And it is terrific: eloquent and angry, funny and poignant. As Karl Marlantes, the Vietnam veteran and novelist who dubbed it "the Catch-22 of the Iraq war", explained, it is a book about "the American way of watching war". It's set on the home front, in 2004 or thereabouts, over one long Thanksgiving Day match at the Dallas Cowboys' stadium. Now, with Fountain well into his 50s, his full-length debut has finally emerged – a fierce, exhilarating novel about the Iraq war.īilly Lynn's Long Halftime Walk features no more than a few glimpses of battle. Back in 1988 he left his job as a property lawyer in Dallas, Texas, to write at his kitchen table his first book, the acclaimed short story collection Brief Encounters with Che Guevara, was not published until 18 years later, in 2006. Fountain is such an egregious late bloomer that, a few years ago, Malcolm Gladwell wrote a New Yorker article about him. B en Fountain's blinder of a first novel has been a long time coming.
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