‘From the conditions of frontier life came intellectual traits of profound importance... For a moment, at the frontier, the bonds of custom are broken and unrestraint is triumphant.’

Frederick Jackson Turner

With his third novel, Billy Sunday, Rod Jones would appear to have affirmed an intention – an unexpressed intention, admittedly – never to be considered a contender for the Miles Franklin Award. Julia Paradise (1986), while located principally in Shanghai, did after all relocate itself in northern Queensland. Prince of the Lilies (1991) boasted an Australian protagonist while being set firmly on Crete. Billy Sunday is set, however, in late nineteenth-century Wisconsin and has as protagonist and deuteragonist the historical figures of Frederick Jackson Turner, historian, and Billy Sunday, charismatic evangelist. Rod Jones may not be a Miles Franklin contender – given last year’s eligibility shambles, and one judge’s opinion that Bruce Chatwin’s Songlines might have been considered in a previous year, it is hard to imagine why any novelists would submit themselves to the indignity of being considered – yet he may, on the other hand, have written the Great American Novel.