I could not think of a book that more perfectly eviscerates conservative culture, and specifically, the culture that lives at the unique overlap of conservative religiosity, militaristic hero-worship, sports mania, super-sized life, super-glamorized media, cult-of-Bush spookiness and… really, the whole enchilada. While that can be fun, it can also be pretty mean if done wrong but - that’s not the case here, in fact the book is actually fairly gentle in its critique. Perhaps because it’s all delivered from the perspective of a protagonist who is, very probably, not a liberal or a Democrat by any means. And more so because this book is protesting something which plainly needs to be protested, a senseless and needlessly destructive war.

The characters are charmingly sympathetic, especially Billy Lynn, who is a sweet if somewhat lost soul trying to do the best he can in the face of a difficult life. His commanding officer, Sergeant David Dime, is a free-thinking, unshakeable father figure for a troupe which seems to hunger for father figures. And the fallen brother whose death haunts the entire narrative - Shroom - seems to be a similarly free-thinking person who Billy respected even more than Shroom. Even Billy’s father, who is the closest character we have to a true villain, comes across, in his own way, as someone yearning to express himself and be heard (although, at tremendous cost to his friends and family.) What is noticeable is the relative lack of female characters - with the exception of Billy’s sister and the cheerleader who becomes his love interest - although they largely act in the background.

The main events of the book focus on the adventures and misadventures of Billy Lynn and his troop, the Bravo squad, at the Thanksgiving Day game of the Dallas Cowboys, and the side-plot focuses on the squad’s efforts to parlay their experiences into a movie. That side-plot, together with the events that started the whole thing off (the release of a viral video of a fire-fight in which Bravo squad heroically fought off a group of insurgents) is a clever comment on the war itself: it’s an entertainment piece, essentially a very expensive way to goose the Bush administration’s ratings. What gets buried beneath all of that noise, and which only occasionally surfaces in Billy’s interior thoughts, is the actual horror of the war on the ground.