PULITZER NOMINATIONS: THE LINE STARTS HERE

It won’t be long before literary tastemakers will be preparing to award the Pulitzer Prizes for 2012. I’ve read several good books this year which I’ll tell you about now and in future posts. Today I’ll talk about one of my favorites:  Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk.

The title of Ben Fountain’s astonishing new novel disturbed me at first. Perhaps too pedestrian? (There’s a pun for you!) Couldn’t one have chosen a zippier title to skewer the imagination of potential buyers? Browsers at bookstores have fickle attention-spans, my brain argued; gotta get ‘em inside the tent-flap before you can start the show.

That was before I realized how completely the title embodies its text.

First of all, the novel is about Billy. Billy Lynn. Our everyman, and one of fiction’s better incarnations of him, in my opinion. Billy is a young man, an ordinary Joe, from an average, broke-apart Southern family. Siphoned into the army out of high school just short of his diploma for reasons I won’t reveal here, this nineteen-year-old is somehow endowed with an incipient yearning to do the right thing. (Even his reason for winding up in the army betrays a primitive sense of moral outrage.) Although Billy has no overlay of college-nurtured schemata for analyzing the way things are versus the way they ought to be, he can’t stop thinking about such matters. He can’t stop obsessing about the things that seem, well . . . false. He bounces a few of these vague but prickling dissatisfactions off his better-educated sergeant, but the long, slow, tortured progress of his thinking is all Billy’s. And readers will consider it a privilege – certainly this reader did – to be inside his head.

Furthermore – back to the title, once more – Billy’s experience in the book is a “walk,” not a run. Not even a trot. The whole novel occupies a single afternoon, most of the action taking place in Billy’s head, with occasional references to the back story that brought him to be where and who he is that afternoon, a foot soldier riding in a six-door stretch limo (with all its “pimp finery”) beside fellow members of Bravo Company, on his way to watch the Dallas Cowboys play football.

And finally, the “halftime” of the title is not just a reference to the halftime show performed at that football game but, again, a nod to pace. Everything that day moves at half-time compared to the staccato frenzy of a few deadly moments on a battlefield in Iraq where Billy and his brethren – but particularly Billy – became recognized as HEROES whose exploits were caught on videotape by an embedded reporter in the act of rescuing their ambushed buddies while laying waste the enemy. As a result, they were transported to America for a Victory Tour in support of the war (and a Hollywood producer rides along in the limo, constantly on his cell trying to negotiate a Hollywood film their heroics must surely make).

Money, glory, power, and the Halftime Show at the Cowboys’ football stadium. Did I mention it’s the Super Bowl?

This is satire, of course, and satire of a very high order, which asks provocative questions while engaging our faculties completely. Fountain’s “linguistic firepower,” as one reviewer dubbed it, amazes throughout. As does the story itself. As do the characters, and the dead-on dialogue. It’s funny, supercharged, and brilliant.

In Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, a character speaks of how an individual life, no matter how heroic, may be turned into kitsch by the survivors. That’s exactly what’s going on here. Only it’s a whole country’s values, not an individual’s, that are being kitsch-ified.

The mock heroic game enacted on the football field by overfed gladiators pales beside the very real sacrifices which our Bravo Company represents, and the very real war they are oh-so-briefly home from. The game is scarcely noticed by our soldiers.

But the Halftime Show! An extravaganza! Up close and personal with the beautiful, scantily clad Beyoncé! The precision marching bands! The orgiastic dancing! The sexy Dallas cheerleaders! (And one in particular that Billy takes a shine to; there’s a scene behind a wall in the interior of the stadium that will melt your underwear.) It’s all a rush: a heady, disarming, alarming mish-mash of what a culture seems to think of as the height of its inner core of values. And, as Fountain’s intelligent, fecund, funny, feisty, fierce, falsity-sniffing prose convincingly demonstrates . . . HOLD ON! . . . let me not get ahead of myself:  Read it yourself and decide.

Share this post:
Facebooktwittermail
This entry was posted in On Writing, Publications, Whatever. Bookmark the permalink.