#Answer Read This Book Before The Super Bowl

It Might Make You Sad, It Might Make You Happy, It Might Make You Ask Questions

I’m neither a fan nor a critic of the Super Bowl. I’m among the roughly 200 million Americans who don’t usually watch it. Our numbers are shrinking, according to television ratings and the Census. In 2000, 194 people, or 69 percent of the U.S. population, avoided watching the Super Bowl. By 2015, the share of the population not watching shrank to 64 percent.

I don’t know what these people were doing with their time. Maybe they were working. Or maybe these people were too busy reading a book about football— a book like “Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk,” by Ben Fountain.

The story is about a company of soldiers who, home after an epic battle in Iraq that is captured on video, get feted and paraded at the architectural megaplex that was once Texas Stadium. It’s also a novel about consumption (on the scale that only we Americans can muster) about artifice, and about the gulf between soldiers and civilians.

The opening lines suggests the pace of the book and the liquid armor these soldiers put on to protect themselves from culture shock they expect in the stadium.

“The men of Bravo are not cold. It’s a chilly and windwhipped Thanksgiving Day with sleet and freezing rain forecast for late afternoon, but Bravo is nicely blazed on Jack and Cokes thanks to the epic crawl of game-day traffic and the limo’s minibar.”

For football fans, there’s plenty on the beauty of sport. Billy Lynn, from whose perspective the story is told, finds a soothing calm in watching a kicker warm up. “Billy tries to mark the absolute highest point, that instant of neutral buoyancy where the ball hangs or dangles, actually pauses for a moment as if measuring the fall that now begins as the nose rolls over with a languid elegance…” Fountain writes.

But like all things in this novel, war is never far off, and rears itself even in the arc of a piece of leather.

“The peak moments give him the most intense pleasure, a bristling in his brain like tiny lightning strikes as the ball sniffs eternity’s lower reaches, strokes the soft underbelly of empty-headed bliss for as long as it lingers at the top of its arc. Billy can imagine that’s where Shroom lives now, he is a citizen of the realms of neutral buoyancy.”

Shroom was a fellow soldier who died. How, you’ll have to read to find out. But Billy’s life continues, disturbed, and his state-side dealings with fellow Americans aren’t easy.

There’s the “blithering twit-savant of a TV newsperson” who asked him, straight up, “What was it like? Being shot at, shooting back? Killing people, almost getting killed yourself. Having friends and comrades die right before you eyes?”

There’s the family who says they watched Bravo company’s epic battle in Iraq on Fox News, and tells him they “just couldn’t stop watching!”

“It was just like nina leven, I couldn’t stop watching those planes crash into the towers…Same with yall, when Fox News started showing that video I just sat right down and didn’t move for hours. I was so proud, just so…proud…it was like, thank God, justice is finally being done.”

There’s the movie executive who wants to tell their story, but is unwilling to pay much for it. There’s their time on the jumbotron, where fans claps, and people tell them their proud, and Bravo company smiles and waves, and puffs their chests.

And through all this Billy tries to respect his fellow Americans but can’t stop from being confused.

“They are bold and proud and certain in the way of clever children blessed with too much self-esteem, and no amount of lecturing will enlighten them to the pure sin toward which war inclines. He pities them, scorns them, loves them, hates them, these children.”

And then halftime comes. Bravo company is paraded on the 50-yeard line while Destiny’s Child performs, shadow humping in the soldiers’ direction with 40 million fans watching on television. And one Bravo member can’t help but cry.