The Barnes & Noble Review Sparring Partners
In the fall of 1984, after Raymond Carver's Cathedral came out, I got a letter from a former professor of mine, the best writing teacher I ever had. It was in his class three years earlier that I'd first been exposed to Carver's stories. It was under his tutelage that I came fully to appreciate Carver's idiosyncratic, totemic genius.
The letter was generous about what he'd seen of my new writing. What I remember best about the letter, though, was its postscript. He'd read Cathedral and was disappointed. Nearly all the protagonists are inarticulate, blue-collar drunks, struggling not to be either. Most fail. Busted marriages everywhere. The same components, again and again and again. Carver seems, my professor wrote, to have lapsed into self-parody.
Those sentiments — all of which except the self-parody part are indisputable — were shared by many reviewers. Yet 15 years later, opinion has come full circle: The stories in Cathedral are those upon which Carver's reputation most squarely rests. The similarities between the stories' component elements are a unifying device, but a deceptive one. Upon further review (as NFL referees were once wont to say), the stories in that book have a greater depth and broader range of emotion than those in Carver's earlier books. The subject matter is more diverse. The shapes the stories take are more varied. Even the spectrum of socioeconomic classes depicted is wider. Carver's core obsessions, far from seeming self-parodic, are part of what makes Carver so strangely andwonderfullyhimself.
So it is in the sublime oeuvre of Vladimir Nabokov, who, with five-minutes-to-Wapner tirelessness, returns in book after book to chess, tennis, doppelgängers, émigrés, and butterflies. Though this may sound like shtick, it plays more as the signature moves of a great athlete; watching the components accrue is like watching Michael Jordan play, waiting to see that unblockable fadeaway, that semiunconscious tongue loll, that assassin's look he gets in his eye with the game on the line. (I'm sure, if I knew anything about chess or tennis, the allusion here might appropriately be to Bobby Fischer or Martina Navratilova, but I am, alas, a prisoner to my own core obsessions).
And so it is with Thom Jones in all three of his books — his debut, the National Book Award-nominated The Pugilist At Rest , the much-admired title story of which became an instant classic; Cold Snap , which may have lacked a killer story on the order of "The Pugilist at Rest" but was a more consistently dazzling book; and the brand-spanking-new left jab and right cross of Sonny Liston was a Friend of Mine .
Jones's eclectic checklist of obsessions:
Janitors. Epilepsy. The chronically unemployed ("No-Jobs," they call themselves). Tormented lower fauna (the new book includes a talismanic tarantula, a doomed roadrunner, and, most memorably, in the brilliant "Mouses," several dozen mice at the mercy of a No-Job whose pathology manifests itself in his stay-at-home stint as a self-taught lab scientist: a clinically detached bout of sadism and earnest self-delusion that only seems chilling when you step away from the story — and all the more chilling thereby). Vietnam. Clinical madness (including "A Midnight Clear," a convincing story set on Christmas day at a poorly funded asylum, told from the point of view of a doctor visiting for personal reasons). Brand-name, prescription meds (ingested and discussed by characters who know their effects and side effects with the same ebullient precision jailhouse lawyers bring to the state penal code; in the acknowledgments in Cold Snap , Jones thanks the manufacturers of Elavil and Effexor). German philosophy (Schopenhauer, Nietzsche). It's fun and scary to watch these things emerge, story by story, and courageous too, because it's a tactic that by definition walks the line between mannerism and true style — in a way that makes the disparate stories seem more similar than they really are, a virtue that both gives the books coherence and that helps them be much more than the sum of their collected obsessions.
Aside from these components, though, what's most precious about Jones is how, in embracing the challenge of creating a literature in a culture that is fundamentally and irreversibly inarticulate, he takes the torch passed from Raymond Carver and runs it another swift, defiantly post-ironic lap around the track.
In the story "Cathedral," Carver manages to jigger a whole story so that his narrator's final, vapid line — "[i]t's really something" — seems, in context, profound, enough to make the hair on the back of any reader's neck stand up.
Likewise, in a story like "Tarantula," Jones at first seems to be skewering both his character's and the broader culture's witless tendency to call attention to clichés by placing them in quotes; as in, "The old Murphy bed was Harold's magic Persian carpet from which he could encompass the "'big picture.'" This, coupled with Harold's slightly tone-deaf attempts to affect hip speech, as he dreams his more vainglorious daydreams, is at first a kind of subtle but cruel satire that, imperceptibly, comes to seem like an endearingly human failing.
Another characteristically Jonesian gesture: In "You Cheated, You Lied," at the end of a description of a confused and vulnerable man having sex with a woman who literally pulls the man's hair out, the man says, with heartbreaking sincerity, "It hurt, but I felt truly appreciated."
*******A year or so ago, visiting my alma mater, I hooked up with my old professor. I told him again how important he was in my becoming a writer. He was gracious in deflecting credit. I had a chance to visit his class, where, as fate decreed, he taught several Carver stories to a room full of earnest, post-ironic students. Many of the stories were from Cathedral . My professor was very enthusiastic.
Afterward, I did not make any cracks. People have opinions, and opinions change. The things that man had taught me had held me in good stead and had not changed. It was weird, years ago, reading a book and disagreeing with a man who was my mentor about the worth of that book. I was too afraid to say anything. I was a weenie. Now, when I could have said something (in a friendly, "remember when" way), I didn't say anything. We went out to dinner, and I paid.
—Mark Winegardner , a professor in the creative writing program at Florida State University, is the author of four books, including, most recently, the novel The Veracruz Blues .
...[F]eatures Jones' trademark assortment of hard-luck cases and haunted souls....Critics don't often notice how funny Jones can be, and that's a shame, because in some respects his humor is his best punch — it comes out of nowhere and knocks you silly... New York Times Book Review
All of Jones's stories are written in an urgent, in-your-face style that is immediately engaging. He balances humor with sudden ugly bursts of violence and the effect is often devastatingly powerful....It is Jones' voice that carries Sonny Liston , creating characters so compelling that the reader is willing to follow them into even the most hostile, degraded territory. Bookforum
The title story of Thom Jones' third collection, Sonny Liston Was a Friend of Mine , centers on a boxer, but just about every character in these 12 tales has a fight on his hands. Jones' world is as atmospheric as a song by Bob Dylan or Leonard Cohen or Tom Waits. In fact, his turf is something like an aggregate of those guys' -- a territory of soft-underbelly toughness, rough breaks, mental institutions, disgusting ailments, Haldol, morphine, LSD, Lithium (no Prozac), Vietnam, Vietnam aftershock, janitors and impossible love. It was birthed fully formed in his magnificent first collection, The Pugilist at Rest , in 1993. A second, Cold Snap , followed in 1995.
Jones' typical character is in combat -- against the Viet Cong, the ocean, diabolical colleagues, depression, diabetes. (The author himself is famously the veteran of 150 amateur bouts.) His best stories sit at the most bizarre reaches of his universe -- "Mouses," for example, in which a short, humpbacked engineer reacts to getting fired by playing Josef Mengele with the small rodents that infest his apartment, injecting them with testosterone made from minced mouse testicles and marching them on ingeniously electrified treadmills, while he slides into stinking poverty.
The first six stories include a couple of lackadaisical ones about Vietnam; a spine-chilling study of a middle-aged all-but-matricidal mama's boy, "40, Still at Home"; and "Tarantula," a viciously comic morality tale about a hubristic schoolmaster. But it's in the latter half that Jones really delivers. The final story (practically a novella), "You Cheated, You Lied," is a highly sexed love story set in Illinois, Waikiki and a couple of mental institutions. The main characters are William, the epileptic narrator, and irresistible, irrepressible, but "seriously depressed, highly disturbed" Molly Bloom (sic). When Molly tells William, "The whole world is a neurology ward," she could be stating the author's core belief. In his world, mental institutions are as commonplace as diners (the skewed but curiously uplifting Christmas tale "A Midnight Clear" is set entirely in a state hospital), and every character seems to suffer from some disorder or other -- often diabetes, which Jones suffers from himself.
There is a marked similarity in the voices here. Frankie Dell, a high school senior with a night job at the local movie house in "I Love You, Sophie Western," has a crush on Susannah York in Tony Richardson's film of Fielding's Tom Jones (cute, Thom); but what he gets is a ghastly tryst with the pedophiliac projectionist. "Wesley yanked his head down hard. 'You can forget that shit, Susannah York has got to be pushin' sixty by now,'" he growls at the kid. Anson, the demented engineer in "Mouses," observes, "Apparently, 'Don't shit where you eat' isn't in the rodent codebook. Hygiene is not a big concern with them." What these characters share isn't so much scatological diction (though Jones' mouth is filthy) as a tongue-in-cheek cynicism. (The exception is the book's sole female narrator, in the tour de force "Daddy's Girl.") Their disgust manifests itself on the physical plane as "a shower of yellow flakes" from the scalp or a two-fisted combination of Tylenol and bourbon or enough Pepto-Bismol to blacken the tongue.
Spending time with Jones' battle-worn eccentrics and disenfranchised misfits leaves you feeling bruised but also elated. "Been down so long," they seem to be saying, "it's hilarious." -- Salon
Like any good prizefighter, Jones (The Pugilist at Rest ) sticks to what he does best, perfects his technique and doesn't waste his energy. The 12 stories in his third collection are as recognizably his as is any champion's style: crazed, damaged, hell-bent characters banging around in a product-strewn American landscape trying in some fashion, in whatever fashion is handy, to feel good. All this is delivered in a voice that is colloquial, tough-guy and well-read. In the title story, Jones goes inside amateur boxing to follow Kid Dynamite, who fights for an innocent glory, but also to impress his girlfriend and, typically, his stepfather. His big moment is having his broken nose noticed by Sonny Liston at a publicity event. Other stories feature a hypochondriac layabout son tormenting his dying mother ("40, Still at Home"); an ambitious but clearly insane assistant principal who keeps a live deadly spider on his desk ("Tarantula"); a Viet Nam vet who endures his harrowing memories of atrocities by covering himself with Vaseline and taking marathon ocean swims. Throughout, Jones's (mostly male) protagonists self-medicate by gulping Xanax, Tylenol, Advil, morphine pills, whiskey, beer, codeine. His world is a scary one, which he renders without judgment or sentiment. What lingers for the reader is the unsettling knowledge that the streets are populated with people who are somehow still alive, survivors still kicking because they don't care about anyone, not even themselves. When, in the final story, two mental patients seem to have found true love, we know better, making the poignancy of their affections all the more moving.
Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly
The author of two critically acclaimed story collections, including the National Book Award finalist The Pugilist at Rest , Jones returns with 12 tales featuring his best themes: Vietnam, boxing, and minds off kilter.
Twelve stories about the gritty world of gyms, barracks, brothels, and loony bins that Jones (Cold Snap ) has already staked out as his own. The tough-guy approach in fiction has fallen (partly) out of favor since Hemingway's day, but Jones can pull it off with style and without embarrassment. Most of the characters here are decent working-class stiffs who find themselves swamped in a world of mendacity-like Ondine, the Marine sergeant of "The Roadrunner," "A Run Through the Jungle," and "Fields of Purple Forever," who sees action in Vietnam and cannot settle down to peacetime routines afterward. Instead he takes up swimming as both career and pastime, and travels the world to swim across the English Channel, the Straits of Gibraltar, and the Bosphorus. There's another kind of malcontent in "40, Still at Home": Matthew Billis, a depressed middle-aged bachelor who is looked after by his harried mother Margo in their nightmarish suburban home ("The room's textures and color schemes were a fright, like the marriage of Transylvania and Graceland"). "Tarantula" depicts the gradual breakdown of an ambitious graduate student who accepts a high-school post in hopes of becoming headmaster but is driven crazy by the stress of teaching. "Daddy's Girl" consists of an old woman's reminiscences about growing up with her two sisters-one of whom eventually became a doctor, then converted to Catholicism and lived the life of a missionary and nun. Best by far is the title story, an elegiac portrait of Kid Dynamite, a small-time boxer past his prime who can't bring himself to give up the game that is killing him. Slice of life that will not be to everyone's taste, rendered with honest realism(and without nostalgia) by one of our finer stylists.
