Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, by Ben Fountain, Canongate, RRP£16.99, 307 pages

Watching an American football game in 2004, Ben Fountain noticed a group of soldiers playing a bit part in an over-the-top halftime show by girl group Destiny’s Child. From that momentary blip of absurdity, Fountain has fashioned a novel that speaks, with great comedy and perhaps greater pathos, to the much larger absurdity of the Iraq war. His is not a war novel but a novel about the war’s absence from American life. Barring a few flashbacks, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk is set entirely in a Texas football stadium, where a group of Iraq veterans are being feted as America’s Heroes. Fountain’s point – how unreal the war was for everyone except those who fought it – is made by inserting us into the head of a fictional soldier at sea in a real homeland.

“Bravo Squad”, as Bravo Company, second platoon, first squad, has been mistakenly abbreviated by the media, has returned to the US for a two-week “Victory Tour” after an insurgent-obliterating firefight, recorded and endlessly replayed by Fox News. The novel is set during the tour’s last stop, a Dallas Cowboys game where the men of Bravo are expected to play a mysterious role during the halftime show, then two days later return to Iraq, their courage no safeguard against the military’s carnal maw. At the game they will be celebrated and humiliated in equal parts, shepherded from one station of excess – buffets and clubs, bars and parties – to another, but also to seats in the blistering cold weather, against which they alone seem unarmoured.

The action unfurls exclusively in the head of Billy Lynn, a 19-year-old from a small Texas town who was at the centre of the firefight and can’t shake the memory of a dying friend. Nor can he shake his fear of returning to Iraq, which has become less about a collective struggle against an enemy than about each individual soldier’s evasive manoeuvres against death. Even the novel’s satiric subplot – Hollywood’s quickly waning interest in making a movie about Bravo – resonates most when it intersects with this mortal dread: the soldiers are desperate to cash in now because later they may be dead.

The novel’s poignancy lies partly in Billy coming to cherish, almost with surprise, the value of his own life, even as the day’s events deflate his self-worth. His heroism has brought him into unprecedented proximity with wealth and power, embodied by the Cowboys’ owners, players and Very Important Patrons. Even as these encounters open his sense of possibility, they also whittle him down, never more so than when he and the other soldiers find themselves as props at halftime – with post-traumatic-stress-disorder-inducing fireworks thundering overhead – for Beyoncé’s booty-shaking. “All the freak-out flavors of an ambush situation without any of the compensating murderous release,” as Fountain puts it.

Fountain’s short story collection Brief Encounters with Che Guevara (2006) sketched, with a wry, gentle eye, Americans befuddled by encounters with the foreign. Billy is befuddled too, but by his own countrymen, who have been made strange, even freakish to him by his time in Iraq.

In many ways the novel’s putative action – a spark of hot romance with a cheerleader; the question of whether Billy will duck out of returning to the war – is merely a pretext for the exploration of this estrangement: for the question of whether fighting the war makes you “the enemy of all that sent you to the war”.

Perhaps as a result, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk occasionally feels too much like the repetitive slog Billy himself is enduring. Fountain’s vivid, fluid prose mostly overcomes this inertia although his adroit metaphors and similes are sometimes piled as thickly as one of the Cowboys’ refulgent buffets. The novel works best when its spot-on observations seem to, if not emanate from Billy Lynn’s brain, at least comport with his thinking, less well when it feels like a lecture from Fountain, whose resonant digs about Americans’ consumerism and childlike complacency and the wrongness and futility of the Iraq war can seem a cheap satisfaction. Americans can be, quite literally, a fat target.

Fountain is a writer interested in moral quandaries, and the complicated one lurking beneath this novel’s surface is where, exactly, a reader should sit in relation to it. By hewing so closely to Billy’s point of view, Fountain encourages a reader to share it. Yet Fountain seems too smart not to know that, rather than the young soldiers putting their young lives on the line, it is his Texan buffoons that the rest of us most closely resemble.

Amy Waldman is author of ‘The Submission’ (Windmill)

THE SUBMISSION

(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011)

For many months The Submission had a different cover entirely (it’s on the galley) which had appealing elements but didn’t seem to cohere. Perhaps I had been spending too much time with my characters, but I kept thinking, This is not a cover of which Mo—Mohammad Khan, the stubborn architect at the center of The Submission—would approve.

Then, at the proverbial last minute, FSG hired a new creative director, Rodrigo Corral, and I was invited to look at his “tweaks” to the cover. The tweak, in fact, involved scrapping it entirely. Instead, Corral presented a black cover into which he had embossed, also in black, French curves, an architect’s tool, with THE SUBMISSION in white type. Here was a cover I could imagine pleasing Mo.

I loved the elegance and starkness and mystery of it (most non-architects assume the French curves are related to Arabic). The design seemed perfect for a novel that is about how to read symbols (Mo’s design, a possibly Islamic garden, becomes a source of controversy) and how to read people. Since the book came out I’ve had numerous writers say, “I can’t believe they let you get away with a black cover.” I wasn’t aware we were getting away with anything!

If one argument for the continuing production of physical (as opposed to digital) books is their presence as an object in the world, Corral gave The Submission an object power.

—Amy Waldman, author

At its heart, The Submission is about our inability to deal with the emotional devastation of 9/11. Amy Waldman shows us how collective attempts at grieving and rebuilding are eroded by political instrumentalism, racial essentialism, and finger-pointing. This cover features a French curve—an architect’s tool—debossed in black onto a black surface. Symbolic of the novel’s protagonist Mohammed Khan, a Virginia-born agnostic, the image looks as if it could be Islamic but is entirely secular.

I like the idea that the tool is rendered invisible until you approach it—much like Mo Khan, who is shrouded in other people’s stereotypes and speculation, threatened equally by indignant protestors and Muslim imams, all for proposing a winning design for a garden intended for healing. Like the novel, the cover indicates how we can only ever deal with grief by countenancing the internal struggles and terror that lie beyond surface expressions of tolerance and solidarity.

—Rodrigo Corral, designer

But I’ve been following the controversy, in which Lowe’s, Kayak, and possibly other companies stopped advertising on TLC’s “All-American Muslim” after complaints from the little known Florida Family Association, some flame-throwing blogs, and piqued customers. The complaint, in essence, was that the show, which follows five varied, fairly ordinary Muslim families in the Detroit area, is dangerous because it fails to also depict extremist Islam, thus lulling us into complacency. (The irony is that the “Islamic believers” the Florida Family Association claims we ought to fear are also the most likely to agree with its stance against homosexuality and pornography.)

Lowe’s has maintained it wanted to avoid a political or social conflict. Given the Association’s stated mission of defending, protecting and promoting “traditional, biblical values” (determined, apparently, by Internet polling of its members, who cited Islam as their number-one fear), the home-improvement chain has squarely taken sides in a religious one.

My novel, The Submission, deals with somewhat similar territory. In it, an American Muslim wins an anonymous competition to design a 9/11-like memorial, only to find his right to proceed questioned as critics and supporters alike attempt to discern what “kind” of Muslim he is — how bona his American fides are, to mutilate the Latin. The reaction in some quarters to “All-American Muslim” — the assertion that it’s “propaganda” because it doesn’t show the dangerous Muslims — doesn’t entirely surprise me: early on, a reader approached me to make the same complaint about The Submission. She was, by coincidence, also from the Detroit area. It took a long, circuitous evasive conversation to ascertain her beef: none of my Muslim characters were of the Al Qaeda persuasion, and therefore the novel couldn’t possibly be authentic. It wasn’t a “true” picture of Islam. Putting aside whether fiction is required to provide a “true” picture of anything –– it’s not — why is her version of Islam “truer” than mine?

But this is where we are ten years after 9/11: the hijackers dead, the cloud of suspicion they unleashed still hanging over American Muslims. Which is why, to my surprise, I find myself torn about “All-American Muslim” — not the content, which I can’t judge, but the concept. The show sounds like a commendable, even entertaining effort to disperse that cloud of suspicion — to present Muslims as “normal,” as fully American — yet I wonder if it inadvertently fuels the fire it seeks to dampen. The title “All-American Muslim” implies there is another kind, or at least accepts that there is a question about Muslims’ Americanness. Sometimes to entertain a question is also to answer it. It is hard for me to imagine a show today called “All-American Jew,” or “All-American Christian,” or even “All-American Evangelical.” A show called “All-American Black” or Chinese or Hispanic would be considered condescending, even insulting — to suggest they needed that label affixed, that they could be otherwise.

The show is being congratulated for, in the words of Mike Thompson of the Detroit Free Press, demonstrating “that the lives of Muslim Americans are pretty much like the lives of non-Muslim Americans.” Was there doubt? What, exactly, are the lives of non-Muslim Americans like, anyway? When a TLC executive tells The Washington Post, “It was important to provide people with this experience, so they could form their own opinions,” what is he suggesting we form opinions about?

What should concern Muslims and non-Muslims alike is not just Lowe’s cravenness, but the momentum the effort to estrange Muslim-Americans, to make us question their American-ness, has gained, rather than lost, in the past decade. As much as Lowe’s response, perhaps the show also points to that. During an interview this year, I was asked if I thought Muslims would “ever” be assimilated into America. The question shocked me: Muslims, who began coming to America in significant numbers since the 1960s, have been assimilated for decades. Before 9/11 – before the last few years, in truth, when the campaign against even “peaceful” Muslims for their supposed allegiance to Sharia gained momentum —no one would have thought to question it.

The Florida Family Association took exception to a Muslim law enforcement official stating, on the show: “I really am American. No ifs, ands, and buts about it.”

Shouldn’t we all take exception, of a different kind, to any American having to provide that reassurance?

Instead, I am publishing a novel, my first — one that never uses the words 9/11 or Ground Zero but that is clearly about the aftermath of the attack. It tells the story of a blind (and obviously fictional) competition to design a memorial for the victims of a terrorist attack, and the American Muslim -– Mohammad “Mo” Khan — who wins it. The suspicion of him only grows when questions arise about whether his design, a garden, is actually an Islamic paradise.

What made me turn to fiction? On the simplest level, it was having the idea for The Submission. I wanted to know how things turned out not just for Mo but also for the family members, journalists, and even fellow Muslims in conflict with him. But I also had come to feel that journalism didn’t offer the language to explore the uncomfortable questions and uneasy emotions that lingered in the years after the attack. The more we learned about Islam, the more confused we became. Who should we fear? Who should we trust? I had never thought so much about what it means to be American, what kind of country we should be, as I did in those years. And in South Asia and elsewhere, I was reporting on Muslims asking similar questions about their religion. These were parallel, if very different, identity crises, and they seemed ripe for fiction. Maybe I just wanted to be in a quieter space, where I could explore this recent, raw history without being assaulted by the din of the news, or where I could let my imaginary characters explore it for me.

It was those characters that sustained me through the nearly four years of writing the novel. Mo himself, arrogant, ambitious, and stubborn; Claire Burwell, the privileged, rational widow who battles her own doubts; Sean Gallagher, the hotheaded brother of a dead firefighter who seizes on the controversy as a chance to prove himself; and Asma Anwar, the Bangladeshi immigrant, also widowed in the attack, who experiences the controversy, like so much else, as an outsider.

I read somewhere a brief parable about a pilgrim and a gardener. The gardener asks the pilgrim what he saw on his travels; the pilgrim asks the gardener what happened in his garden while the pilgrim was away. A reporter is perhaps the ultimate pilgrim, the novelist a gardener. Each, in their own way, has news to report.

http://www.omnivoracious.com/2011/08/amy-waldman-on-the-submission.html

As a listing of sources this is by no means complete. There were many, many other things I read, watched, or listened to — from Philip Nobel’s acerbic and insightful book about Ground Zero, Sixteen Acres; to the daily round-up of architecture news from ArchNewsNow; to lots of Fox News, to a novel called Paradise, by Abdulrazak Gurnah, in which a garden figures prominently; to many books—across the spectrum—about Islam that offered inspiration or information. From time to time I may try to write about some of the things featured on this website, and some that were left out.

“I remember at the very first press conference a reporter asking me if I did not find it ironic that the memorial was for the Vietnam War and that I was of Asian descent. I was so righteous in my response that my race was completely irrelevant. It took me almost nine months to ask the VVMF, in charge of building the memorial, if my race was at all an issue. It had never occurred to me that it would be, and I think they had taken all the measures they could to shield me from such comments about a “gook” designing the memorial.”
—Maya Lin, Boundaries 

“Lin believes that what enables her to create works that people respond to emotionally is her own emotional detachment, and that what enables her to address political subjects effectively is her apolitical posture.”
—Louis Menand, “The Reluctant Memorialist,” The New Yorker, 2002

“There’s this authority that’s going to say, ‘This is mine first, then it’s going to be yours, then it’s going to be yours.’… .At some level, we all shared it, and that has never happened before in history. I hope that is really taken into account.”
—Maya Lin on memorializing 9/11, “The Reluctant Memorialist”

“[Fernando Caruncho’s] gardens have a serene formality that relates to the historic influence of Islam, yet they are distinctly of the twentieth century: clean, uncluttered, expansive spaces full of light and reflective surfaces.”
—Andrew Wilson, Influential Gardeners

“At the base of the towers, Yamasaki used implied pointed arches—derived from the characteristically pointed arches of Islam—as a transition between the wide column spacing below and the dense structural mesh above. (Europe imported pointed arches from Islam during the Middle Ages, and so non-Muslims have come to think of them as innovations of the Gothic period.) Above soared the pure geometry of the towers, swathed in a shimmering skin, which doubled as a structural web—a giant truss. Here Yamasaki was following the Islamic tradition of wrapping a powerful geometric form in a dense filigree, as in the inlaid marble pattern work of the Taj Mahal or the ornate carvings of the courtyard and domes of the Alhambra… A number of designers from the Middle East [described] the entire façade as a giant ‘mashrabiya,’ the tracery that fills the windows of mosques.”
—Laurie Kerr, “The Mosque to Commerce,” Slate, 2001

“There is no escaping the unfortunate fact that Muslim government employees in law enforcement, the military and the diplomatic corps need to be watched for connections to terrorism, as do Muslim chaplains in prisons and the armed forces. Muslim visitors and immigrants must undergo additional background checks. Mosques require a scrutiny beyond that applied to churches and temples.
—Daniel Pipes, The New York Post, 2003

“Here is a picture of the Garden promised to the pious: rivers of water forever pure, rivers of milk forever fresh, rivers of wine, a delight for those who drink, rivers of honey clarified and pure, [all] flow in it; there they will find fruit of every kind; and they will find forgiveness from their Lord.”
—The Qur’an, 47:15 (translation by M.A.S. Abdul Haleem)

“Because paradise is described as a shady garden with four gardens and four streams, it might seem logical to assume that this provided Muslim architects with the blueprint for the Islamic chahar bagh [four gardens]. But the four-part division and the metamorphosis of the simple irrigation canal into a defining element in garden organization predates Islam…Hence, it is not the form that reflects a specifically Muslim conception of paradise, but rather the description of paradise that reflects a preexisting vocabulary of garden forms.”
—D. Fairchild Ruggles, Islamic Gardens and Landscapes, 2007

“The Koran…promises entrance to the Garden of Paradise to anyone slain fighting for the ‘Way of God.’…This Paradise, a series of walled gardens, is Allah’s reward to god-fearing men and women, the humble and the almsgivers, the forgiving and those who have suffered for God’s sake.”
—Elizabeth Moynihan

“Always, remember to pray if possible before reaching the target or say something like ‘there is no god but God and Mohamed is His Prophet.’ After that, God willing, we will meet in Paradise.”
—document found in 9/11 hijacker Mohamed Atta’s luggage

“In the early part of this century there began to appear, first in France and then in Russia and in Holland, a structure that has remained emblematic of the modernist ambition in the visual arts ever since. Surfacing in pre-War cubist painting and subsequently becoming ever more stringent and manifest, the grid announces, among other things, modern art’s will to silence, its hostility to literature, to narrative, to discourse.”

“In the spatial sense, the grid states the autonomy of the realm of art. Flattened, geometricized, ordered, it is antinatural, antimimetic, antireal. It is what art looks like when it turns its back to nature.”
—Rosalind E. Krauss, “Grids,” 1979

“Dreyfus had for so long been an abstraction — whether admired as “the martyr” or reviled as “the Judas” — that his actual arrival required emotional adjustments that many were unable to make… Dreyfus himself could not live up to the role that dramatic logic required of him.”
—Ruth Harris, Dreyfus

“Real men, flesh and blood men, above all those whose martyrdom is revealed,  whose tortures…make people cry their eyes out, are not wooden pawns on a chessboard. One must choose. If they are wooden pawns on a chessboard, then don’t trouble my nights with the nightmares you paint.”
—Joseph Reinach, supporter of Dreyfus

“Men and women on both sides felt that the Affair offered themselves a chance to remakes themselves, and they threw themselves into the public drama to hasten their transformations.”
—Ruth Harris, Dreyfus

“When men throw themselves into action…the love of principles, the thirst for an ideal…are the attributes of only a few.”
—Mathieu Dreyfus, brother of Alfred

“The Dreyfusards do not require the myth of spotless heroism and purity that was built around their advocacy after the Affair was over…They were men and women with all the flaws, inconsistencies and occasional cruelties of ordinary people, and should be admired as such.”
—Ruth Harris, Dreyfus

“We called it a ‘crescent’ because it was a curving land form. We called it ‘Crescent of Embrace’ because of the symbolic gesturing of embracing this place.”
—Paul Murdoch, Flight 93 Memorial Designer

“On the anniversaries of 9/11, it’s not hard to visualize al-Qaeda celebrating the crescent of maple trees, turning red in the fall, “embracing” the Flight 93 crash site. To them, it would be a memorial to their fallen martyrs”….
—Mike Rosen, Rocky Mountain News

“It’s really revolting to me, this whole thing. It’s an insult to my son and all the others.”
—Tom Burnett Sr., father of Flight 93 victim; opponent of Crescent of Embrace

“Wow. Such hate. I’m shocked. When you insult the place and inflame events, I want you to know you hurt us, too.”
—Sandra Felt, widow of Flight 93 victim; supporter of Crescent of Embrace

“It’s a disappointment there is a misinterpretation and a simplistic distortion of this, but if that is a public concern, then that is something we will look to resolve in a way that keeps the essential qualities.”
—Paul Murdoch, memorial designer

‘The designer will look at all recommendations, and he will go back and make refinements. It won’t come back as a square, but it will progress.”
—Jeff Reinbold, National Park Service Flight 93 project manager

“It’s not meant to be eaten,” Jorge said, suddenly shy. “It’s a tribute.”

“A people who believe that nature is somehow sacred—God’s second book, according to the Puritans; the symbol of Spirit, according to the transcendentalists—will probably never feel it easy bending it to their will, and certainly not for aesthetic reasons.”
—Michael Pollan, Second Nature

“After this, after “Allah Akbar,” there is no thought other than prayer, no view or gaze aside from the activities of prayer. There is only complete concentration. You are far from the cares and demands of your life. Architecture is the least of the things you have forgotten.”
—Imam Muhibbur Rahman, Masjidul Aman, in New York Masjid, by Edward Grazda

“History has no memory of the great majority of gardens that have graced the earth over the millennia—gardens being by nature impermanent creations that only rarely leave behind evidence of their existence—nor should it.”
—Robert Pogue Harrison, Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition

Young Muslim man—30s or 40s—Indian or American or maybe mixed—architect—wins blind WTC or equivalent competition…outrage/uproar follows…pressure to withdraw, submit under s/one else’s name….

Ch: 1: the committee meets. Last discussion of their decision, say all the reasons why it is their choice. Committee head — urbane man, bowtie, summons assistant.

“Please bring envelope #3113.”

He brings it in, chairman opens, reads, seems to blanche a bit, says nothing, passes paper to left, folds his hands as if in prayer. Goes around room, one woman gasps, until finally Robert Roeder speaks for all of them.

“Jesus Christ,” he says. “It’s a goddamned Muslim.”

READ THE SUBMISSION’S FIRST CHAPTER HERE