If we leave home at eighteen, it’s often to a particular kind of institution. For me, as for Selin in The Idiot, that means university; for Billy Lynn, as for many young working-class adults who are less academically inclined, it’s the military. While, as Selin discovers, universities encourage questioning, not all questions are received with equal relish. On the other hand, as Billy learns, the army might discourage independent thought, it can’t prevent his wondering. Will these young people find the answers they’re looking for? Read on!
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The Idiot by Elif Batuman
Selin, a young American of Turkish heritage, arrives at Harvard in the mid-1990s with a mind and heart open to the experiences this will bring. A quirky character, as innocent as she is intelligent, she questions everything from why social life depends so much on alcohol to the causal relationship between language and thought. At her beginners’ Russian class – and, as an aside, I should point out that this British reader is continually confused by the smorgasbord that seems to characterise university education in the US, whereas in the UK, although there are options within the curriculum, we sign up for a degree in a particular subject – she’s paired with an older student, Ivan, for role-plays based on a stilted and simplified romantic story from their textbook. Soon, the pair takes their conversation out of the classroom into the new medium of email, where Selin analyses Ivan’s text as rigorously as those set by her tutors. Although Selin is the more smitten, and constantly battling the consequent humiliation, the friendship seems important to both. While Ivan remains loyal to his girlfriend, he’s delighted when he wangles a place for Selin at an English-language teaching programme in his native Hungary so that they can see each other during the summer.
With a lively wit and honesty, Selin is an engaging late-adolescent narrator as she shares her preoccupations across a year of her life, raising intellectual questions in an accessible and amusing manner. With events rather than a plot, and very few answers at the end of it, The Idiot is almost the antithesis of the coming-of-age novel and much truer to the mess of real life. Although for me, it could have been shorter, I did enjoy the journey even if, at the end, I find it hard to sum it up. Thanks to Jonathan Cape for my review copy. For another recently reviewed novel about an American university, see The Devil and Webster.
With a lively wit and honesty, Selin is an engaging late-adolescent narrator as she shares her preoccupations across a year of her life, raising intellectual questions in an accessible and amusing manner. With events rather than a plot, and very few answers at the end of it, The Idiot is almost the antithesis of the coming-of-age novel and much truer to the mess of real life. Although for me, it could have been shorter, I did enjoy the journey even if, at the end, I find it hard to sum it up. Thanks to Jonathan Cape for my review copy. For another recently reviewed novel about an American university, see The Devil and Webster.
Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk by Ben Fountain
When he trashes the expensive car of the man who has dumped his sister, Billy faces a stark choice between jail and the war in Iraq. Plumping for the latter, he is awarded a Silver Star for gallantry and, along with half a dozen other Bravos, and the flag-draped coffin of the comrade who didn’t make it, is flown home for a two-week “victory tour”. It's not clear (or I don't remember) whether this is arranged by the military or the agent from the film industry who’s trying to find a Hollywood sponsor for a movie based on the soldiers’ heroics, but it includes meeting President Bush, public and TV appearances in various (electorally) marginal states, a couple of days back home with his family to the grand finale at the Texas Cowboys’ football game on an icy cold Thanksgiving, which is where this novel is set.
Billy isn’t stupid. He knows there’s something phoney about this war. But he’s learnt to compartmentalise and find a sense of safety in his lack of choice. As the tour trundles towards its climax, and it becomes increasingly clear that, even as a hero, he’s a pawn, there’s a perverse comfort amid the terror in knowing he’ll soon be going back. When not battling his headache, or gulletting the alcohol he’s officially still too young to buy, he uses his temporary association with the wealthy to try and figure out how the system works.
And yet. There’s an eleventh hour tension in Billy’s situation, and likewise it wasn’t until the eleventh hour of the novel that I felt its real emotional pull. The backdrop to the tour has been a hope that things might be different: a psychological or physical avoidance of the return, albeit with the odds of a lottery win. The film deal that will make their fortune; losing his virginity; meeting Destiny’s Child. Being whisked away from the stadium by the anti-war activists his sister has contacted. Is any of this is going to happen? The blatant cynicism of the soldiers’ conscription into the commercial-break porn-fest that is the half-time entertainment, complete with fireworks, noise and strobe lights (yeah, exactly what men who’ve been in a war zone are going to love), gives a clue. And yet these adolescents continue (more or less) to remain polite to the members of the public who want to shake their hands and thank them for their service, and then immediately turn around and forget.
Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk is an angry novel about capitalism, war and sacrifice (that spoke to me in such an unexpected way it actually had me dreaming anger, a very rare occurrence). But I think the dynamic it captures doesn’t only apply to military service: we distance ourselves from anyone forced to bear the unbearable by turning them into heroes, telling them they’re brave. First published in 2012, I wonder what Billy would think of my copy, courtesy of Canongate books, being a 2016 movie tie-in. My own short story ”Heroes” is on a similar theme.
Billy isn’t stupid. He knows there’s something phoney about this war. But he’s learnt to compartmentalise and find a sense of safety in his lack of choice. As the tour trundles towards its climax, and it becomes increasingly clear that, even as a hero, he’s a pawn, there’s a perverse comfort amid the terror in knowing he’ll soon be going back. When not battling his headache, or gulletting the alcohol he’s officially still too young to buy, he uses his temporary association with the wealthy to try and figure out how the system works.
And yet. There’s an eleventh hour tension in Billy’s situation, and likewise it wasn’t until the eleventh hour of the novel that I felt its real emotional pull. The backdrop to the tour has been a hope that things might be different: a psychological or physical avoidance of the return, albeit with the odds of a lottery win. The film deal that will make their fortune; losing his virginity; meeting Destiny’s Child. Being whisked away from the stadium by the anti-war activists his sister has contacted. Is any of this is going to happen? The blatant cynicism of the soldiers’ conscription into the commercial-break porn-fest that is the half-time entertainment, complete with fireworks, noise and strobe lights (yeah, exactly what men who’ve been in a war zone are going to love), gives a clue. And yet these adolescents continue (more or less) to remain polite to the members of the public who want to shake their hands and thank them for their service, and then immediately turn around and forget.
Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk is an angry novel about capitalism, war and sacrifice (that spoke to me in such an unexpected way it actually had me dreaming anger, a very rare occurrence). But I think the dynamic it captures doesn’t only apply to military service: we distance ourselves from anyone forced to bear the unbearable by turning them into heroes, telling them they’re brave. First published in 2012, I wonder what Billy would think of my copy, courtesy of Canongate books, being a 2016 movie tie-in. My own short story ”Heroes” is on a similar theme.
| The Carrot Ranch is having a break from weekly 99-word stories, but that doesn’t mean we can relax. Quite the contrary, with two flash fiction contests a week during October (and I, fully immersed in another draft of my current WIP, was struggling to keep up before). The first, 100 words on when I grow up, set by Norah Colvin, runs until 10th October, and I’m honoured to be an assistant judge along with Robbie Cheadle. |  |
Alongside the eight contest prompts, flash-fiction queen and editor of the forthcoming Rough Writers’ anthology, Sarah Brentyn, is running a flash fiction fundraiser for hurricane relief. I felt rather smug yesterday, finding inspiration in an extremely windy walk, but I failed on two counts: the word limit is 50 and I couldn’t manage to tell the story I wanted in that space; the prompt is help not hurricane (although I did manage to squeeze that in retrospectively). Given that Brits will recognise an impending thirty year anniversary, and a friend’s son (although not the one who joined the army) did develop a fear of wind after their roof was blown off in a storm, I thought I’d share my attempt anyway.
The legacy of October 1987
Winds high enough to rattle the windows, to shake him from sleep. He slakes his fear with a beer from the fridge. A soldier more spooked by storms than snipers? Galled less by guerrillas than by gales? Cleaning up after Harvey, he’s bugged by the breeze that blew the roof off his childhood. “Britain doesn’t get hurricanes,” scoffed the weatherman. Seems he got his forecast wrong.
Winds high enough to rattle the windows, to shake him from sleep. He slakes his fear with a beer from the fridge. A soldier more spooked by storms than snipers? Galled less by guerrillas than by gales? Cleaning up after Harvey, he’s bugged by the breeze that blew the roof off his childhood. “Britain doesn’t get hurricanes,” scoffed the weatherman. Seems he got his forecast wrong.
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