Perfect Silence - Hardcover

Hutton, Jeff

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1891369202 ISBN 13: 9781891369209

Publisher: Breakaway Books, 2000

Synopsis

An astonishing first novel-the story of one baseball-playing farmboy's journey into the hell of war, and the endless road out of it. It is a love story born in the terror of battle, and in the glorious early years of baseball. The writing is austerely beautiful-an incandescent prose that seems pounded out of hot iron upon an anvil.

Joseph Tyler's farm life is hard-working relentlessly in the fields. His sole pleasure comes from baseball, the new game from the North, played in the meadow near his farm. He is something of a prodigy, a natural. In 1864, with Union troops drawing close to his home, Joseph joins the Confederate army. The killing machine of war is horrific beyond comprehension, and the days of his pastoral life are gone irretrievably.

Wounded, left for dead, he wakes to find the battlefield aflame. He rescues a wounded Union soldier, a boy no older than he, from the conflagration; they collapse together by a pond. When Joseph next wakes, the Union soldier has died of his wounds. Joseph finds among his things a love letter to this soldier's sweetheart. He puts the letter in a pocket and forgets about it-until many weeks later, after being captured and sent to a horrid Union prison in Elmira, New York. With other prisoners dying around him of disease and inhuman abuse, Joseph finds the strength to live from the simple passion of that letter.

He contrives to escape the prison (via a ballgame), and goes on to become a great baseball player in the after-war years. Baseball is the only balm to his war-wracked mind. Then he meets Sarah Kingsley, the intended recipient of the letter, and his journey back to humanity truly begins.

Jeff Hutton is a landscape designer in Connecticut. He is 46 years old. This is his first novel.

About this title

About the Author:

Jeff Hutton is a landscape designer in Connecticut. He is 46 years old. This is his first novel.

From Publishers Weekly:

Hutton's amateurish but entertaining debut combines three of America's favorite topics. It starts as a historical tale about baseball, becomes a novel of the Civil War and ends up as an unlikely love story. Young Joseph Tyler spends the first three years of the War Between the States working with his father on their small Virginia farm. His only pastime there is a newly invented game called "Base," which his best friend Terence brought home from the North. Then the boys impetuously join John Pegram's Confederate brigade; in the confusing Battle of the Wilderness, Joseph is wounded and left for dead. Waking up in the burning woods, he discovers a mortally wounded Union soldier, in whose pocket is a letter to his sweetheart, Sarah Kingsley, of Rocker Falls, N.Y. Seized as a prisoner of war, Joseph is shipped off to prison in Elmira, N.Y., where he ingeniously uses his "base ball" expertise to escape. After the war is over, Joseph joins the Terryville (N.Y.) Niners, where he becomes the star player called "Rebel Joe." Just down the river from Terryville is Rocker Falls: what will happen when Joseph finds Sarah there? Readers of Frazier's Cold Mountain may see in it one inspiration for Hutton's plot and for his sometimes out-of-control prose. History buffs may admire Hutton's research, but they might also wince at errors: 1860s ballplayers (for example) didn't use gloves and didn't compute batting averages. If Hutton's prose and scholarship sometimes founder, his storytelling finally succeeds, producing delights for baseball and history fans, as well as a tender story of self-discovery.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Breakaway Books
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 1891369202
• ISBN 13: 9781891369209
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 320