The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Billy Sunday by Rod Jones
Irving Malin

Rod Jones. Billy Sunday. Holt, 1996. 255 pp. $23.00.

This novel—almost a prose poem—succeeds in capturing our yearning for transcendence (exemplified by the historian Frederick Jackson Turner and the revivalist Billy Sunday). It is a meditation on the “American” spirit; it creates the very idea of “America” as spectral emanation.

The novel is a “romance,” one which reminds us of Hawthorne’s ambiguous inquiries into “history.” Almost every page contains references to paradoxical qualities of absence and presence, dream and matter, spirit and body. The opening scene—a still point—offers a “portrait” of a “human figure” observing a Wisconsin lake. And we observe his observation; we view his view: “The trees were dreaming in glass on the surface of the lake. The human figure was as still as sleep. In the middle of the lake was a group of sedge islands, each like an afterthought of the forest, the last few drops from the dream” (my emphasis). The italicized words structure the contents—the ideas—of the entire novel.

Perhaps the most significant words in the novel are “spirit photography.” The photographer, Van Schnick, tries to capture the “other side” of reality—that side which is secretive, occult, uncanny. His photographs—like Jones’s prose—contain “shadowy lines fluid, changing.” They are “inspired by a single breath of pure wonder.” And yet they cannot be interpreted fully. They defy rational investigation, conventional analysis.

Although Jones at times becomes somewhat mechanical and repetitive in his imagery, he often startles us with such mad lines as these: “Desire had passed along the rails of time into an unknown country”; “What is beautiful attracts, but what is sublime transcends”; “The note sustained itself so long the mist took on its colors, pink and mauve, like shot silk.” The material world—words on the page, stones on the ground—yields to sudden strangeness. And we are trapped in “ghostly” glass. [Irving Malin]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction Billy Sunday by Rod Jones Irving Malin Rod Jones. Billy Sunday. Holt, 1996. 255 pp. $23.00. This novel—almost a prose poem—succeeds in capturing our yearning for transcendence (exemplified by the historian Frederick Jackson Turner and the revivalist Billy Sunday). It is a meditation on the “American” spirit; it creates the very idea of “America” as spectral emanation. The novel is a “romance,” one which reminds us of Hawthorne’s ambiguous inquiries into “history.” Almost every page contains references to paradoxical qualities of absence and presence, dream and matter, spirit and body. The opening scene—a still point—offers a “portrait” of a “human figure” observing a Wisconsin lake. And we observe his observation; we view his view: “The trees were dreaming in glass on the surface of the lake. The human figure was as still as sleep. In the middle of the lake was a group of sedge islands, each like an afterthought of the forest, the last few drops from the dream” (my emphasis). The italicized words structure the contents—the ideas—of the entire novel. Perhaps the most significant words in the novel are “spirit photography.” The photographer, Van Schnick, tries to capture the “other side” of reality—that side which is secretive, occult, uncanny. His photographs—like Jones’s prose—contain “shadowy lines fluid, changing.” They are “inspired by a single breath of pure wonder.” And yet they cannot be interpreted fully. They defy rational investigation, conventional analysis. Although Jones at times becomes somewhat mechanical and repetitive in his imagery, he often startles us with such mad lines as these: “Desire had passed along the rails of time into an unknown country”; “What is beautiful attracts, but what is sublime transcends”; “The note sustained itself so long the mist took on its colors, pink and mauve, like shot silk.” The material world—words on the page, stones on the ground—yields to sudden strangeness. And we are trapped in “ghostly” glass. [Irving Malin]

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