Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk: A Novel
By: Ben Fountain / Narrated By: Oliver Wyman
Length: 11 hrs and 39 mins
Painfully good, really
I am soooooo glad y’all voted Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk as my Next Listen; I’d been looking forward to listening to it for quite some time, but really—I had no idea it was gonna be so good. I generally start to listen to books a second time before I write my reviews, just to get an idea of the sense of them, what I liked, memories that come to mind, how the narrator’s voice strikes me, but with this audiobook? Well, damn me if I didn’t listen to the entire thing again, all the way through.
Though it takes place during one Dallas Cowboys football game, it encompasses so much more than what would be the three hours of the game. The boys of Bravo, Billy and his comrades in arms, are set to be honored during the game’s halftime show, but there’s a bit of time jumping as thoughts and memories bounce around his head, all as he’s trying to deal with reality, with his sense of the surreal, with hopes and fears about his future, or lack thereof.
What I really liked was that we never really are told of exactly what happened in Iraq that has turned the young men, boys actually, into America’s latest heroes. Instead, Ben Fountain crafts his novel with a sentence here, a sentence there, each of them of mind-blowing horror. And we can tell, by their actions, what the guys went through as we hear of their reactions to being in the confined space of an elevator (hands clenching, held breath, a desperate urge to defecate) or to their reactions to offhand comments the public make (a choke-hold that could turn deadly). The writing is so exquisite that similes deftly show how perverse our society is, and they show how tragic life has become. And they’re pretty gosh darned funny at times too.
Oliver Wyman does a masterful job, able to pour personality into each of Bravo’s young men, which is no easy feat. These guys are rambunctious, profane, lovably confused, and Wyman delivers their dialogue and interactions with an eloquence that is simply stunning. You listen to this and you feel like you KNOW these guys; they’re real. Add to that, the text is written with sentence fragments, words that simply pop into Billy’s head as he attempts to navigate his way through this civilian life that has become unreal. Wyman imbues each word perfectly, like you’re surfing Billy’s mind, feeling his anger, feeling his hysterical laughter, feeling the sense of loss that he carries around with him every split second of every day. He’s a 19-year old who is so very, very old.
I can’t recommend this audiobook highly enough (just be prepared for the profanity young men who live death use as their preferred method of communication). I hear tell it was a movie, but might I suggest you listen to it before going to see it? SO MUCH goes on that’s just part of what a person’s mind-hopping would do that I’m not sure it can be conveyed through the simply visual. I mean, how do you display in visuals what a young man thinks when he hears, “Thank you for your service”?
Billy hears that a lot, and it makes him love hard and hate even harder. Prepare yourself for 11+ hours of hate/love, despair/hope. Because, ultimately, this is a book about trying to live when you think you’re already dead.
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