Billy Lynn and his mates in Bravo Squad get into a firefight in Iraq. It’s captured on video, the video gets on YouTube, and they come out of the event as accidental celebrities. The halftime of the title refers to a Thanksgiving Dallas Cowboys game, where the members of Bravo Squad have been invited to make an appearance, and the entire book takes place on the day of that game. The men of Bravo Squad knock around backstage, macking on cheerleaders, fielding calls from Hollywood and thinking over their strange fate, pinned down with media attention that’s as psychically violent as the war they barely escaped. They’re funny, profane, undereducated and both traumatized and totally innocent, and their voices have an authenticity unlike anything else in American fiction this year.