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Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk: A Novel
Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk: A Novel
Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk: A Novel
Audiobook11 hours

Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk: A Novel

Written by Ben Fountain

Narrated by Oliver Wyman

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

4/5

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About this audiobook

A re-release of this award-winning, critically acclaimed novel just in time for its major motion picture release, directed by Two-time Academy Award® winner Ang Lee, screenplay by Jean-Christophe Castelli and featuring Joe Alwyn, Kristen Stewart, Chris Tucker, Garrett Hedlund, with Vin Diesel and Steve Martin.

A ferocious firefight with Iraqi insurgents--caught on tape by an embedded Fox News crew--has transformed the eight surviving men of Bravo Squad into America’s most sought-after heroes. For the past two weeks, the Bush administration has sent them on a media-intensive nationwide Victory Tour to reinvigorate public support for the war. Now, on this chilly and rainy Thanksgiving, the Bravos are guests of a Dallas football team, slated to be part of the halftime show.

Among the Bravos is Specialist William Lynn, a nineteen-year-old Texas native. Amid clamoring patriots sporting flag pins on their lapels and support our troops bumper stickers on their cars, the Bravos are thrust into the company of the team owner and his coterie of wealthy colleagues; a luscious born-again cheerleader; a veteran Hollywood producer; and supersized pro players eager for a vicarious taste of war. Among these faces Billy sees those of his family--his worried sisters and broken father—and Shroom, the philosophical sergeant who opened Billy’s mind and died in his arms.

Over the course of this day, Billy will begin to understand difficult truths about himself, his country, his struggling family, and his brothers-in-arms-soldiers both dead and alive. In the final few hours before returning to Iraq, Billy will drink and brawl, yearn for home and mourn those missing, face a heart-wrenching decision, and discover pure love and a bitter wisdom far beyond his years.

Poignant, riotously funny, and exquisitely heartbreaking, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk is a searing and powerful novel that has cemented Ben Fountain’s reputation as one of the finest writers of his generation.

Motion Picture Artwork ©2016 CTMG.

LanguageEnglish
PublisherHarperAudio
Release dateMay 1, 2012
ISBN9780062212672
Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk: A Novel
Author

Ben Fountain

Ben Fountain was born in Chapel Hill and grew up in the tobacco country of eastern North Carolina. A former practicing attorney, he is the author of Brief Encounters with Che Guevara, which won the PEN/Hemingway Award and the Barnes & Noble Discover Award for Fiction, and the novel Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk, winner of the National Book Critics' Circle Award and a finalist for the National Book Award. Billy Lynn was adapted into a feature film directed by three-time Oscar winner Ang Lee, and his work has been translated into over twenty languages. His series of essays published in The Guardian on the 2016 U.S. presidential election was subsequently nominated by the editors of The Guardian for the Pulitzer Prize in Commentary. He lives in Dallas, Texas with his wife of 32 years, Sharon Fountain.

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Reviews for Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk

Rating: 4.0588235294117645 out of 5 stars
4/5

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  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5

    Although it took me a chapter or two to get into the flow of this book, it is one of my favorite books I've read this year. Highly recommended.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I am at a loss for the words to describe this poignant, moving book and I don't believe I know how to write a worthy review...I just feel like it's shook me up, much the way a true account would. Brilliantly written and a must-read for all. Get ready to question the way you feel about the Iraq War. 
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I picked up this book based on both the topic(the Iraq war) and the good critical ratings. The book takes place during one Thanksgiving day at a Dallas Cowboy game. The book focuses on a group of soldiers who were involved in "heroic" battle and now are being trotted out by the Bush administration with a 2 week cross country tour to pump up war support. The book does a great job of getting into contradictions flowing through the soldiers and war supporters and detractors. There is the backdrop of the game, a potential movie deal, and the impending return to Iraq. Mostly told through the eyes of 19 year old Billy Lynn, it is well written with both humor and good insights into our approach to the war and to soldiers. I definitely recommend this book. It was a quick read and I intend to read the authors other book.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Set in Texas during the war in Iraq, this novel explores the huge gap between the war at home and the real one abroad. The focus is on the surviving members of Bravo Squad at one their exhaustive media stops in Dallas during their "VictoryTour." Remarkable.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Ben Fountain's novel of the Iraq War, BILLY LYNN'S LONG HALF-TIME WALK, is that rare bird in contemporary fiction: a bestseller that deserved to be one. Fountain's nineteen year-old soldier protagonist's innocence brought to mind another fictional innocent, Melville's Billy Budd. But in Fountain's world, modern-day Texas, it wasn't so much the forces of evil that strove to bring down the young hero, but the collective forces of indifference and greed. Okay, maybe that does constitute evil. Whether Fountain's Billy will ultimately survive is left open. But there's already been plenty written about BILLY LYNN, so I'm just gonna say it's a helluva good story. Although the first half of the book was just a mite sluggish, the last part more than made up for it. I didn't find any evidence that the author had ever served in the military, so I have to say he certainly did his homework, because he nailed the language and attitudes of our all-volunteer army. Fountain knows about right and wrong; and he's also done some hard thinking about the spectacle and ludicrousness of professional sports, and is not impressed. His porttrit of America's complacent civilian populace, and Dallas Cowboys organization in particular is hardly flattering. I suspect many of his fellow Texans were not pleased with this book. For standing up to that kind of colossal greed and hypocrisy, and for writing a extremely readable modern morality tale, this old vet salutes you, Ben Fountain. Highly recommended. (four and a half stars)
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I loved this book. A squad of young soldiers whose brave actions in Iraq were filmed and shown on TV is home in the US making a tour. The tour is ending on Thanksgiving at a football game in Dallas, after which they will return to Iraq. The action is centered on one day, with flashbacks and back stories. Each character is an well-developed individual, particularly Billy, who one can't help but love. Though the boys have grown up in terms of courage and soldierly proficiency, they are still boys, excited, romantic, sometimes drunk, hopeful of lots of money from a movie version of their exploits.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A great commentary on the way war is portrayed and perceived in America, and a sympathetic portrait of a veteran. The misadventures Billy Lynn experiences in Texas Stadium among the rabble and the wealthy are humorous without betraying the tragedy of the novel: the disconnect between the sensational picture civilians have been fed of a war in stark blacks and whites and what Billy actually goes through. Fountain's book can be pedantic, but his view of the incongruities in American culture are mostly on target.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Witty and warm, if occasionally implausible, it's a cunning look at patriotism, consumerism and propaganda. And violence. And cheerleaders.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Even though they were not finalists the same year, I would have preferred this book won the National Book Award than "Redeployment." I found "Billy Lynn's..." more engaging and easier to digest, characters easier to relate to and sympathize with than "Redeployment." Of course not all war books are the same, but having read both that deal with a contemporary war—and being on the NBA list—it's difficult not to compare the two. I just felt Fountain was more successful at making the war and being in the armed forces easier to understand for someone with zero experience with that.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A solid read, although the Texan lowlifes who are the villains of the piece, are a bit too broadly drawn.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Recommend !!
    Whooaaaa . . let's stop and think about this one. To be a young person (especially male) in America with war and major league football to compare. Made me dizzy to think of all the absurdities so glaringly revealed in this brief snapshot of the Bravo Company's Heroic 2 week tour - - -being famous for the worst day / several minutes of your life. Then being "paraded" around the country as a way to "sell the war" to oblivious Americans, monied football fanatics, etc. Then being immediately sent back to the war zone. Wow!
    He has opportunity to make a different choice - how would you handle that choice?
    Billy Lynn is well portrayed - small town Texas boy - with his first encounters into many aspects of life - rather like a young person's first year away from home at college - except he's already had a best friend die in his arms. He's a person who will make a mark in life and one of the cheerleaders - omg, seems to have become immediately smitten with him . . . .
    Wonder what the next weeks will bring?
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Contains at least one of the best chapters I've ever read.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I saw something that called this book "the Catch-22 of the Iraq War." I wouldn't say it's the same sort of broad farce, or as bitingly satirical as that, but the comparison has some merit. Billy Lynn is at home with his squad for a dog-and-pony show they've earned by surviving and performing bravely in a firefight in Iraq. They go someplace, get trotted out to meet and greet the public who are just oh-so-grateful to them for their service, and then get on a plane and go to the next place to do it all over again. The book takes place at a Dallas Cowboys game, and in flashbacks to Iraq and time Billy (who is from Texas) was able to spend with his family before the game. Billy and his squad are public commodities - there's a movie deal in the works for their story, they're supposed to do some as-yet-unclear walk-on during the halftime show at the game, and everyone they talk to wants to feel like they have some sort of ownership of the squad's bravery. Everyone wants to hear a war story from the young, brave troops. (Side note: if you like this book and haven't read it yet, read The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien. It'll give you a perspective like no other on war stories.)Billy is a great character - conflicted about the war and his role in it, contemplating the big questions of life and death, courage and duty, and just really wanting to get drunk and forget it all for a while, if he can. I felt like the book dragged a bit in a few places, but it was worth it for the great quotes that were scattered throughout, and for the thoughts on football as a sport and its place in American culture. War and football ... they have more in common than just the obvious comparisons about hostility.Recommended for: people who are interested in nuanced attitudes about complicated topics, readers who want a book about war with a minimum of actual war scenes.Quote: So many omens, so many signs and portents to read. It's the randomness that makes your head this way, living the Russian-roulette lifestyle every minute of the day.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    A jingoist Texan comes up to a soldier on leave from Iraq, thanks him for his service and spouts a string of familiar lines about terrorism and the importance of the war. For his part, the soldier feels awkward about the praise, ambivalent about his involvement, and suspicious towards his thanker. If you would enjoy such an exchange, this book is for you--wherein it seems to be repeated about 400 times.

    I did enjoy the book's ending though, which I thought nicely encapsulated the country's true power structure (spoiler alert: it's money).
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    The most insightful piece of fiction to date pertaining to the greatest mistake this country has ever made....our Arab adventure...the Iraq war. Yet, is this about the war, or us, the self absorbed and endlessly distracted American sports consumer? Heartbreakingly funny and absurd.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Terrific book; amazing writing. This book isn't for everybody, but I loved it. Actually, it would be more accurate to say I respect it.

    Billy Lynn is a nineteen year old veteran of the Iraq war. He was caught on film in a terrible firefight where he heroically fought jihadis. He and his band, Bravo troup, are back in the US for a "Victory Tour", as the US government endeavors to gin up flagging support for the war effort.

    All the action basically takes place on one day, Thanksgiving Day, at Cowboys Stadium (the old one). Written in present tense by a narrator with an amazing voice, this is a book as much for fellow writers as it is for readers. Put it on your To-read shelf. Better yet, just read the damn thing.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    Read this for book club. Someone complained about all the foul language. It took 80 pages before I got into the book. After that is was easier. It's about a military unit called BRAVO. They have been dubbed "heroes" for fighting a battle in the Iraq war. They are on a victory tour in the USA..
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    2.5**

    From the book jacket: A ferocious firefight with Iraqi insurgents – three minutes and forty-three seconds of intense warfare caught on tape by an embedded Fox News crew – has transformed the eight surviving men of Bravo squad into America’s most sought-after heroes. For the past two weeks the Bush administration has sent them on a media-intensive nationwide Victory Tour to reinvigorate public support for the war. Now, on a chilly and rainy Thanksgiving Day, they are guests of the Dallas Cowboys, slated to be part of the halftime show alongside Destiny’s Child.

    My reactions
    My stars, this took forever to take off. For the first 100 pages or so, I was completely bored and had no idea where this mess was going. I didn’t like how the men of Bravo squad were portrayed – hard drinking, foul-mouthed, crude. If this hadn’t been a selection for my F2F book club I would have given up after 50 pages.

    Once the squad gets into the private club room to meet the Cowboys’ owner and other high-powered, moneyed VIPs, the book begins to get interesting (pg 108). The last third of the book was very good. Billy Lynn is only 19 after all, from a small town, with limited education and no real exposure to the world at large. He takes his cue from the other members of Bravo Squad, particularly Staff Sergeant Dime, who is more a father to Billy than his own father is. In the space of several hours Billy is forced to examine his role in the war, in the media circus that is their victory tour, in his family. He begins to consider his options and what his future might look like.

    This is a satire, so many of the characters and situations are outlandish and exaggerated. This is also Fountain’s first full-length novel, though he won numerous awards for his short stories. I think his experience and skill at short story writing showed in this work. The work seemed choppy in places, lacking any sort of transition from chapter to chapter. Some of the scenes (Billy’s visit with his family, in particular) would make fine short stories all on their own.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Truly amazing book. Billy Lynn is a soldier. He is one of eight soldiers of "Bravo Squad," ordinary army grunts in Iraq who one day find themselves in a brief but fierce battle that happens to be captured by their embedded reporter on video. The film of their battle makes them instant "heroes," so the pentagon decides to pull them out of Iraq and send them on a two weel "Victory Tour" around the US to drum up support for the war. The final appearance of the Tour is a Dallas Cowboys football game on Thanksgiving day. The whole story takes place on this one day, with brief flashbacks to a few scenes in the previous weeks.Fountain packs so much emotion and thought into every scene that I was often exhausted from reading, but in a good way. He manages to get you to think, but without being preachy. He is ironic, but without the smugness that often marks modern American irony. It's emotional without being maudlin, political without being partisan or polemic.This story isn't for everyone, but those who read it will be glad they did.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I nearly put this one aside after reading the first chapter. The slangy young dude language was driving me to drink. I'm thankful that I kept reading! This turned out to be a book that I won't soon forget. It made me revisit some of the feelings I had at the beginning of the war in Iraq. It made me uncomfortable and angry, but in a good way. A fantastic book.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I'm not sure how to review this book without gushing and thus losing the chance to convince people to read this novel. So, know my goal is to encourage people to read this book; I will not summarize plot. I will try to contextualize why I think this book is worth your time.

    Perhaps it's just one of those "perfect timing" novels where I found exactly the kind of book I wanted at the right time. Fountain's novel swept me along and I never wanted it to end. The climax is fascinating and surprising and nearly perfect. If you have any interest in novels about 21st century American culture -- teh culture of money and competition and violence and spin, then this book will satisfy you. It is a book about soldiers and war, but not in a warzone. It's a book about friendship and family and the things that give people a reason to keep going.

    To keep it simple: BILLY LYNN'S LONG HALFTIME WALK truly does feel like a CATCH-22 for the Iraq War (as one of the blurb proclaims). Now, that's a heavy burden for a book, since CATCH-22 is a classic of war satire (in fact, is it one of the only war satires? LYSISTRATA comes to mind, but I blank on others at the moment).

    Let me also say that I am a rabid Tim O'Brien fan. Any fiction I read about war is always read through the filter of THE THINGS THEY CARRIED. Ben Fountain's novel manages to coexist with O'Brien's philosophy on stories about war. Mainly because this is a novel about how America views itself during wartime. Billy Lynn, rather than being an O'Brien-esque story-spinner trying to make sense of his experience is, instead, a semi-sober critic of American culture. He spends the bulk of the novel trying to reconcile what he's fighting for with what he sees during the course of a 2 week 'victory tour' with the rest of his unit. Yes he struggles with the purpose of the war, but he also quickly realizes what O'Brien's short story collection contends: a soldier cannot explain the war experience to civilians. (Hemingway's IN OUR TIME argues this as well).

    So, while he does spend some time pondering his life, his future, and his family in a particularly effective chapter, Billy Lynn can spend more time wondering how the Americans flooding Texas Stadium for the Thanksgiving Day game can be so happy and dumb. As Lynn points out: "Somewhere along the way America became a giant mall with a country attached." It's one of his many great DeLillo-esque observations that might seem "out of character" for a 19 year old from a small town in Texas, except that Shroom -- one of the casualties of the battle in Iraq that made Billy & his unit famous -- certainly pointed him towards deeper thinking.

    A fantastic book. One I'll make time to read again.

  • Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
    1/5
    I’d happily fall in love with a book that was trying to capture and examine our contemporary reality. Politically, I absolutely agree with the themes highlighted (to death) in this book about the calculations behind going to war, about our society’s inane ‘priorities,’—everything. But Ben Fountain never lets me forget that he’s communicating his messages, that he’s making these oh-so-important statements. Instead of telling a good story or giving us a meaningful character study, all Mr. Fountain did was use his characters like they were action figure toys that he’d inject into *set pieces* as a way to introduce unsubtly yet another example of how hypocritical, ignorant, superficial, or greedy some people are. There is not one section in the book where I couldn’t see the author’s clumsy hands all over each page. There's nothing artful or literary about this at all. Instead of getting lost in the story, lost in Billy’s meditations, I just felt like the author was punching me in the face with messages that weren’t even very deep.

    He wants to raise important questions, but how come his treatment of them is so trite? The same themes are repeated over and over and over and over again, in the EXACT same way each time. It is not as if, in revisiting the same themes again and again, we are peeling back different layers of meanings and perspectives. No, the author doesn’t open our eyes to any new dimensions. Seriously, after the first 100 pages (maybe even less), you don’t gain any new insight into Billy, into war, or our superficial culture that the author didn’t already make in the first few pages. Moreover, most of the characters are crude stereotypes, except for Billy (kind of)—and maybe Dime.

    If a book doesn’t work for me, then it just doesn’t; there’s no need for extra, special outrage. Most of the time, I’m self-aware enough to chalk up it up to differences in opinions and tastes. Everything’s subjective anyway; yes, I understand. But allow me to be immature here, just this once. In this case, there is a need for extra, special outrage. HOW IS THIS BOOK CONSIDERED WELL-WRITTEN, ENGAGING FICTION???? Why so many people, whose opinions I trust, have trumpeted this as *the* book of the year baffles me to no end.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    This review should be called "Liam Sullivan's Long Summertime Read" because it took me months to complete reading. The slothfulness of the read should reflect more on the reader than the novel, and in fact the intricate level of detail in the book may be appreciated by a slow read. Fountain's novel tells the story of the Bravo Squad whose firefight in Iraq caught on video goes viral making the ten young men instant heroes brought back to the US to be celebrated and used for a promotional tour. The majority of the novel takes place on Thanksgiving Day at a Dallas Cowboys game where the Bravos are part of the pre-game and halftime festivities and is told from the perspective of the young Texan infantryman Billy Lynn. There's little nuance in Fountain's writing as this is clearly an anti-war novel with a pile-on of hypocritical people using the Bravos to advance their agenda. The incidents of the novel also grow increasingly absurd including Billy's fling with a cheerleader and the surreal halftime show where the Bravos support the performance of Destiny's Child. My ultimate summation of this book is good but not great, where the small details stand out better than the overarching themes of the novel.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    The more I read this book, the more I loved it. The length of the book is over one day of a Victory tour for a group of soldiers who are on leave from Iraq.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    An interesting and original take on war (in Iraq especially)without any real rescription of the war itself. I particularly enjoyed the section on Billy's family and his return home but the problem I had with the book was the setting of most of it in the football stadium. It became very repetitious and, some of it, a trifle irrelevant e.g. the scene where the equipment man takes them intot the store and goes through the endless supplies of football equipment.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Absolutely fabulous. So good, so good!
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    I wanted to enjoy Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk. I really expected I would. And halfway through it, I thought I was enjoying it. But by the time I reached the third act, I realized that everything was so one-dimensional. I get that as a first-person, steam-of-consciousness narrative, some things are going to be unreliable and something things will be omitted. The problem is that too many really interesting and important things are set up, but never actually happen. Chief among those is the battle that made Billy and his squad into internet stars – it is never explained what happened or why it was different. Maybe Fountain’s point is that it doesn’t matter. But it does matter when that was the premise behind all of the events taking place. Perhaps Billy’s tale is so frustrating because Billy is so one-dimensional himself. The whole point of this sort of book is to live the journey from the eyes of somebody else as events happen that force them to change or evolve. The trouble is that Billy never does change. He simply floats along through a chain of events he seems powerless to alter and uninterested in trying to. And frankly, the ending was so devoid of any hope that it made The Road feel uplifting in comparison. Maybe Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk is a critique on how society handles war and its participants. Unfortunately, none of the people or events felt realistic. It was like living in a caricature of how people act that left everything feeling artificial. I can see why many people like it, but the story and the characters simply didn’t feel plausible enough for me to become emotionally attached.
  • Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
    1/5
    Tedious. Annoying. Unfunny.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This book is amazing in that it takes place during one Dallas Cowboy football game. The fact that is is over three hundred pages and never drags for an instant is a testament to Ben Fountain's wonderful writing. The story involves an American military unit of eight men who are involved in a tremendously heroic engagement that is caught on video and has gone viral and virtually everyone in the country has seen it. The army brings them back to the United States so that the American public can get a glimpse of their heroes. The are to be presented at halftime of the game which is the last in a long series of public appearances. Billy Lynn is the youngest man in the unit and it is told from his perspective. The book engages a wide variety of topics including love, family, the nature of heroism and the way America views the military. I can certainly see why the book got all the awards that it did, I loved it.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This novel is to the Iraq/Afghanistan generation as Catch 22 was to WW II and Vietnam. Billy Lynn, conscripted by a mean judge into jail or the service at age 19, performs a dramatic rescue during a firefight in Iraq. His Bravo Company, minus the dead, are brought back to the US for a VICTORY TOUR culminating in a halftime appearance at Dallas Stadium for Thanksgiving. It's so ridiculous, even to the naïve Billy, that all the guys get shitfaced and stoned as quickly as possible. And Billy's on track to lose his virginity to a Dallas cheerleader. And to perform with Beyoncé at halftime. And then to be shipped back to Iraq.The hypocrisy, expressed in perfect word clouds, is strong in this one. Laughter and tears are very close. This novel is a triumph that I hope will not be ruined by the upcoming film. YOU MUST READ THIS FIRST.