Discontents 'culture'

Ben Fountain, who arrived quite late at writing, soon proved to be a great novelist. Author for now a single collection, very successful, but already there dating back a few years - Brief Encounters with Che Guevara: Stories / Brief encounters with Che Guevara (see my review) - I expected his new delivery . So it has signed a first novel, Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk: A Novel (or here or there) / End of half-time to the soldier Billy Lynn (large fomat) / End of half time for Billy Lynn soldier (pocket) and despite some minor flaws that can be found there, disappointment is not with go.

This is of course the ambition that initially be welcomed. If the stories - more or less rough around the edges - and tests around outdoor wars the United States has mushroomed in recent years, there finally had enough yet few attempts to approach them frontally by the novel. Certainly, veterans of Afghanistan or Iraq are now part of the expected characters in American fiction, literature or cinema - cf. for example the interesting character of The Wilding / Canyon Benjamin Percy, whose return to the country is apprehended relatively complex way - but few novels grappled directly and widely in how they are perceived and to perverse use that fact.

The story is simple (see description above). Back home, where a 'Victory Tour' was held in their honor and to boost morale of a nation that was beginning to ask questions about the validity of the war in Iraq, the eight soldiers of the squad Congratulations are tossed from one place to another, to the stage of Dallas where they will be exhibited in front of the appreciative crowd during halftime. Flanked by a Hollywood producer on the return which acquired the rights to their story and trying with great difficulty to find funding and partners, they operate in a marquee that exceeds, happy to be there - they are celebrated, will be able to meet the cheerleaders and rub Beyoncé - but also dropped considerably before the questions put to them and the roles assigned to them. The focal length is particularly fixed on Billy Lynn, 19 years old Texan whose intervention was crucial for 'Al-ansakar event', which made heroes: the character is ideal in the sense that he started a accelerated maturation process that leads him to ask a few basic questions, made all the more acute by the expectations of each other once back home.

The great success of Ben Fountain's novel is probably due to the fact that, while being just enough frontal, it still took some necessary angle and carefully avoided the pitfalls that could concern on the issue. First of all, one that would be to construct his characters to make mere pretexts to termination. Not that he does not denounce, but if there is a goal, it is rather in the way of States of America and its people to recycle the notion of heroism to your heart, and squeeze the juice of his heroes to the last drop (those like others). It is not for Ben Fountain of orchestrating the revelations which would aim to show what type of abuse would engage the soldiers in Iraq or elsewhere, or to contrast a little bit so the will to go 'do good 'and inglorious results that the American presence outside could succeed. If all that can emerge here and there on the occasion of a dialogue or a rumination of the character, Ben Fountain took the party to show his characters 'after the battle': whether their action was indeed heroic or not does not interest only insofar as it is reflected by the soldiers themselves and American civilians who come into contact with them - never described himself, the act to which they have given us is restored piecemeal only by reflection at a given time. The novel thus leaves never hear these national heroes are not: If there is doubt, it emanates from the characters themselves, or the gap between what the soldiers seem to have done and how it enhances the beyond all proportion (but to a certain extent). Immersed in a maelstrom, they find themselves as above ground, even when they come home.

Attentive to his characters and has as many American novelists a good ear, Ben Fountain makes them speak with some accuracy. It also lends to its main character moments of reflection, doubt and confusion that allow it to be flush with the awareness of the links that would not otherwise be woven. If Ben Fountain does not always avoid giving the analysis and sometimes turnkey poured into a certain didacticism (but a few lines, never by spreading), it happens more often to raise many of the traits that define it as United States called 'the culture "(which could result in the context / cultural environment). Torn time to bath, returning soldiers are immersed in a washing machine which, they include more or less confused, no different from that in which Americans constantly bathe: consumerism, commercial recycling, all-round recovery by the protean entertainment industry, exaltation of values ​​that tramples upon his best interest is not best served, etc.

If the novel is not free of small defects - will say too much at times, ideas somewhat lower in the treatment of how Billy finds love with a cheerleader tender, variations on the theme a bit redundant - he finds the right balance between his picaresque dimension, pushed his few grotesque and examining his young shaken character. Sold as the "Catch 22 of the war in Iraq," this novel is in fact not a charge against the absurdity of war as could be that of Joseph Heller. Less crackling and hénaurme, a less elaborate structure, less repetitive and more subtle as it aims primarily discomfort in 'culture' American. It is here also that it constitutes an original proposal, which has found its own form, prancing at times and reflexive to others, whose ambition is usually best served by the stylistic choices made.

I hesitated as to the number of stars to give this novel. I finally opted for 4 because of its few kinks, but I salute romantic thinking and ambition which, without being sensational, are more than ever to public health in the US.

This book is translated, as his first, Albin Michel. Having read the book in English to his exit, I have only to look at the translation of twenty pages before completing my review for the French edition. Michel Lederer seemed to me for what I have read deliver a heartfelt translation, as usual. First hat to him and the editor have learned with all the honors of the translation of the title: he had to grind well brains to get there, at that! If I could get the impression that maybe missing here and there a little salt in the return of some idiomatic expressions, I can only welcome the way he succeeds in making the various levels of oral language, not to mention the various jargons with which the author has fun. Not too much loss to the passage in French, so - it is fortunate that we have entrusted it to a translator experienced as Lederer - even if it is typically the kind of novel that's worth reading in the original if one is able to do so.