In the Summer of 2012,  I took my 11-year-old son to Lane Stadium here in Blacksburg to watch a Virginia Tech intrasquad football scrimmage.  ESPN ranks the stadium as the second-most scariest place for opposing teams to play in college football, but on this particular placid Saturday afternoon, only a fraction of the stadium’s 66,000+ seats were occupied.  All the seats for the scrimmage were free, so we immediately made our way up to the club seats at the forty-yard-line, seats that we’d never be able to afford at an actual in-season football game.  So, while my son watched Virginia Tech’s offensive and defensive units square off against each other, I sat back in the outdoor club seats and read Ben Fountain’s fantastic novel, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk.

Fountain’s novel, which Karl Marlantes (Matterhorn) blurbs as being “the Catch-22 of the Iraq War,” chronicles one day in the life of Billy Lynn, a war hero on a glorified two-week “Victory  Tour” throughout the United States with his unit (the Bravos) before having to re-deploy with his unit back to Iraq.  On this particular day of the novel, the Bravos are treated to a Thanksgiving Day Dallas Cowboy’s football game.  A spiffed-out white luxury SUV takes drives them.  As they approach their destination, Billy sits “watching the stadium swell outside his window to Death Star proportions.”

What makes the Bravo unit so special is that, while in Iraq, a video of the Bravos engaging in a daring and deadly fire fight has gone viral.  Overnight, they become national heroes, a symbol of hope during the worst days of the Iraq war.  To shore up political support for the war, the Bush Administration brings the heroes stateside to parade them around the country as if they were show ponies.  People come up to the Bravos expressing gratitude but, knowing that they’ll be shipped back to Iraq as soon as the Victory Tour concludes, the Bravos quickly surmise how hollow these shows of support are.

“Victory Tour.”   

I couldn’t help but think of Michael Jackson each time the phrase popped up in Fountain’s novel.  Yes, I’m aware that the reference dates me terribly, but it made for an even more ridiculous reading experience.

Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk just sizzles with dry black humor.  The verve of Fountain’s voice is incredible.  As they pull into the stadium parking lot, their tricked-out SUV passes over a speedbump

“Shit,” someone murmurs, a speed bump in the silence—their first burst of enthusiasm on sighting the stadium has flatlined into verbal arrest...  Bravo doesn’t do so well with silence anyway.  Guff and bullshit are more their working style, but the spell of introspective dread concludes with the appearance of a large, carefully rendered homemade sign affixed to a roadside utility pole.  STOP ANAL RAPE IN IRAQ! the sign reads, below which someone has scrawled, heavens to betsey.  Bravo howls.

Where Fountain excels most is in juxtaposing the immense wealth of the Dallas Cowboys with the Bravos’ own shabby circumstances.  Though Billy Lynn is a lifelong Cowboys fan who grew up in a town “a mere eighty miles west…[of] fabled Texas Stadium,” he has never actually seen it “save through the expurgating medium of TV.”  For all his proximity, he might as well have grown up in a separate country.

When the Cowboys’ owner invites the Bravos into his private stadium suite to watch part of the game, Billy is overtaken by the suite’s “blue carpet, the blue furnishings with silver accents, giant flat-screen TVs implanted in every wall, two bars, hot and cold buffets, white-jacketed waiters… [the] steep-pitched bank of stadium seats, rows of upholstered chairs stair-stepping down to the glassed-in front and its postcard view of the playing field.”

He’s never been in the proximity of so many wealthy people before.

“The money vibe can be felt at once, a faint hum, a kind of menthol tingling of the lips.  Billy wonders if wealth can be caught like a germ, just by virtue of sheer proximity.”

As Scott Fitzgerald famously wrote,

“Let me tell you about the very rich.  They are different from you and me.  They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand.”

The wealthy are like different creatures from Billy.  By the end of the novel, the wealthiest of the pack will attempt to screw over the Bravos for ownership of the only real asset of monetary value that the Bravos possess: the story of their heroism.

                                                                  ~~~

So.

I was sitting in this sunny, tranquil Virginia Tech stadium reading Fountain’s book when I came across the most remarkable passage, made all the more poignant for me because of where I was at the time.  About mid-way through the novel, the Cowboys’ equipment manager gives Billy a tour of the team’s equipment room.

They pause at neatly racked jerseys in home and away colors.  [The equipment manager] points out the spandex panels to ensure tight fit, the extra-long tails with spandex hems, the moisture-wicking qualities of the space-age fabric.  Billy pulls out number 78 and holds it up by the hanger; they share a chuckle over its impossible size, enough fabric to clothe an average family of four.  Then it’s on to the shoes, an entire section of wall shelved floor to ceiling with shoes, shoes, shoes, shoes, and nothing but more shoes….

…  Each player, [the equipment manager continues], requires three kinds of Astroturf treads, one for dry, one for damp, and one for wet conditions, plus a molded-form shoe with fixed cleats for grass, plus another grass shoe with interchangeable cleats, four kinds of cleat styles for all different weathers.  Then to the shoulder pads stacked on steam tables, stack upon stack and row upon row like bones in an Old World catacomb.  Twelve styles, which is to say a style for each position, four sizes per style plus flak-jacket extensions plus infinite customizations possible…

Chewing gum, we provide five flavors for the guys, you’re looking at twenty twenty-five hundred-count boxes right there.  Velcro strips and tags here, to keep your gear snug and tight, you don’t want to be giving the enemy any handles to grab.  Hip, thigh, and knee pads sorted by style, size, and thickness.  Tact gloves for receivers, padded gloves for linemen.  Orthopedic insoles, all sizes.  Baseball caps.  Knit caps.  Electric drills for changing out cleats.  Talcum powder.  Sunscreen.  Smelling salts.  Twenty-two different kinds of medical tapes.  Gels, creams, ointments, antibacterials, and antifungals.  Coolers.  Cartons of powdered Gatorade.

Three full pages are given to this catalog of equipment.  It just boggled my mind. 

While reading this, Virginia Tech football players smashed into each other, practicing, the clack of their shoulder pads audible even at the distance of the exalted outdoor club seats in which my son and I sat.  Although college players might not have the same chewing gum options as pro players, the supplies necessary to sustain a college football team throughout the season would be just as exhaustive. 

I kept imagining some local Virginia Tech employee showing off the contents of whatever equipment room lay in the bowels of Lane Stadium.  I imagined the employee rattling off a list of different kinds of padding, the jock straps and chin straps housed within his hangar-sized equipment room.  I imagined him unfurling the extra jerseys, tossing around excess helmets and kicking tees. 

And I thought of Jay Gatsby, how jubilantly he showed off his wardrobe for Daisy Buchanon in Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby:

He took out a pile of shirts and began throwing them, one by one, before us, shirts of sheer linen and thick silk and fine flannel, which lost their folds as they fell and covered the table with many-colored disarray.  While we admired he brought more and the soft rich heap mounted higher—shirts with stripes and scrolls and plaids in coral and apple-green and lavender and faint orange, with monograms of Indian blue.

The joyful excess of it all, huh?

                                                              ~~~

Left unstated in Fountain’s novel is mention of how ill-equipped U.S. soldiers were in the Iraqi war.  As the Iraqi insurgency heated up in 2003, nearly one-quarter of U.S. troops serving in that country did not have adequate bullet-proof flak jackets.  Soldiers were vulnerable to IED attacks because their Humvees had no body armor.  In many cases, the soldiers’ parents were responsible for properly equipping their children—that’s right: the media was rife with stories of how our soldiers were so ill-equipped that their parents took up collections to pay for their children’s flak jackets and their vehicles’ body armor.

                                                               ~~~

Addendum: I’ve thought a lot about Ben Fountain’s novel in recent days.  And I've thought a lot about the Bush-era wars that gave rise to Fountain's novel.  Last week, while driving to Memphis, I stopped off at The Frist Center for the Visual Arts in Nashville and took in a pair of war-related exhibits: Goya’s Los Desastres de la Guerra (The Disasters of War) and Steve Mumford’s War Journals.  Earlier this week, my friend and former professor Ed Falco posted a Facebook comments about his own appreciation of Fountain’s novel.  I want to write more about this next week, so please bear with me.

Addendum II: I had a fantastic time in Memphis last week!  Along with Anders Carlson-Wee (here’s “Riding the Owl’s Eye,” one of the great poems he read), Jill Talbot, and Abraham Smith (check out this video of his 2012 Alabama Book Fair reading), I read at The Pinch’s spring release party.  The story that I read from ("The Last American Tiger") focused on the surreal, unseemly aspects of American excess.  Many people were kind enough to tell me they enjoyed the reading, but the best part of the evening was just meeting and talking with so many University of Memphis MFA people.  I owe thanks to many people, especially Kristen Iversen, Chris Moyer, Andy Ross, and Ruth Baumann.  Thank you!

The other day, I came across a quote in a Roanoke Times travel section article about Siberia.  The writer, Jeff Ell, found himself in that barren land while accompanying a friend to a conference.  They took a day-trip and visited the quarry work site of a former gulag.  

Ever since picking up a copy of Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago as a teen, Ell had been fascinated by tales of Soviet gulags.  I can understand this fascination: terror and misery, as a subject matter, have a hold on us.  

Yet there's this wonderfully reflective moment in the article where Ell begins to question what, exactly, he was hoping to find in that quarry.

"I don't know what I was expecting to find there.  Solzhenitsyn's mitten?  An inkwell of suffering so deep that I would be able to dip in my pen and write words that would make readers weep?"

I understand his feelings, and his frustrations.  We seek out sites of disasters, memorials and museums dedicated to genocides and terror and tragedy.  We go to lectures, watch movies and television documentaries about the great horrors of our time-- the Holocaust, the Rwandan genocide, the Bataan Death March, Ground Zero and the World Trade Center bombings.  But to what end? 

Surely, there’s the need to remember the fallen.  And, yes, there’s the Santayana adage that tells us “those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it.”

But the impulse runs deeper than that—there’s the need to affirm our own humanity.   Confronted with tragedy, we need to remind ourselves how precious life is.  This is hardly an original thought, but it’s true.  As is the realization that random chance plays a great role in our present survival.  Each of us exists today because our forefathers and foremothers did not fall prey or be eradicated by some earlier genocidal impulse. 

The other great fear each of us confronts when remembering the dead is that, given a little prodding, we might not be unlike those who perpetrated past crimes. 

There’s a great United States Holocaust Memorial Museum video about “Why We Remember the Holocaust” that reminds us that the Holocaust was abetted and enabled by “so many people who participated in different ways, who made it possible: people who followed orders without questions; bystanders who watch and do nothing; ordinary men and women simply going with the flow.”

Remembering, as the video suggests, “is a call of conscience today in our world to make sure we aren’t the silent ones standing by and contributing to the suffering of others.”

Returning to Ell’s great reflection.  When I first read it (“an inkwell of suffering so deep”), I immediately thought of its great converse:

In “Tombstone Blues,” Bob Dylan sardonically sang

“Now I wish I could write you a melody so plain
That could hold you dear lady from going insane
That could ease you and cool you and cease the pain
Of your useless and pointless knowledge”



“An inkwell of suffering so deep” versus a “melody so plain.”

A melody so plain that could numb you and narcotize you and cause you to stop thinking, stop feeling.

It’s no accident that the Nazis sought to ban modern art from museums and art galleries and replace it with propagandized depictions of Aryan heroics and inoffensive, dulled-down and idealized landscapes that provoked no serious questions or emotions.  An art that doesn’t questions its culture is scarcely art—it’s wallpaper.  And a people that fail to interrogate the wisdom of its leaders is, as history proves, easily manipulated into committing great horrors.

At its minimum, challenging art teaches that multiple valid ways exist in which to view the world.  When you step into a gallery and are confronted with paintings you can’t readily interpret or understand, you realize very quickly that other people (for example, the artist who painted that indecipherable painting) think very differently from you.  In other words, art teaches tolerance. 

Of course, at its best, art challenges your assumptions about the world. 

Return back to that “inkwell of suffering,” which brings us closer to our fellow man.  By remembering his or her suffering, we actively contemplate three points-of-view: the victim, the perpetrator, and the bystander.  We become part of the tragedy just by thinking about it.  And we become part of the anti-tragedy as well when we contemplate how things might have—should have—been different.

Not all dramas take place on the stage, or even in the physical world.  For most of us, the most riveting dramas we see are played out solely within our mind.  Remembrances, with their implicit multi-faceted perspectives, become, if you will, a form of art. 

Errata: I’ll be reading tomorrow night (March 21) in Memphis to celebrate the release of the new issue of The Pinch.  The event begins at 7 pm and is being held at The Dixon Gallery, which seems like a gorgeous venue.  If you’re in the area, do drop by!

Errata #2: I’ve done a fair bit of reviewing lately.  Here’s a Heavy Feather Review review I wrote of Jessica Hollander’s IN THESE TIMES THE HOME IS A TIRED PLACE, which won the 2013 Katherine Anne Porter Prize.  Within the next few weeks, I should also have reviews up at Necessary Fiction, The Collagist, and another at Heavy Feather Review.

I was at my grandmother’s house on the weekend before Thanksgiving Day 1978.  My brother and I helped her with a few chores, did our homework, and watched television.  I remember us watching a hockey or football game that was interrupted with news reports about fatalities in Guyana.  A Congressman had been killed. I remember the adults present that day flooding into my grandmother’s living room, aghast. 

California Congressman Leo Ryan had been in Guyana to investigate human rights violations at “Jonestown,” the jungle commune established by American cult leader Jim Jones.  Jones’ security guards ambushed Ryan and his aides while they attempted to board a pair of small aircraft on a remote jungle airstrip.  Bob Brown, an NBC cameraman covering Ryan’s visit, captured the ambush on film before being shot himself.

As horrendous as the ambush was, a far more sinister tragedy would soon emerge. 

Jones’s followers, at his urging, committed mass suicide by drinking cyanide-laced Kool-Ade.  Babies too young to voluntarily drink the Kool-Ade, and those who resisted, were injected with the poison via syringe.  Jones himself was found dead with an apparently self-inflicted bullet wound in the head. 

All told, 918 people, including 304 children, died at Jonestown. 

Sometimes, thinking about the scale of this tragedy, I tremble.  Seriously.  How could 900+ people, most apparently willingly, have been induced to drink the Kool-Ade?

Fred D’Aguiar’s spectacular new novel, CHILDREN OF PARADISE (Harper Collins), attempts to answer that question.  We get the brutality, the chaos, the attempts at mind control, the delusional paranoia, and the mass hysteria that afflicted the commune, but what I loved most about the novel is its narrative path.  The book is only loosely based on the actual events of Jonestown, allowing D’Aguiar to take creative and compelling liberties in the telling of the tragedy. 

The Jim Jones-type character, named here as “Father” and “the preacher,” is scantly present during the first third of the novel.  Instead, D’Aguiar ushers us into the lives of the commune’s residents: a mother and daughter (Joyce and Trina), two of Trina’s young friends (Rose and Ryan), a pair of guards (Kevin and Eric), the riverboat captain who ferries people to the commune, and a most peculiar gorilla (Adam) who acts as the commune mascot but is later shown as a wonderfully sentient creature with strong attachments to those who bear the brunt of Father’s brutality.

I must confess that, being irrationally drawn to the Great Man theory of history, I was initially disappointed that “Father” was not more present in the opening pages, but by focusing on the other characters, D’Aguiar shows us the consequences of Father’s tyrannical reign.   We become emotionally invested in these characters.  We care about their plight, their struggles, in a way that would not have been possible had D’Aguiar allowed Father to overwhelm the narrative from the get-go. 

I’m a great fan of dystopian fiction, but D’Aguiar paints a dystopia unlike any other I have read before.  Reading George Orwell as a teenager was one of the formative events of my life.  I love George Saunders.  I loved Adam Johnson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning North Korean novel, THE ORPHAN MASTER’S SON, yet no other novel has made me think as much about organizations and structures, the individual’s relationships to power, and the yin-yang dichotomy of public vs. private yearnings.  D’Aguiar’s commune is vivid, credible, and maddening.

We learn very early that something is horribly amiss at the commune.  A teenage prefect charged with keeping order, rats out his mother for mumbling something that contradicts what Father has said.

“A prefect shouts for help to come right away and deal with his rebellious mother.  Two guards approach the teenager and his mother.  She tries to tell her son to be quiet, that she meant nothing by what she said to him.  But the prefect, in keeping with his training to listen and report anything suspicious that he hears, no matter the source, tells the guards…  The guards congratulate the prefect on his loyalty to Father, and the commune, over and above any loyalty to blood, and second only in loyalty to the Most High.  They grab the woman and march away.  The teenager looks satisfied but not completely so.  He looks around for someone else, anyone else, nearby to tell him he did the right thing in reporting his mother to the guards.”

As D’Aguiar writes, “It seems ever adult in the commune is bent on emulating the ways of the preacher.”

Characters quickly learn to stifle their private doubts about the fitness of Father’s autocratic rule or risk public beatings.  Just as at the real Jonestown, malcontents are flung down cobwebbed wells until they repent.

Young Trina, who must be ten or twelve years old, “has worked out already at her delicate age that everything they do at the commune, each chore or demonstration of loyalty, has to carry with it like a shadow a performance for some other thing that can never be shown.”

“Trina waves at her mother by pretending to wave away a fly.  Trina even says, Shoo, fly.  And she speaks quite loud.  Every muscle in Joyce’s body wants to wave back at Trina, but she knows better to attract the attention of a prefect or guard.  Like every parent at the commune, she has to downplay public displays of affection toward her child.  Trina belongs less to her and more to everyone in the community.”

Commune residents, including children, are chronically underfed.  When a loaf of bread goes missing, guards storm into the dormitories to flush out the culprit.  At school, children are ordered to cane-whip the thief, who happens to be their classmate.  Trina, whom Father has treated with special attention, resists until she is counseled about the consequences of resisting.

“The head teacher leans in close to Trina’s ear and whispers that this order comes from the preacher, and not to obey it would mean terrible things for a lot of people, not just Trina.  The teacher urges Trina to think of her mother.  Trina takes the cane and holds it beside her.  The cane is as tall as Trina.”

In such an environment, a smile becomes an act of bravery.

Trina “weighs on scales in her mind just how much happiness there is among the children as opposed to misery.  This morning is ruled by misery.  [One of her classmates] is missing.  To get through her day, she decides to smile at as many children as possible.”

Later, while talking with Rose, Trina tells how she is able to survive in the commune.  “She says that while the body may be trapped in this place, the mind is always free to roam wherever it feels safe.”

As the novel progresses, the preacher emerges as a central character.  Vain, amphetamine-amped and tricked out in dark sunglasses and Elvis-style jumpsuits, he’s prone to blood lust and incoherent rants.  We see his grandiosity, his hypocrisy, his self-importance, his love for—if this makes any sense—an ordered chaos.  After guards assault one too many children, he orders the children to cane their parents. 

Father’s bent on stockpiling vast quantities of cyanide.  Though he’s miserly on rations for his flock, those fortunate to be invited into his house “eat fried chicken and cole-slaw, imported apple pie and cream, and drink as much reconstituted Kool-Aid as the can.”

And it is with that casually-thrown “Kool-Aid” reference that we begin to worry about the fate of the commune.  Two-thirds through the novel, the endgame becomes clear.  Suffering from a persecution complex like no other, Father devises a mass suicide plan should outsiders disrupt his version of “paradise.”

In theory, since we all know what is going to happen, I would have thought that the novel’s tremendous narrative propulsion would wane as we near its finish, but it is to D’Aguiar’s great credit that the last hundred pages are unputdownable.  At moments, it seems possible that someone will step forward to put an end to Father’s madness.  Adam’s sentient ways, and the protection he offers to the otherwise-doomed children fascinate us, but ultimately—because we care about the characters—it is the drama of who (if anyone) will survive the tragedy that keeps us reading. 

Addendum: Okay, don’t take my word about how great this novel is.  Go ahead and check out The New York Times’ review.