Jim Breslin

There’s two things I love about Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk. The concept of the novel is brilliant, and the writing is is sublime. Ben Fountain won the National Book Award for this debut novel, and the award is well deserved.

Billy Lynn is a 19-year-old soldier who, along with his Bravo Unit, achieved fifteen minutes of fame for a brief and deadly firefight with Iraqis. A Fox News crew happened to be embedded with the unit and video of their attack has made these young soldiers heroes. Now, on a two-week “Victory Tour,” Billy and his brothers find themselves being celebrated for their courage during a nationally televised Thanksgiving Day Dallas Cowboys Game, where they will appear as props during a half-time appearance by Beyonce. Throughout the day, a hot shot Hollywood producer who has signed an option for their story holds cell phone negotiations in an attempt to secure financing to put their epic battle on the big screen. This is one epic day as the Bravo unit drinks, fights, gets stoned, hobnobs with the 1% in luxury suites, fights with roadies, and flirts with the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders. Here’s the catch – at the end of this three-ring circus – they are due to fly back to Iraq for another eleven-month tour. 

Author Ben Fountain moves mountains with this novel. His prose is wickedly funny and brightly colored, while we also feel the pain of Billy and his peers as they watch the masses of civilians walking through the concourse. At one point, a Dallas Cowboys lineman asks if he could join them in battle, “just for a week.” When a soldier suggests that the football player could enlist, the NFL players in the locker laugh.

To complicate matters, though Billy has held a dying friend in his arms, he is still a naive kid in many ways. He’s a virgin. His sister keeps sending him texts, trying to convince him to consider going AWOL. He’s lost while talking business with the rich men, and realizes they are patronizing him. When Billy makes a surprising connection with a cheerleader, he starts dreaming about a romantic life – heaven – while knowing he is hours away from returning to hell. In essence, he is just a teenager trying to figure out his world.

At one point, the producer tells him, “Billy you’re a philosopher.” But the kid tries to deny it, replying, “Hell no, I’m just a grunt.” Heartbreaking.

There’s so much more packed into these 307 pages, but I don’t want to ruin your reading experience. All I can say is, take the walk with Billy Lynn and you’ll see America in a new light.

Turns out that right after reading Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, I needed to read F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night for the West Chester Library Book Club. Considered his most autobiographical novel, Tender is the Night follows the lives of Dick and Nicole Diver, an expat couple who have a penchant for holding parties and being at the center of good times. The book is unconventional in that it starts with the good times being had, before a slight crack in the facade can be seen. I have to say, the first section of the book was not easy to get into. There are many characters shuffling through the scenes, and some of the language had me scratching my head. But then I came to this awesome quote, in which Dick says to Nicole,

“I want to give a really bad party. I mean it. I want to give a party where there’s a brawl and seductions and people going home with their feelings hurt and women passed out in the cabinet de toilette. You wait and see.”

This foreshadows Dick’s eventual destruction, and while their party ends up leading to a duel the following morning, the real destruction happens much later in the book. The second section takes the reader back to when Dick and Nicole met, he a psychologist and she a patient, and divulges family secrets and the believed source of her mental illness. In the final section, we are projected forward to their dissolving marriage and infidelities. As Nicole has become stronger, she has grown independent. In turn, Dick battles career issues brought on by his drinking.

Before all that though, there is the movie starlet Rosemary Hoyt. She is surprisingly aggressive in courting the married Doctor Diver, and eventually gets under his skin, leading to this excellent line:

Dick walked beside her, feeling her unhappiness, and wanting to drink the rain that touched her cheek.

Overall, for the era this was written, there is plenty of soap opera style drama, including: incest, mental breakdowns, marital affairs, fights, arrests, and duels. Our book group all found it amusing how the Divers had two little children running around during all this mayhem, cared for by a nanny.

My Goodreads rating will probably end up being 3 out of 5 stars. With the movie version of The Great Gatsby coming out soon, re-reading that will have to be done soon.

When the writer Elizabeth Mosier tagged me in a post, I knew I had to reply. Libby informed me it was Work In Progress Day, which meant this was a day to encourage writers to post the first few lines of their work in progress. Click on Libby’s name above to read the opening lines of her work. Libby gives credit for the idea to her friend, the writer Beth Kephart.

Although I’m about 80 percent through my work in progress, the book is currently unnamed. The book is a black comedy that follows characters who work behind the scenes at a (hold your breath here!) a fictional home shopping network. For those that don’t know, I was a producer at a similar venue for many, many years, as you can see from the photographic evidence I have supplied. Here’s the current opening lines:

“You fell down the rabbit hole, eh?”

Now, he was backstage at a channel that sold chatychkes, standing beside this rabbit-like creature. Unbelievable.

I was already an Ernest Hemingway fan, so it will be no surprise to say I loved Papa’s memoir of the his early days in Paris. A Moveable Feast (the restored edition) recounts Ernest’s lean years after he quit his journalism work to focus on writing stories.

Hemingway describes this time in the twenties, with his first wife Hadley and their son, living cheaply in a room without a proper toilet. The room often grew so cold he saw his breath in the morning. Hemingway focused on his work during the day, writing in cafes, but he was aware of the sacrifices his wife was making for his work. Hemingway stated:

“I knew how severe I had been and how bad things had been. The one who is doing his work and getting satisfaction from it is not the one the poverty is hard on.”

About ten pages in, I realized I should have had my highlighter ready from the start. There’s solid writing advice and motivational quotes throughout the book, including one of his most famous thoughts on the craft of writing:

“All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence you know.”

The memoir is also remarkable for reading Hemingway’s thoughts on his mentors and friends during this period. He provides his perspective on Gertrude Stein’s mentorship and their relationship. He discusses seeing glimpses of James Joyce dining in a cafe with his family. There are quite a few chapters recounting Hemingway’s relationship with F. Scott Fitzgerald, and how Fitzgerald appeared to have quite a few medical issues (in addition to the stress of dealing with Zelda.) Hemingway appeared to be quite fond of Fitzgerald’s writing, and claims he remained loyal to his friend. At the same time, some of his stories cast Fitzgerald as having some strange issues, the most memorable being Fitzgerald’s concern after Zelda told him he lacked in the manhood department.

If you have read Hemingway and want to learn about his early years, I definitely recommend picking this book up and giving it a read. It’s worth buying so you can make your own notes.

Also – There is also a Hemingway documentary that I found to be interesting. Hemingway: Wrestling with Life was available on Hulu for free, at least the first part was. It was interesting to watch this in conjunction with this excellent memoir.

The Safety of Objects by A.M. Homes is a fascinating collection of odd suburban tales. Written in a simple style, these stories are laden with symbolism that reveal a disturbing depth. A couple experiments with drugs after shipping their kids to the grandparents, a fat girl sunbathes nude in her backyard, a boy has a sexual affair with his sister’s Barbie doll.

I first read A.M. Homes last summer. Her short story Do Not Disturb was listed as one of the best short stories of all time. When I read that, I knew her writing was write up my alley. In clear, concise language, she is descriptive and haunting. Her prose reminds me of Raymond Carver, though A.M.’s stories are unsettling in a different way – utilizing stark symbolic images.

A few of the stories in this collection really connected with me. The first story, Adults Alone, is true suburban darkness. A couple with a faltering numbness in their marriage, send the kids to Florida for the weekend. They don’t have much to do together anymore, and they end up getting stoned, eating in bed, watching TV and eventually experiment with smoking crack. Stories that plunge into this darkness of the soul are something I’m fond of – Leviathan from Tobias Wolff is one of my all time favorites – and Homes does an excellent job here.

Esther in the Night is heartbreaking. A mother recounts her life taking care of her son who has been injured in a car accident, how this tragedy has changed her family’s life and made their situation a spectacle. This territory is every parents’ nightmare, and it’s wrenching to read as she reveals what this life is like and what the mother deems is her solution.

Slumber Party resonated the most with me, yet it would be awkward to say I “like” it. The symbolism is very well drawn out. A young girl and her slightly older friend, who is a boy, are getting into mischief – setting fires in the woods until their ankles are burned. When the boy sleeps over, they end up touching each other sexually, and the boy suggests going to stand in the backyard naked. As they stand in the backyard, two innocent naked children, two older boys who are burglarizing the neighbors walk through the backyard and stop. The scene is full of palpable tension, and the mark left resonates on a much larger scale in the girl’s life and in the reader’s eyes. Well done.

These are not feel good stories, but they are stories about the darkness often found in the soul. For readers who don’t pick up symbolism, they will just appear to be strange and in some cases, even degrading. For those readers that are able to uncover and absorb the symbolism, the best of these stories will haunt you.

Last night was the Payoff Party!

The contributors to Chester County Fiction held a festive party at the General Warren Inn last night to mark the first anniversary of the launch of the anthology. At the gathering, the contributors donated a portion of the profits from the book to the IHM Family Literacy Center, which teaches English and life skills to families.

Attending the party were Sister Bernadette Mary Heister and Sister Jean Hennelly, the two sisters who started and operate the educational outreach facility, which is “committed to developing strong healthy family units and to breaking the cycle of illiteracy that exists within many families.”

After visiting the IHM Family Literacy Center over the summer, we asked the sisters for their wish list. Thanks to the successful sales of Chester County Fiction, we were able to fulfill their request. At the party, the contributors donated an iPad and nine copies each of the following books for children: The Little Penguin by AJ Wood, Kissing Hand by Audrey Penn, Ruby In Her Own Time by Jonathan Emmett and The Little Polar Bear by Hans de Beer.

For those who are hearing about Chester County Fiction for the first time, here’s a little background:

In December, 2010, I approached several local writers whose fiction I admired, and asked if they would like to contribute a short story to an anthology called Chester County Fiction. We collected the stories in late summer of 2011, spent two months editing and occasionally re-editing, while our photographer and book cover designer collaborated on cover ideas.

On October 2nd, 2011, Chester County Fiction was launched with a party at the legendary Baldwin’s Book Barn. Sales were brisk throughout the holiday season and the collaborators bonded at several local book signings. We were also fortunate to get press from Main Line Today, WCHE radio, and WHYY radio.

From the beginning, my hope was that we could contribute a portion of the proceeds to a local literacy charity and hold a party for the contributors. It was exciting to see the project through to such a worthwhile conclusion. Thanks so much to all the collaborators in the project, who are listed below!

Chester County Fiction contains short stories by Virginia Beards, Jim Breslin, Robb Cadigan, Wayne Anthony Conaway, Peter Cunniffe, Michael Dolan, Ronald D. Giles, Terry Heyman, Joan Hill, Nicole Valentine, Jacob Asher Michael, Eli Silberman and Christine Yurick. Our book cover photographer was David James. Book Cover design by Larry Geiger. PR provided by Jennifer Vanderslice.

This past weekend, I had the opportunity to meet one of my favorite writers.

Stewart O’Nan was the keynote speaker for the Conversations and Connections Conference in Philadelphia. Stewart has written many excellent books, including: Last Night at the Lobster, Emily Alone, Songs for the Missing, A Prayer for the Dying, Snow Angels.

Of all the O’Nan books I’ve read, Last Night at the Lobster is my favorite. It’s an excellent novella that takes place on the final snowy night of a Red Lobster restaurant that is being closed by corporate headquarters. We follow manager Manny as he struggles to keep the restaurant up to corporate standards. He is the only staff member that cares and by the end, we care also. Manny is an every man, and he is also a hero.

I brought a copy of Last Night at the Lobster with the hope of getting it signed. Stewart showed up an hour before his scheduled talk and just hung out in the lobby. It’s always a great feeling when an artist I admire turns out to be warm and friendly. My friend Laura and I were lucky enough to chat with him about writing, his schedule, even about his “beat-up” old car which became famous when mentioned in a magazine article about Stewart. He asked us what we were working on and listened intently and offering suggestions. He was laid back and engaged. We were chatting with Stewart for so long, I felt a sense of guilt but he didn’t mind at all. Oh, and her did sign my book too.

A short time later, Barrelhouse editor Tom McAllister introduced Stewart and summed up his work with one word – empathy. This was a succinct and true statement. During Stewart’s presentation, he read from his new work, The Odds, and he talked about the craft of writing. Here are two quotes I jotted down:

“Sales don’t make your book one word better.”

“The reader’s caring is an echo of yours.”

Stewart talked about the importance of keeping the ass in the chair. He said he writes 9-5 every day, and some days that only totals 300 words. When asked about writers block, he said just sit there. He also relayed a story about Joseph Conrad. Apparently Conrad for some time used a writing space in a friend’s barn and every day he would climb up in the loft for his writing time, but every day he dreaded going to the loft. And that’s true of writing – getting started each day is the hardest part.

Stewart also explained his belief that readers like to learn “privileged information” while reading stories. An example could be knowing what really happens in the back kitchen at a Red Lobster and relaying that in the work. Stewart believes this provides the reader with a ‘non-fiction” experience, they are having something revealed they wouldn’t normally know. He also believes the reader needs to see the story through the eyes of the character who cares the most. Stewart certainly has done that in his novels, and it’s this fact that takes us back to the key word – empathy. I was heartened to see that Stewart O’Nan is as likable as his characters.