Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk by Ben Fountain
Published 2012 · 308 pages · 77,000 words · about 9 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction, Satire & Humor, War Fiction
How hard is Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk to read?
Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk scores 49 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 38 out of 100
- Military and football vocabulary.
- Sentence structure: 42 out of 100
- Fountain's energetic, satirical prose.
- Abstraction: 50 out of 100
- Iraq War and American spectacle.
- Information density: 50 out of 100
- Dense with football game and military detail.
- Narrative indirection: 45 out of 100
- Billy's perspective on surreal experience.
- Symbolic density: 55 out of 100
- The halftime show, the war, America carry weight.
- Ironic distance: 60 out of 100
- Fountain's satire is pointed.
- Resolution withholding: 50 out of 100
- Soldiers return to war; spectacle continues.
- Structural complexity: 40 out of 100
- Single day with flashbacks.
How Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk is regarded
Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk holds a literary regard score of 61 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.