Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk
July 2012
Not long before his death Joseph Heller contended that his great anti-war work was not really about World War II but rather a response to the Cold War, Macarthyism and ‘the hypocrisy, the bullying that was going on in America’. So it’s apt that Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk is being touted as ‘the Catch-22 of the Iraq War’ for it exposes the hypocrisy of a political system and public that sends its young so readily and mindlessly off to war.
Nineteen-year-old Billy, together with seven other surviving members of the Bravo squad are on a victory tour, a brief two week hiatus from gruelling Iraq. Thanks to Fox News capturing their daring gun battle, they have been catapulted into the ranks of national heroes. Having buried one of their own, they’re on a parade through America’s swing states which culminates in an appearance at a Thanksgiving football game.
In Billy, Ben Fountain offers the voice of a prophet; an inspired mix of naïf, reluctant virgin and working-class pawn with the uncanny ability to eviscerate the bloated spectacle and fantasy that have become attached to the national gods of war, football, media, Hollywood, celebrity and consumerism. Cynicism continually nudges against wistfulness, ‘Somewhere along the way America became a giant mall with a country attached.’
The prose is as obscene at times as the events it contains. But then, the soldiers of Bravo are a rag-tag group of testosterone-overloaded, foul-mouthed boys with the bodies and weapons of men. Their moneyed university-educated Sergeant reads The Economist, aligns politically with the left, is dangerously funny and a constant source of bewilderment for Billy. The dead soldier, Shroom, spiritual and philosophic mentor to Billy, introduces him to dangerous works of literature; among them the apposite Slaughterhouse-Five. Wartime camaraderie, its intensity akin to homoeroticism and yet beyond it, is elegiacally depicted.
The story is bookended by the action that plays out in a Texas stadium populated by powerful millionaires, Hollywood producers and lithe cheerleaders, one of whom develops a burning romance with our hero (there is never doubt that our love for Billy is not misplaced). The climax, played out as a halftime extravaganza, devastates and astounds. Beyonce, just past the soldiers’ reach, is a symbol of everything else worth desiring. At one point, if we were not invested enough in Billy’s tragedy, a visit to his home compounds it. As his adored sister, Kathryn, opines, ‘Some days I think I’m living in a bad country song.’ Billy’s existence is more of a bad wartime song but if he does survive his tour of duty, we can only wonder with dismay, what then?
The Catch-22 comparison fits, for Billy Lynn shares its fiercely comic brilliance. Meetings with Bush and Cheney are uproarious. The writing is dizzyingly good. On contemplating how to address the nature and essence of war, Billy considers, ‘As if to talk of such things properly we need a mode of speech near the equal of prayer, otherwise just shut, shut your yap and sit on it, silence being truer to the experience than the star-spangled spasm, the bittersweet sob, the redeeming hug, or whatever this fucking closure is that everybody’s always talking about.’ Part literary cataclysm/lamentation/wonder, Fountain provokes howls of laughter which inevitably turn into yowls as we confront his wartime explications on Munch’s The Scream.
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