Jones is uneven, but at his best he offers a poignant, compelling view of the human condition.
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 depicted—and showed extraordinary empathy for—characters 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.Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-44934-2
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Author of a previous collection (Plato at Scratch Daniel's, 1990) and a novel (Winter in Florida, 1990), Falco writes tense, gritty fiction that portrays ordinary people caught between the claims of ``normal'' life and the lure of the forbidden and untasted. His characters include an aimless teenaged burglar (in ``Radon''), a college student radically transformed by his friendship with a troubled married couple (in ``Ax''), and (in the title story) a reformed drug addict whose old life won't leave him alone. Battling or grieving families, unstable and endangered relationships, assume haunting accusatory shape in 13 pellucid stories that are stylistically akin to the plays of David Mamet or Sam Shepard. Falco's voice, though, is his own, and his work keeps getting better and better.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-268-00646-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Univ. of Notre Dame
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1996
BOOK REVIEW
Ten subdued, unusually well-written stories set in Montana and the New South, most featuring that American staple: the sensitive but emotionally blocked guy who feels closer to nature than to his fellow men. Bass (Platte River, 1994, etc.) writes in prose scraped clean of excess and has selected each story with obvious care. His collection begins evocatively with ``The History of Rodney''—two damaged white lovers live in a ghost town created when the Mississippi River switched channels—and then slips down a notch with ``Swamp Boy,'' a tale of childhood cruelty directed at an odd boy who turns out to be the narrator. The three subsequent stories, however, ``Fires,'' ``The Valley,'' and ``Antlers,'' weave a wry and magical portrait of a Montana community on the edge of the wilderness. ``Fires'' quickens the pulse with its portrait of an acclaimed female runner's visit for a summer of high-altitude training: the narrator's descriptions of his wonder at the runner's finely honed body and psyche smoulder with the fury of a brushfire. ``The Valley'' limns the rituals that hold this attenuated community together before its members soar into a moment of collective madness. And ``Antlers'' moves from the comedy of Halloween—when everyone wears deer or elk antlers—into terror as the narrator realizes the madness behind an obsessed bowhunter's polite smiles. Of the rest, only ``The Legend of Pig-Eye'' develops a similar power, though it suffers from belonging to the well-worn genre of boxer-in-training fiction. The problem throughout may be with Bass's main character—a Nick Adams of the '90s who's moved to the wilds to escape humanity's dangerous attachments. A few more deeply explored relationships would make a difference. Some gems, and the rest highly readable, if under-emoted: worth the effort.
Pub Date: June 20, 1995
ISBN: 0-395-71687-X
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1995
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