Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Jones (1945-2016) survived a rough childhood, the marines and the Vietnam War, alcoholism and drug addiction, and was working as a janitor when his first story was published in the New Yorker. His extraordinary run as a master of the form was proven in three books Sonny Liston Was a Friend of Mine (1999), Cold Snap (1995), The Pugilist at Rest (1993) from which most of the stories gathered here come; the book also includes seven previously uncollected tales. Jones' struggling characters, often driven by machismo, drugs, or dreams of easy living, include soldiers, boxers, and the mentally ill as well as a disgraced doctor, a 40-year-old living with his parents, a delusional Casanova, and a free-wheeling but impoverished innovator. For many, the line between poor judgment and bad luck is unnervingly thin. In I Want to Live! , a cancer patient gradually succumbs to her fate while finding renewal in small moments. The Pugilist at Rest recounts a Vietnam vet's battle with epilepsy and haunting memories of his best friend's violent death. The newer stories are more reflective, especially Diary of My Health, perhaps Jones' most personal story. Jones' style is characterized by compassion, surprising humor, and his characters and their determination to survive. This superb volume, richly introduced by Amy Bloom, will renew appreciation of Jones' literary power.--Jonathan Fullmer Copyright 2018 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
This volume collects 26 shocking, grimly humorous stories (seven previously unpublished) by the author of The Pugilist at Rest and two other short story collections. Jones, who died in 2016, crammed whole disorganized lives into his stories, which are often told in the deluded voices of drug and alcohol-addled protagonists who also suffer from a wide range of medical complaints. In "The Black Lights," a Marine who has been in more than 150 boxing matches and now has temporal lobe injuries is sent to a military neuro-psych ward and observes the doctors and patients there with mordant wit. Jones is an uneven writer at best, with moments of remarkable power alternating with sloppy passages. The volume, arranged in roughly chronological order, suggests a downhill slide in his work, which became increasingly crass and decreasingly compassionate. One example of this is "Tarantula," which envisions the many horrors visited on an ambitious high school administrator by his underlings. Another later, uneven story is "Diary of My Health," which consists of a dated series of diary entries of the physical symptoms of, and drugs consumed by, a protagonist who shares the author's name. While perhaps more Jones than the casual reader will want to handle, this collection condenses his literary output into an accessible volume with some standout stories. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A generous posthumous selection from Jones' (1945-2016) three short story collections along with seven new works.In a humorous new story mainly about infidelity ("A Merry Little Christmas"), the narrator says of his novel in progress, "I've got the voice down and the characters have taken on a life of their own." Jones (Sonny Liston Was a Friend of Mine, 1999, etc.) has a distinctive voice that comes through often in raw, direct, almost driven language, as if he felt short of time. His mostly blue-collar characters were often fiercely alive, whether he was writing about soldiers, boxers, victims, or miscreants. Many fans discovered that voice with "The Pugilist at Rest," the title story of his first collection (1993), as its narrator works through Marines boot camp, Vietnam deployment, the Greek gladiator Theogenes, a boxing injury, and the shifting truths behind heroism. Jones often depictedand showed extraordinary empathy forcharacters alone in extreme situations, those who "knew what it was like to fall back into the inner darkness of the self," like the woman with muscular dystrophy contemplating for one awful paragraph how slowly time moves for her. The shattering "I Want to Live!" describes a woman's endurance of cancer treatments. It's not all misery. There's an edgy humor in "Tarantula," in which a cocky high school administrator tries to handle defiant custodians, partly with a scary spider. In "Mouses," a man with a spinal deformity ("a hump") evolves from having a minor rodent problem to performing dubious experiments on caged mice. In the end, though, on the last page of the last story, there's the dialysis patient asking "Can someone tell me why life is so hard," followed by a paragraph of pain and the possible comfort of a Chopin waltz.Jones is uneven, but at his best he offers a poignant, compelling view of the human condition. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
