That’s some catch, as Yossarian might say, after letting out a respectful whistle. The brief exchange between naive grunts and a grizzled veteran of Tinseltown is an obvious homage to Joseph Heller. But it’s also a bold announcement that “Catch-22” is about to be updated for a new era.
In his immortal classic, Heller was lampooning the military’s attempt to bureaucratize the horror of World War II. In Fountain’s razor-sharp, darkly comic novel — a worthy neighbor to “Catch-22” on the bookshelf of war fiction — the focus has shifted from bureaucracy to publicity, reflecting corresponding shifts in our culture. The invisible architects of Heller’s war, the mysterious “they” who pulled all the strings, aimed to apply organizational theory to inhuman chaos, with predictably absurd results. In Fountain’s war, once it has become abundantly clear that the Iraq mission cannot be accomplished, the only hearts and minds left to be won are those of ambivalent Americans back home — and the only way to win them, naturally, is through pageantry, jingoism and self-congratulation.
On Thanksgiving Day of an unspecified but recent year, the surviving members of Bravo Squad — whose battlefield bravery has been replayed endlessly on Fox News — are at Texas Stadium, home of the Dallas Cowboys, as special guests of the team’s owner. They are vaguely aware that they are to take part in the high-octane halftime performance, along with the scheduled entertainment: Destiny’s Child, the R&B act led by Beyonce. They are more acutely aware that they are to be redeployed in a matter of days.
Nineteen-year-old Billy Lynn is filled with dread, not so much having to do with returning to Iraq (though he’s not particularly looking forward to it) as with going on national TV in front of tens of millions of viewers and representing America’s fighting forces under such strangely, and even obscenely, contrived circumstances. Then again, their elaborately orchestrated, cross-country publicity tour has been an education in a very different kind of self-sacrifice for Billy and his fellow soldiers. Everywhere they go, they meet awestruck Americans who can’t help but couch their sincere gratitude to Bravo Squad in the rhetoric of predigested, unearned bellicosity, which Fountain relays as a run-on stream of patriotic cliches.
Billy obliges every last fan with his courteous humility and resolute bearing. “In a way it’s so easy, all he has to do is say what they want to hear and they’re happy, they love him, everybody gets along,” Fountain writes of the starring role Billy has assumed in the national psychodrama. “Sometimes he has to remind himself there’s no dishonor in it. He hasn’t told any lies, he doesn’t exaggerate, yet so often he comes away from these encounters with the sleazy, gamey aftertaste of having lied.”
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