![]() ![]() The book's not merely good it's Pulitzer Prize-quality good, so much so that readers might find themselves wishing it had been published last year so that the Pulitzer committee could have saved themselves the bother of a hung jury, and just given its damn award to Fountain.Ī bracing, fearless and uproarious satire of how contemporary war is waged and sold to the American public, Fountain's novel gives us one Denisovichian day in the life of Billy Lynn, a 19-year-old soldier who's on a "Victory Tour" of America during the time of the Iraq war. It's the kind of book where you find yourself reading key passages aloud moments after your laughter has awoken your spouse. The reason I bring this up is that Ben Fountain's "Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk" is about 95 percent of the most entertaining novel I've read in ages. ![]() Two of the best novels I've read in the past year - Lauren Groff's "Arcadia" and Jo Ann Beard's "In Zanesville" - featured endings that, to my mind, didn't quite measure up to the promise of their earlier passages. "The Corrections"? For the life of me, I can't even remember how it actually ended. ![]() Upon reflection, even some of my favorite books of the past decade or two seem to suffer from unmemorable or less-than-satisfying conclusions. ![]()
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