From the opening moments of Ben Fountain's masterful novel about the Iraq War, it's clear that the author has a firmly dialed-in sense for the cadence, language and absurdities of our post-9/11 era. The word soup of "terrR," "nina leven," and "ire Christian values" washes over the eight young soldiers of the Bravo Unit, in the midst of a whirlwind Victory Tour celebrating the heroism of their deadly firefight in the Al-Ansakar Canal. Footage of the battle has gone viral, thanks in part to dutiful promotion by Fox News, and the unit returns stateside as unwitting celebrities in an alien culture of spectacle. Billy Lynn, the pensive and literate nineteen-year-old private at the center of the narrative, is our outsider's guide to this world over the course of one fateful Thanksgiving day at Texas Stadium where Billy and his squad find themselves center stage in a troubling national fantasy.
It's more than just linguistic prowess that lends Billy Lynn its authority as a powerful cultural document. Fountain, a longtime Dallas resident, has conjured the spirit of that moneyed metroplex as an entry point for a discussion about American excess and the contradictions between the glitz of our popular culture and "life as it is." In an interview with Walton Muyumba, he speaks at length about the importance of place in the novel:
I think you can make the argument that Dallas is the most American of all American cities . . . certain aspects of mainstream American culture find their purest expression in Dallas. Capitalism, to give one example; this is a city that loves its free markets, at least in theory. You can add to that conspicuous consumption, the luxury lifestyle, fundamentalist Christian religion, and hard-core devotion to that other American religion, football. If a person is interested in seeing how all these currents play out, Dallas is a pretty good place to start.
Fountain's ability to facilitate this "playing out" without condescension or the crutch of ham-fisted moralizing makes his debut novel the decade's most human and incisive book about modern life during wartime. It is a jumbotron-sized novel about "the nonstop sales job of American life" as much as it is a controlled meditation on its inherent deliciousness and possibility. Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk introduces us to ourselves in a way that few other recent novels have, which—considering the deeply-entrenched echo chamber that is our national media—may well be the the modern fiction writer's most constructive power. Like the impossibility of the hulking Dallas skyline in a yawning wash of prairie, Billy Lynn's pyrotechnic prose and vicious cultural accuracy will thrill and perplex you as a feat of imagination and ingenuity. But make no mistake: it will also break your heart.
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