve ever seen in my life.’ And yet it was a typical day in America. Nobody bats an eye.”
When I asked him if he was a football fan, he laughed:
“When I was growing up, I loved playing and watching football… But over the years, I’ve become less and less enamored, and now I’m pretty disenchanted.
“The whole sport is so top-heavy. In a three-and-a-half hour game, there are only 11 minutes of live-ball playing time. When you look at the hundreds of millions of dollars that goes into 11 minutes, it’s completely out of balance,” he said.
In one scene, the boys of Bravo are tossing around a ball for fun in the end zone. He writes:
“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.”
Of course, these boys of Bravo— who live on MREs in tents in the dust in Iraq— are in culture-shock in Dallas, in Cowboy land, a land of beer, beer, beer, fast-food, cheap pizza, whiskey, money- money-money, Hollywood, film crews, cheerleaders, movies, commercials, “Built Ford Tough,” Beyonce, Destiny’s Child, photo shoots, turkey, stuffing, potatoes, pie, PR people, cameras, autographs, footballs, promotional T-shirts, wiggling pom-poms, fireworks, short skirts, tight tops, Coca-a-Cola and ads, always ads, ads, ads.
At one point in the novel, Billy says to Bravo Sergeant, Dave Dime:
“Sergeant, I feel sick.”
Dime gives him a once-over. “You look okay to me.”
“Not like sick sick. More like bent. Baked.” He taps his head. “Halftime sort of skitzed me out.”
Dime laughs, at-at-at, a machine-gun rattle high in his throat. “Son, try to look at it this way. It’s just another normal day in America.”
Lauren Daley is a book columnist and freelance writer. Contact her at ldaley33@gmail.com.
