Waiting for the kickoff: Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk

Reluctantly I have to say that Ben Fountain's Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk is starting to get a little thin as I read into the 2nd half of the novel - maybe it's a case of wrong expectations, but as we proceed with this story it becomes more evident that it's not really a story about the Afghan War or about a company (or squad, more accurately) of soldiers or even about one soldier, the eponymous Billy, but it's about America's celebrity culture, how we, and by we I mean the media in large part, create reluctant or abashed heroes, dazzle them with visions of wealth and fame, woo them and court them and then spit them out or toss them aside and move on. The entire novel, to this point, centers on one football game that the Bravo company, after a Time mag cover for wartime heroics and a nationwide tour, visits as guests of the D. Cowboys - but really to this point in the novel we don't know any of the characters in depth, we know little about their wartime service, what we see is how they interact with the big-shots who fawn over them, grabbing a bit of their patriotic luster by contact or osmosis. You could, I think, substitute any # of groups or individuals for Bravo Company: this could be a novel about perhaps Boston marathon victims or American Idol winners or first responders or any group thrown into the spotlight for a moment and dazzled by the brightness. That's not a bad thing in itself, but I'm really waiting for liftoff here - just not much has happened, and I don't feel, 150 pages in, that I had any more depth of understanding of these men than I did at the end of chapter one. Fountain is laying a foundation for a comparison of football and war as two national sports or past-times - which could be OK though to this point he hasn't really converged the two elements. I don't know, there's a lot to like about this novel, notably how effectively Fountain handles dialogue among many characters and his sense of humor and his inside knowledge about pro football (this will appeal to many readers though I'm not so interested in that topic), but as I have said in many posts novels need to follow some kind of design, usually an arc, and lead characters have to undergo a process or a journey, and this novel so far is too flat. I will read further, for a while.