Inspiring Older Readers

posted on 08 Aug 2020

The Pugilist at Rest by Thom Jones

Periodically, it seems, the USA produces a short story writer who in form and content draws comparisons with Ernest Hemingway. Back in 1991 at the mature age of 40+, Thom Jones and his debut collection, The Pugilist At Rest, joined that august company.

So why the rather clichéd comparisons with Hemingway? Well, that’s pretty easy to answer – boxing and war. Jones’ father, a boxer himself, schooled his son in the pugilist arts and inadvertently saved his son from being shipped out to Vietnam. But the avoidance of a tour of duty came at one hell of a price. Jones had joined up with the Marines and just before shipping out he found himself in a boxing match during the course of which he received a severe beating. So bad was it that he developed temporal lobe epilepsy that prevented him from joining his company of soldiers who, to a man, went off to their death. The injury resulted in his discharge from the army  and provided him, along with his illness and his guilt at avoiding his fate in Vietnam,  with the raw materials for his writing career.

But he was by no means an overnight success – taking work as an advertising copywriter and a janitor while he worked his way through a prodigious mountain of reading he thought was essential before he could write effectively. There was also the small matter of the lake of drink to work his way through too and by the 1980s he was in the grip of alcoholism and diabetes.

Taming his alcohol addiction in the early 1990s coincided with his breakthrough as a writer and this collection includes stories first published in a host of prestigious literary magazines that made his name a buzzword for a short time.

The book is divided into four parts – the first of which contains the fictional semi-autobiographical Vietnam stories. He stretches out to modest humour, stories of mental ill-health and surrealism in the other sections but to be honest I found these quite pale in comparison with the extraordinary power and intensity of the Vietnam stories, especially the title story, which had me completely gripped and breathless. It’s a superb piece of writing.

In his obituary piece on Jones published in The Guardian back in 2016, Chris Power noted:

“Jones’s legacy, however, will be defined by his Vietnam stories, uncannily authentic-seeming explorations of a reality that he was bound for but never actually experienced. That fact gives an obsessional, guilt-ridden sense to his constant returns to these same characters who, like the soldiers of Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, pass from story to story, a bit part player in one becoming the lead in another.”

The Pugilist At Rest is a short story that not only explores the extraordinary psychology of the men sent to fight a war they were so ill-prepared to fight, in an environment that was utterly alien to them but also a mediation on reality and unreality, sanity and madness, good and evil. It’s a brutal story of butchery for no good reason and of man’s need, his instinct even, for combat and the moral complexity that such an instinct probes.

The lead story is so strong – as are the two that follow it, ‘Break On Through’ (you may recognise The Doors reference) and ‘The Black Lights’ – that the stories which follow suffer as a result. This is probably unfair and there are plenty of contemporary reviews of the book that nominated other stories in the collection as their favourites but I just can’t see that. I would return again and again to these first three stories and feel very little compulsion to read on and take in the rest. I’m pretty sure that the world would be a poorer place if the Vietnam stories didn’t exist – and that’s a good enough reason to get yourself a copy of the book.

There’s a very nice Faber Modern Classics paperback available for well under a tenner and if hardbacks are your thing, you’ll find one without too much trouble that’s very affordable on the second hand market.

 

Terry Potter

August 2020