Though it covers only a few hours, the book is a gripping, eloquent provocation. Class, privilege, power, politics, sex, commerce and the life-or-death dynamics of battle all figure in Billy Lynn’s surreal game day experience … There are such bravura scenes in Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk that this book never seems narrow or small … Mr. Fountain describes the erotic fireworks of a Destiny’s Child performance mixed with the military fervor of an accompanying marching band...The stimulation of these extremely mixed signals simply explodes in Billy Lynn’s brain; the effect of this ‘porn-lite out of its mind on martial dope’ on readers will be just as devastating … The halftime of the title isn’t about the pause in the football game. It’s about this brief, stunning, life-changing pause in the way Billy Lynn, two-week American hero, goes to war.
Like the flag raisers of Iwo Jima, the men of Bravo have been whisked back to the United States for a two-week victory tour, climaxing, on the day of the novel, with an appearance at the Dallas Cowboys’ stadium … Within 50 pages things are coming nicely into focus, from ‘the woody grain of the turkey’ served up as part of a gigantic buffet, to the shifting choreography of the squad’s dealings with their adoring public … Fountain keeps the reader’s plate piled high. It all happens in tandem; by the time Billy falls for his cheerleader we are in love with the book, and that love finds expression in more and wilder laughter … The book seems like nothing else so much as a single wonderful scene — with a brief intermission at Billy’s home — from which all traces of initial uncertainty have been removed.
The brief exchange between naive grunts and a grizzled veteran of Tinseltown is an obvious homage to Joseph Heller. But it’s also a bold announcement that Catch-22 is about to be updated for a new era … In Fountain’s razor-sharp, darkly comic novel the focus has shifted from bureaucracy to publicity, reflecting corresponding shifts in our culture … As they’re being shuttled from one staged event to another, Billy is subjected to the gauche iconography of the country he’s been fighting for: draft-dodging, platitude-mouthing millionaires and their trophy wives, holding court in owners’ skyboxes; a scantily clad Beyonce entertaining football fans with a ridiculous military-themed halftime show; the surreal presence of pom-pom-shaking Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders at a news conference in which Billy and the other Bravos are asked to describe the hell of war … There’s hardly a false note, or even a slightly off-pitch one, in Fountain’s sympathetic, damning and structurally ambitious novel.
Billy and the seven other men in his squadron, dubbed ‘Bravo’ by the media, are spending the last day of a two-week long victory tour … The Bravos are the first to perceive the victory tour as a thinly veiled PR stunt to garner support for a war that’s going terribly. Shipped from Iraq to the States with less than two hours notice, they are shuttled across the country, to malls and convention centers, with just twenty-four heartbreaking hours with their families. Bright-eyed, patriotic fans approach Bravo for autographs, thank them for their service, and talk to them about ‘democracy, development, dubya em dees’ … Within the framework of this tightly structured book, Fountain includes a sprawling amount of drama and emotion.
Bravo Squad fought bravely in a battle that was caught on video and went viral. That's why they're back in the U.S., heroes from a war in which little has gone right … The soldiers are treated well, limo'd, fed and beveraged. But the litany of rhetoric about the war has become so familiar that Billy hears little more than phonetic buzzwords … Fountain's novel is not a work of realism; it's an über-story, defined by irony and metaphor. Texas Stadium stands in for America, where the wealthy in their special section have access and privilege completely alien to Billy and his fellow soldiers.
The war, of course, hangs heavily over the novel, but the book's literal subject is football, and through football Fountain excavates the issues of 21st century homefront American life … Over the course of his day as guest of honor at the Cowboys-Bears contest, Billy encounters the 1 percent in the owner's box, and the 99 percent deep in the bowels of the stadium … It's more common for baseball to be the national pastime of choice in literature, but reading Billy Lynn, it's hard to imagine an America outside of Texas Stadium. Then again, perhaps you don't need to. Maybe the 21st century, with all it's problems and glories, is just a football type of time.
This postmodern swirl of inner substance, yellow ribbons, and good(ish) intentions is at the core of Ben Fountain’s brilliant Bush-era novel, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk … There’s the eponymous Specialist William Lynn, the virginal, Silver Star–earning eddy of a literary hero, a local boy willing to both dry-hump a Cowboys cheerleader and philosophize about the military-civilian divide in the same hour, if not the exact same moment … This divide becomes a chasm over the course of the novel, from the shallow pomp and ceremony surrounding Bravo’s arrival to the hundreds of ‘Atta Boys and back slaps to a locker-room encounter with outsized Cowboys players who want to ‘Cap some Muslim freaks’ for a couple weeks, but not for the years of service the military requires—they have football careers to consider, after all.
Caught on video by Fox News, the skirmish turned the young soldiers – crude, irreverent kids – into American idols, ripe for exploitation by politicians, corporate executives, and other predatory patriots. Yanked out of Iraq, the Bravos are sent on a two-week ‘Victory Tour’ throughout the United States … 19-year-old Billy Lynn, the focus of the novel who received a Silver Star for acting out of instinct and fear, is confused by all the attention...It is through Billy’s virginal eyes and his boozy, migrained brain that we encounter the wretched excess of the Stadium Club buffet; the 3,000 pairs of shoes in the equipment room; and the bloated halftime extravaganza starring Destiny’s Child.
A bracing, fearless and uproarious satire of how contemporary war is waged and sold to the American public, Fountain's novel gives us one Denisovichian day in the life of Billy Lynn, a 19-year-old soldier who's on a ‘Victory Tour’ of America during the time of the Iraq war … In Fountain's fairly persuasive view, the American public has been ruthlessly manipulated by the government and the media, which in turn are shamelessly beholden to moneyed, corporate interests.
On one level it is simply a description of that extraordinary time as seen through the eyes and processed through the mind of the 19-year-old hero Billy Lynn. On other levels, the tens of thousands of fans in the aging Texas Stadium become a microcosm of America in an age of almost suffocating phoniness, especially phony patriotism … In the midst of this almost hallucinogenic sensory overload, Billy’s mind keeps returning to his real world: his dysfunctional parents who can no longer make their mortgage payments; his sister who is trying to persuade him to desert; his fantasies of future happiness with his just-met cheerleader … But the constant presence — the real reality — is the war and its pain and grief including the death of his best buddy, Shroom, who died in his arms in the battle for which Billy was decorated — which overshadows even the most ostentatious display of what a materialistic society deems real.
Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk is a novel about the Iraq war. Sort of … [The Bravos] are feted at Texas Stadium, where the Dallas Cowboys are taking on the Chicago Bears. And that's where this war novel takes place — at a pro football game, where the soldiers drink too much and brawl with groundskeepers and where Billy Lynn falls in love with a Cowboys cheerleader … The book bounces around, from low comedy to high tension, from the affluence of private-suite Cowboys fans to the near-peon status of the foot soldiers, from GI high jinks to philosophy about how the soldiers who fight a war look at it, as opposed to how the civilians for whom they are fighting that war look at it.
