Billy Sunday: A Novel

by Rod Jones

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 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.

Genres: Fiction

255 pages, Hardcover

First published June 1, 1995

About the author

Rod Jones is an award-winning Australian novelist. He was writer in residence at La Trobe University for four years, and has also been the Australia Council's writer in residence in Paris.
He studied English and History at the University of Melbourne.

Reviews

[Alex · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another of the (sadly) obscure literary novels I read as a reviewer in the 1990s. This is a haunting book that melds history and whimsical conjuring in a way that leaves you questioning how we are ever to tell the difference between the two. You won't forget it.

[Barbara · Rating 2 out of 5]

I gave it almost a hundred pages and then decided life is short and I should move on. It wasn't moving me. Too ethereal and disconnected. Most of the main characters were based on real people yet the author didn't wish to make their lives historically accurate. That kind of bothered me. I wanted to like it but just couldn't.

[Judith Clark · Rating 4 out of 5]

Is this the quintessential American novel?

[Eamonn Gunning · Rating 5 out of 5]

Good, can't remember why, but maybe a bit of magical realism.

[Colin Greenland · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was given Julia Paradise to review. I was properly amazed and overwhelmed by it. I knew I should have to read it again to get anything like a grip on what was going on, and what the point was of its psychedelic interior explorations.

Points, I mean. If there were any, if the word's even applicable, I'm sure there couldn't be just one.

I didn't have time, anyway, because of the deadline. And life and reviewing went on, and I never came back to it. But at some point, in some Oxfam shop, I stumbled across this, also by Rod Jones, so I bought it, and let it gather dust a long time before starting to read it.

I'd never heard of Billy Sunday, though I knew a song that mentions him, quite mysteriously. I had no notion he really existed.

I enjoyed what Rod Jones did with him, but my taste for this sort of oneiric, hallucinatory writing had rather lapsed in the interim. Taken all together, the other readers' comments here on Goodreads echo the entire story of what I found in the pages I did read, and explain my failure to read any more.

I apologise unreservedly to Rod Jones.

[Deb Garretson · Rating 1 out of 5]

I expected this novel to be about Billy Sunday, the evangelist, but it is not.