Book Summary: Told over the course of a single day--specifically Thanksgiving Day at Texas Stadium, as the Dallas Cowboys take the field--Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk
is the story of Bravo Squad, eight survivors of a ferocious firefight
with Iraqi insurgents, whose bravery and and valor have made them
national heroes. In the final hours of their Pentagon-sponsored "Victory
Tour," Bravo's Silver Star-winning hero, nineteen-year-old Billy Lynn,
will confront hard truths about love and death, family and friendship,
war and politics, duty and honor.
This is one of the best books I've read all year, and one that I'd say is a real contender for 2013's round of major literary awards. The writing is terrific, and I feel that in addition to being a fresh and edgy book, this may be an important one. So far it's the only one I've read coming out of the Iraq War
that subsumes itself in neither action sequences nor in an overwrought
family or romantic drama. Instead it seems to be just as much about the
concept of war itself as the politics behind it and how America feels
about it. (Though given the book takes place mostly in Texas,
especially Dallas, we're not really given a look at the dissenters'
side of things.)
Billy
Lynn is a fascinating character, a boy thrust into the army (in lieu of
doing hard time) after taking a crowbar to his sister's ex-fiance's car
for gallant but misguided reasons. He's a thoughtful young man, fully
aware that the labels of "hero" mean nothing when one's actions are
guided neither by bravery nor fear, but are simply reactionary to any given
situation, including Bravo's famous firefight with the Iraqi insurgents:
one day you're the hero and the next day you're cowering under your
humvee and refusing to come out. His thoughts are never far away from
his imminent return to Iraq, nor from his buddy, Shroom, who died the
day Billy was labeled a hero.
Ben
Fountain's novel is also the first book coming out of the Iraq War (that
I've read, at least) that seems willing to say that war is, more than
anything else, a commercial enterprise. It's difficult not to draw
these parallels about the US's involvement in Iraq with, say, the Dallas
Cowboys franchise and the oil-steeped politics of the state in which
the book is largely set, or the larger-than-life characters we meet,
such as the Dallas Cowboys' owner or the man who spends the book
negotiating a movie deal for Bravo. War as commercially motivated
enterprise, not a political one, isn't a new concept per se, but it goes
a long way in increasing this particular reader's distaste for it,
because if it's really not about oil, really not about protecting our interests, and really not about freeing a people from their dictator's rule, then it's really not something I can ever understand, or wish to, for that matter. What's more, Fountain seems to be suggesting that, despite whether they're for or against the Iraq War, that most Americans only monitor it from the comfort of their living sofas, and thus we have an enterprise reduced to entertainment television.
Karl
Marlantes blurbs this book, and he's not a writer whose opinion I take
lightly, especially when it comes to the topic of war. He calls it "the
Catch-22 of the Iraq war," and with a comment like that, I'm not
sure that there's anything more to add. I'll just conclude with some
passages that resonated with me as I read it:
"So they lost Shroom and Lake, only two
a numbers man might say, but given that each Bravo has missed death by a
margin of inches, the casualty rate could just as easily be 100
percent. The freaking randomness is what wears on you, the
difference between life, death, and the horrible injury sometimes as
slight as stooping to tie your bootlace on the way to chow, choosing the
third shitter in line instead of the fourth, turning your head to the
left instead of the right. Random. How that shit does work on your mind
(26-27)."
"Those
people [movie studios, producers, etc], the kind of bubble they live
in? It's a major tragedy in their lives if their Asian manicurist takes
the day off. For those people to be passing judgment on the validity of
your experience is just wrong, it goes beyond wrong, it's ethics porn.
They aren't capable of fathoming what you guys did (57)."
I love this moment between Billy and his sister Kathryn, re: their father:
" 'He's an asshole,' Kathryn said.
To which Billy: 'You just now figured that out?'
'Shut up. What I mean is he likes being an asshole, he enjoys it. Some people you get the feeling that can't help it? But he works at it. He's what you'd call a proactive asshole' (75)."
Billy with his nephew on leave:
"Based
on his highly limited experience with small children, Billy had always
regarded the pre-K set as creatures on the level of not-very-interesting
pets, thus he was unprepared for the phenomenal variety of his little
nephew's play. Whatever came to hand, the kid devised some form of
interaction with it. Flowers, pet and sniff. Dirt, dig. Cyclone fence,
rattle and climb. Squirrels, harass with feebly launched sticks. 'Why?'
he kept asking in his sweetly belling voice, as pure as marbles swirled
around a crystal pail. Why? Why? Why? And Billy answering every question
to the best of his ability, as if anything less would disrespect the
deep and maybe even divine force that drove his little nephew toward
universal knowledge...So is this what they mean by the sanctity of life?
A soft groan escaped Billy when he thought about that, the war revealed
in this fresh and grusome light. Oh. Ugh. Divine spark, image of God,
suffer the little children and all that--there's real power when words
attach to actual things. Made him want to sit right down and weep, as
powerful as that. He got it, yes he did, and when he came home for good
he'd have to meditate on this, but for now it was best to compartmentalize, as they said, or even better not to mentalize at all (82-83)."
The
reader never gets the full picture of exactly what happens to earn the
Bravo Squad their Victory Tour back home, but here is one of Billy's
ruminations on it: "All your soldier life you dream of such a moment and
every Joe with a weapon got a piece of it, a perfect storm of massing
fire and how those beebs blew apart, hair, teeth, eyes, hands, tender
melon heads, exploding soup-stews of shattered chests, sights not to be
believed and never forgotten and your mind simply will not leave it
alone. Oh my people. Mercy was not a selection, period. Only later did
the concept of mercy even occur to Billy, and then only in the context
of its absence in that place, a foreclosing of options that reached so
far back in history that quite possibly mercy had not been an option
there since before all those on the battlefield were born (125)."
Read this book. Seriously, just read it. And if you don't want to take my word for it, check out this superlative review from The New York Times earlier this week.
Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk is the Odyssey Bookshop's May selection for its First Editions Club. Ben Fountain will be reading at the store tonight, May 11, at 7:00 pm.
~Emily
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