Billy Sunday: A Novel - Hardcover

Jones, Rod

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0805042725 ISBN 13: 9780805042726

Publisher: Henry Holt & Co, 1996

Synopsis

In Billy Sunday, his second novel published in the United States, Jones turns his ambitious imagination to the American psyche at the end of the frontier period. Three historical figures stand at center stage: Frederick Jackson Turner, author of the famous book of essays The Frontier in American History; Charles Van Schaick, the photographer Michael Lesy made famous in his surreal and haunting book Wisconsin Death Trip; and Billy Sunday himself, an orphan, undertaker's assistant, and onetime professional baseball player who became a charismatic evangelist in the 1890s. Their paths cross during the steamy summer of 1892, when a girl's body is discovered in the woods beside a dreamy lake on the very edge of civilization. This terrible moment becomes the fulcrum for Jones's compelling and tragic meditation on the end of an era, as well as of an ethos, in our history.

About this title

Review:

Australian writer Rod Jones bends history at one of its unique crossroads to create this intriguing work of historical fiction. As both frontier life and the 19th century wind down, Jones fashions a meeting in the Wisconsin woodlands between soon-to-be-famous evangelist Billy Sunday, essayist Frederick Jackson Turner, and photographer Charles Van Schaick. As the characters' histories unfold, their intersection stands as a metaphor for the closing of one century and the dawning of another. Interested readers may want to look for other books on Billy Sunday, including Billy Sunday, Baseball Preacher, and Preacher: Billy Sunday and Big-Time American Evangelism.

From Kirkus Reviews:

Australian writer Jones (Julia Paradise, 1987) wades into the murky past, recruits three historical figures as his protagonists, and returns with a mottled, half-throttled view of malaise and mystery in the Great Northern Woods of Wisconsin. In 1892, an odd (and entirely fictional) convergence of forces brings photographer Charles Van Schaick, his half-breed assistant Billy Sunday, and young historian Frederick Jackson Turner, soon- to-be-author of the frontier theory of American history, together in the lakeside village of Balsam Point for the summer. The town, kept alive by summer trade and nearby logging, retains a shadow of its earlier frontier character, with a few diseased Indians still living nearby. But something in the village casts a longer, darker shadow: As Van Schaick pursues his interests in photographing the spirits of the place, Billy has visions of a native woman in the woods and one day comes upon a rotting female corpse. Since teenage girls have been disappearing from town, never to be found, his sighting is believed even when he can't find the body again--and is accused of her murder. Billy escapes by jumping into the lake (where he finds another corpse) and soon after joins the circus. Turner, meanwhile, has been having visions, too, but they are familiar ones and are the primary reason he returns every summer to spend time fishing and daydreaming by the lake. At 16, he had a romance there (his first) with a beautiful Indian girl--an affair abruptly terminated when she became pregnant. He never saw her again but returns annually to the woods where he believes her spirit still lingers. . . . Too many disparate plot threads here to weave together tightly, and the attempt to catch America's identity crisis at the end of the century by focusing on these three men isn't persuasive. Still, the primary setting, an ancient forest in summer where pleasure and horror can almost merge, makes the presence of the past keenly felt. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Henry Holt & Co
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 0805042725
• ISBN 13: 9780805042726
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 255