Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk

"Loss is the standard trajectory. Something appears in the world--a baby, say, or a car or a house, or an individual shows some special talent--with luck and huge expenditures of soul and effort you might keep the project stoked for a while, but eventually, ultimately, it's going down. This is a truth so brutally self-evident that he can't fathom why it's not more widely perceived, hence his contempt for the usual public shock and outrage when a particular situation goes to hell... Billy suspects his fellow Americans secretly know better, but something in the land is stuck on teenage drama, on extravagant theatrics of ravaged innocence and soothing mud wallows of self-justifying pity."
--Ben Fountain, Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk

When you put on a convincing enough show, you run the risk of deluding yourself. I'm not talking about telling a lie so often that you begin to believe it. No, the show is the thing you put on to enhance reality (a halftime show at a football game, say) or distract yourself from that reality (the football game itself). The problem is, between the two, there's not much left to enhance or distract from and, after a point, the reality and the show become indistinguishable. And we cannot acknowledge the show, lest risking that it all come crashing down. Whole economies are built on the fantastical puff we've constructed: war, business, Hollywood. The show is what makes the world go round. Best to stay the course. So Ben Fountain slyly demonstrates in Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk.

When Bravo Company become national heroes via a video captured by a Fox News imbed, they're given the star treatment and a victory tour through the States... just before being sent back to Iraq. The pomp and circumstance provide ample rumination material for 19-year-old Billy Lynn, whose real world experiences boil down to the war and the things he did to get sent to the war. That relative inexperience--along with one hell of a hangover--notwithstanding, Billy demonstrates impressive observational skills and possesses a fine ear for bullshit, if only because he hears it often enough.

Two days before redeployment Billy and the Bravos are the props guests of Dallas Cowboys' owner Jerry Jones Norm Oglesby at a Thanksgiving game. America's heroes (for the time being), hosted by America's team (hahahaha), enjoying America's game (so appropriately war-like that Billy wonders why we don't send the players--"well rested, suited up, psyched for brutal combat"--to fight the war). The Bravos, being late-teenaged/early twenties, are hungover, party-ready horndogs, preferring (given their druthers) a lack of sophistication. That's precisely what's charming--and human--about each of them. But to the nation they are icons, heroes that America is starved for in the age of terror. Never the twain shall meet, save for a brief subjection to a gross, confusing, and exploitative halftime show that opens a couple of the Bravos up to the early stages of PTSD. In America, the more garish and over-saturated an event is, the less open it is to doubts of patriotism.

Between exploring the bowels of the immense Texas Stadium, receiving showy receptions from the wealthy attendees, and witnessing the clunky process of acquiring a movie deal, Billy gets a crash course in how most things seem to be coated in a thin layer of bullshit. Once again, that's not to be confused with lies. Everyone in the book is refreshingly honest. Bullshit is the constant in Billy Lynn. That and the most pointless kind of capitalism. The concourses of Texas Stadium are as much a shopping center as a sports venue. Combined with the airports and arenas and hotels that the Bravos pass through, America comes off as little more than "a mall with a country attached," as Billy observes. Young Billy is barely able to process the psychic onslaught at Texas Stadium. Everything has a listed value and nearly everything is for sale and "nothing looks quite so real as a fake." That's the sweet spot of bullshit. 

It's hard to peg a solid chronology in Billy Lynn. George W. Bush is still president and the Cowboys still play at Texas Stadium (the reader pines for what Fountain might've done in describing the monstrous carnival that is that stadium's replacement) and not only is the war still raging, it hasn't gone to hell yet. Admirers tell the Bravos totally straight-faced that the public supports the war (though we must account for some of the aforementioned showmanship). Anyway, we're probably looking at mid-2000s, a time when the Iraq War seemed a semi-reasonable idea when argued by the right people. It wasn't so much a war built on lies as it was built on bullshit. And we're not smarter than we were ten years ago, we've just wiped those layers clean. Mostly.

Buttressed by some truly lovely writing ("the manager himself, a slender, oleaginous fellow with the unctuous patter of an undertaker murmuring pickup lines in a bar"), Fountain lays out an American experience that's soul-punchingly honest, if a little hard to remember through the fog of... whatever we've been doing since. Candy Crush, probably.

I don't know if anyone will remember the minutiae or the day-to-day psychology of that era. Billy Lynn offers a decent entry-point into all that (for anyone with the stomach for it), but it would be unfair to say that's all it is. Billy Lynn is about America, Iraq War or no. And it will happen again. There will always be a Billy Lynn, just as there will always be a Norm Oglesby. All that will change are the nouns. At least we get good stories out of them.

Grade: A