Sharpshooter: A Novel of the Civil War

A surprising look at the Civil War from the perspective of a man trying to process his own experience many years after the fact. Willis Carr was the product of a Unionist family in East Tennessee. At age 13, he was caught up in a war he did not understand when he followed his father and older brothers on a mission to burn railroad bridges. Captured and offered a choice between joining the rebels and being sent to prison in Tuscaloosa ("The very name sounded like the end of everything holy.") Willis chose the Confederacy, and became a sharpshooter. The first third of the book is Willis's first hand account of his experiences in various battles, from the sharpshooter's nest in the tower of Bleak House overlooking the Kingston Pike and the Tennessee River during the siege of Knoxville, through the horrors of Devil's Den at the battle of Gettysburg, to guard duty at Andersonville Prison, where he first learned to read and write -- in Cherokee -- from a black prisoner. The remainder of the book chronicles his quest, later in life, to sort out his memories, fill in the gaps, and find out "what really happened" during the war by retracing his steps and talking to other survivors along the way. More introspection than action; thoughtful exploration of the mind of a soldier, the importance of physical and temporal perspective, and the fallibility of memory. Quite a remarkable read.

Madden's novel is both entertaining and challenging. The first half is a young adults conversion from non combatant and Tennessee farm boy through an East Tennessee rail road raider and into the CSA army as a sharpshooter. The second half of the novel presents the soldier after the war as he returns from an alcoholic binge in the West. His personal recollections are hazy but he confronts the question: "Was it war or was it murder?" By touring the Civil War battlefields and bumping into assorted veterans, some of whom are truthful and some are liars, he confronts his battlefield wounds of his body and his psyche. Not your usual Civil War novel and at times it may make you restless but Sharpshooter does the work its sets out to do