Summary
Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk takes place over a single Thanksgiving Day at Texas Stadium, where the Dallas Cowboys are playing and the eight surviving soldiers of Bravo Squad are the guests of honor. Weeks earlier an embedded Fox News crew filmed their firefight at the Al-Ansakar Canal in Iraq, and the footage made them famous. Specialist Billy Lynn, nineteen, from a small Texas town, has a Silver Star for it; his sergeant, Shroom, died in his arms. The Pentagon has sent Bravo on a two week Victory Tour that ends with this game, after which they go back to Iraq.
Ben Fountain follows Billy through the day. A Hollywood producer, Albert Ratner, works the phones trying to sell Bravo's story to a studio. Albert's target is a hundred thousand dollars for each soldier's life story; the Cowboys' owner, Norman Oglesby, comes in as the film's backer and by the end of the day has whittled the figure to fifty five hundred. Billy drinks Jack and Cokes, is mobbed by well wishers who thank him for his service and cannot imagine what it was, falls for a cheerleader named Faison Zorn who is shaken when she learns he is going back, gets into a fight, and stands with his squad at halftime beside Destiny's Child. In flashback he visits his family, where his sister urges him to desert, and for a while he considers going AWOL. He leaves the stadium with the only people who understand him. Kirkus summed up what the men discover as "treachery and betrayal beyond anything they've experienced on the battlefield."
The novel is a satire, fast and loud, and its comedy comes from Billy's confusion, "being honored for the worst day of your life," as he tells a cheerleader, in a line the NBCC's Steven G. Kellman singled out. Fountain has a gift for the way Americans talk, from oilmen and megachurch types to nineteen year olds who have killed people. Kirkus called it "war is hell in this novel of inspired absurdity"; Publishers Weekly dissented, finding the writing campy and the dialogue canned. It reads quickly and suits anyone who liked Catch-22 or wants the Iraq war seen from the home front rather than the front line.
Historical Context & Significance
The novel won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction for 2012, announced on February 28, 2013, over Laurent Binet's HHhH, translated by Sam Taylor, Adam Johnson's The Orphan Master's Son, Lydia Millet's Magnificence and Zadie Smith's NW. It had also been a finalist for the 2012 National Book Award, which went to Louise Erdrich's The Round House, and it took the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the Center for Fiction's first novel prize.
Billy Lynn was Fountain's first novel. Born in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, in 1958, he took a law degree at Duke in 1983, practiced real estate law at Akin Gump in Dallas, and quit in 1988 to write fiction full time. His story collection Brief Encounters with Che Guevara appeared in 2006 and won the PEN/Hemingway Award; Malcolm Gladwell used him in a 2008 New Yorker essay, "Late Bloomers," as a case of talent that arrives slowly. Ang Lee's film of Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk, with Joe Alwyn as Billy, premiered at the New York Film Festival on October 14, 2016 and opened in the United States on November 11.
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