Available:*
Library | Call Number | Status |
|---|---|---|
Searching... R.H. Stafford Library (Woodbury) | FICTION MCF | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
** Washington Post Best 50 Books of the Year**
This stunning Civil War novel from best-selling author Dennis McFarland brings us the journey of a nineteen-year-old private, abandoned by his comrades in the Wilderness, who is struggling to regain his voice, his identity, and his place in a world utterly changed by what he has experienced on the battlefield.
In the winter of 1864, Summerfield Hayes, a pitcher for the famous Eckford Club, enlists in the Union army, leaving his sister, a schoolteacher, devastated and alone in their Brooklyn home. The siblings, who have lost both their parents, are unusually attached, and Hayes fears his untoward secret feelings for his sister. This rich backstory is intercut with scenes of his soul-altering hours on the march and at the front--the slaughter of barely grown young men who only days before whooped it up with him in a regimental ball game; his temporary deafness and disorientation after a shell blast; his fevered attempt to find safe haven after he has been deserted by his own comrades--and, later, in a Washington military hospital, where he finds himself mute and unable even to write his name. In this twilit realm, among the people he encounters--including a compassionate drug-addicted amputee, the ward matron who only appears to be his enemy, and the captain who is convinced that Hayes is faking his illness--is a gray-bearded eccentric who visits the ward daily and becomes Hayes's strongest advocate: Walt Whitman. This timeless story, whose outcome hinges on friendships forged in crisis, reminds us that the injuries of war are manifold, and the healing goodness in the human soul runs deep and strong.
Author Notes
Dennis McFarland was born in 1950 and received his B.A. from Brooklyn College. In 1981, he was awarded a Wallace Stegner fellowship.
In addition to writing books, McFarland has taught creative writing at Stanford University and has written numerous contributions to such periodicals as Mademoiselle and The New Yorker. His novels are generally about families ravaged by alcoholism. They include "School for the Blind," "The Music Room," and "A Face at the Window."
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
In McFarland's emotionally harrowing Civil War novel, Summerfield Hayes is a 19-year-old Brooklynite, living on Hicks Street and pitching for one of the local "base ball" teams. Over the objections of his older sister, Hayes enlists in the Union Army and ends up taking part in the Battle of the Wilderness. Wounded, he winds up in a hospital in Washington City, where his doctors see that the horrors of battle have rendered him mute and incapable of even signing his own name, and diagnose him as suffering from a medical condition then called nostalgia. Hayes is cared for by, among others, a ward matron and a bearded hospital volunteer named Walt whose identity should be immediately apparent to anyone who knows anything about 19th-century American poets. Employing three alternating narrative strands-Hayes's idyllic life in his native Brooklyn, his horrifying battlefield experiences, and his nightmarish hospital recuperation-McFarland manages to find something new to say about a war that could have had everything said about it already. In the end, this is a moving account of one soldier's journey to hell and back, and his struggle to make his own individual peace with the world afterward. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
This Civil War novel by respected novelist McFarland (Prince Edward, 2004) tells the story of young Union soldier Summerfield Hayes. By switching seamlessly between harrowing scenes of combat (at the Battle of the Wilderness), wartime recreation with an emphasis on base ball (apparently the contemporary usage), at which Hayes excels and Hayes' postbattle, disoriented wandering and later hospitalization (where his muteness is regarded as malingering), as well as his childhood and recuperation at his Brooklyn Heights home, McFarland portrays a troubled if multidimensional character. The tragically accidental loss of both parents has affected both Hayes and his sister, Sarah, with whom he has an unusual bond. The ministrations he receives from Walt Whitman add a literary touch to this deliberately paced novel, and the touchingly sympathetic characterization of Whitman will appeal to many readers, as might the base ball. --Levine, Mark Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
IT'S no surprise Dennis McFarland chose the Battle of the Wilderness as the contextual scaffolding for his searing, poetic and often masterly new Civil War novel, "Nostalgia." The intense three-day campaign, fought in Northern Virginia in May 1864, was the first showdown between the armies of Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee, and the casualties on both sides were staggering. It marked the beginning of Grant's Overland Campaign, a strategy that eventually led to the sieges of Petersburg and Richmond and the defeat of the Confederacy. Yet details of the battle remain as shrouded as the thick forests in which it occurred. There were few brilliant maneuvers, few heroes remembered by history, and no clear winner. What a perfect setting, then, for a novel exploring the chaos of war and the confounding disorientation of its aftermath. When we first encounter Summerfield Hayes, a 19-year-old private in Grant's Army of the Potomac, he is wandering, wounded and alone, through the woods, having been abandoned by his regiment in the high heat of combat. His injuries worsening (a mortar attack has rendered him mute), his supplies running low, he stays hidden for fear of being caught and accused of desertion. He is attempting to make it to Washington, D.C., and from there home to Brooklyn. The novel moves gracefully back and forth through time, and soon we are transported to New York in the months before Hayes's enlistment, when he is still the popular star pitcher for the Eckford Baseball Club. (McFarland's descriptions of 19th-century life, from the intricacies of musket warfare to the formative years of our national pastime, are stunning in their lyricism and detail.) Hayes's parents have recently died in an accident, and he lives with his beloved sister, Sarah, who is pleading with him not to go to war. But she doesn't understand the true - and less than noble - reason behind his decision. As the narrative moves to Hayes's time at the front, McFarland's prose all but lifts off the page: "As he gathered his gear, there came a lull in the fighting, and the deafening barrage slowly abated to the sporadic popping he associated with picket skirmishes. He thought it dusk now, but a dusk like none other, a failure of light that lacked the promise of darkness. He could hear the enormous thunder of combat farther away and then the deep rumble of more combat farther away still. What had seemed to him so convincingly the heart of the war was but a single lesion on the leprous body of a giant." Hayes finally does make it to Washington, and "Nostalgia" coalesces around his convalescence in the overcrowded military hospital where, still unable to speak, he has indeed come under suspicion of desertion. The narrative slows once the action moves indoors, but picks up again when a mysterious bearded man tending to the limbless, lost and dying is revealed to be Walt Whitman. The great poet (who really did serve as a volunteer nurse) takes a liking to Hayes and devotes himself to the young soldier's predicament. McFarland's previous novels, including "The Music Room" and "Letter From Point Clear," often focus on the complexities of family, and so does "Nostalgia"; war is not the only dark theme running through these pages. Shifting from the adrenaline-fueled battlefront to the Victorian-like domesticity of the home front can make for jarring reading, but that's the point; imagine how jarring it was in real life. Over time, the word "nostalgia" has adopted a tranquil bent, but its Greek roots, as the novel's epigraph tells us, are "nostos" (return home) and "algos" (pain). Post-traumatic stress disorder is often associated with recent conflicts of dubious necessity, so it is fascinating to read about Civil War soldiers living through the same nightmare. That Mc-Farland can make such difficult subject matter both entertaining and essential is a tribute to his evident literary talents. "Nostalgia" is a perfect Civil War novel for our time, or any time. NOSTALGIA By Dennis McFarland 322 pp. Pantheon Books. $25.95. DAVID GOODWILLIE is the author of a novel, "American Subversive," and a memoir, "Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time."
Kirkus Review
A Civil War novel from Vermont-based author McFarland (Letter from Point Clear, 2007, etc.) that, like The Red Badge of Courage, focuses on the horror of battle as well as on the psychology of the soldier. Summerfield Hayes signs up to fight for the Union for several reasons, some of them better than others. He's from Brooklyn and was recently made an orphan when his parents died in an accident while visiting Ireland. Strangely, but perhaps most importantly, he feels the need to get away from his older sister, Sarah, for whom he has quasi-incestuous feelings. In 1864, he finds himself fighting in the Battle of the Wilderness in Virginia. Wounded by shrapnel and bleeding badly, he's abandoned by his regiment but eventually wends his way to an Army hospital in Washington, D.C. Temporarily unable to escape, he listens closely to the conversations of his wounded comrades and is also subject to the tender ministrations of a nurse--Walt Whitman. It's a matter of concern and outrage when an officious captain comes into the hospital and berates Hayes for being a deserter. Before the war, Hayes had been an outstanding baseball player, and early in his Army career--before the horrors of the Wilderness--he was instrumental in helping to set up a friendly rivalry between two competing teams. (It's amusing that since there has to be some kind of rationale behind the teams, it's decided to have single men on one team and married men on the other.) The captain investigating Hayes believes he's now malingering simply so he can go back to New York and play baseball once again. Using a complex, effective narrative strategy, McFarland moves us confidently from battlefield to hospital to baseball diamond as well as through dream, reverie and memory. A distinguished addition to fictionalized narratives focused on the Civil War and its aftermath.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
The Battle of the Wilderness (May 5-7, 1864) is remembered as one of the most infamous and critical battles of the Civil War. Summerfield Hayes, an earnest and well-intentioned young man, impulsively enlists in the Union Army and finds himself in brutal hand-to-hand combat, hoping to lose himself in the experience and escape the inappropriate feelings he has developed for his older sister. He achieves his first desire after receiving a savage blow to the head-he loses his voice, his sense of self, and his ability to distinguish among memory, reality, and dream. Author McFarland has written eloquently about loss and grief in a number of acclaimed novels (The Music Room; Singing Boy) and he returns to these themes again in this powerful, moving new book. By capturing the kaleidoscopic, hallucinogenic nature of warfare persuasively, he skillfully brings his psychologically shattered protagonist through the difficult journey and returns him to health and sanity-kindness and compassion are what saves him. The characters here are especially well drawn, including a genial and wise old hospital volunteer named Walt Whitman. VERDICT Masterful writing recommended for Civil War buffs and fans of literary fiction. [See Prepub Alert, 4/22/13.]- Patrick Sullivan, Manchester Community Coll., CT (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Beneath the bridge, he has fallen asleep despite his resolve, but not for long, never for long. The noise of his dreaming, as usual, awakens him, and as usual, he begins to tear at his clothes in an effort to expose his injuries. Soon he is naked, his trousers crumpled at his ankles, and he twists round and contorts, trying to explore with his hands the two wounds, one high in the middle of his back, the other along the back of his left thigh--each the bad work of shrapnel. He can achieve no position that allows him to see the wounds, though they recurrently burn like the heat of a hundred needles and sometimes soak his clothes with blood. If he could only see them, he might breathe easier, confirming by sight they're not mortal. He draws back on his trousers and shirt but leaves off with any buttons or buckles, for his hands have started again to shake, violently, the most irksome of his strange physical alterations. His hearing has returned almost fully, though the fierce ringing in his ears remains. A high-pitched sizzling whir, it revives in him a sickening regret and sometimes vibrates his skull. He has noticed a soreness at the crown of his head, and when he touches the spot, he feels what's left there of a scab; he has no recollection of what caused this particular injury, but thankfully it appears to be healing. When he is able to sleep, he most often has the old dream-come-true, which he first had about a week before the brigades began to cross the Rapidan: he'd startled awake in his tent one warm night near the end of April, crying out and rousing his bunkmate, Leggett, for in the dream his comrades had abandoned him on the battlefield. Now when the nightmare comes, it comes with the mechanics of memory, and he generally continues to doze till he is awakened by the popping dream-din of musketry, the gut-thunder of artillery, or, by far the worst, the grim fire-yelps of men dying. For a few seconds, the scent of gunpowder lingers in his nostrils, or the sweet coppery stench of charred flesh, and he begins again to tear at his clothes. He rests in rocky soil beneath a bridge; this much he knows. The stone arch overhead spans a creek of about twenty paces in width. He doesn't know the name of the creek. From the sunlight that slides through the pines on the opposite bank and agitates on the brown water, he judges the time of day to be around six in the evening. Regarding his whereabouts, he knows only that he is most likely somewhere between Culpeper and Washington City. In his bread bag are some leftover rations--two worm castles, some sugar and pickled cabbage, the stub of a candle, and a strip of dry lucifers; in his knapsack, the book sent to him by his sister, her letters, his Christian Commission Testament, and a varnished, inscribed base ball. He figures he has averaged eight to ten miles a day, slipping footsore along streams, crouching through woods and fields, venturing onto roads only after dark. Though he has done no wrong, he must play the fugitive; though he himself was the one deserted, he is certain to be taken for a deserter and has no paper to prove otherwise. Even if he were to try joining another regiment, he might be arrested, perhaps quickly tried and executed. He has heard that the streets of Washington teem with soldiers of every stripe and condition, and he thinks that there he might escape scrutiny while he arranges, somehow, a return to Brooklyn. From the Hardcover edition. Excerpted from Nostalgia by Dennis McFarland All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
