Refraining from a roll in the gutter

kw: book reviews, short fiction, short stories

"You can't rassle with a skunk and come out smelling like a rose." —anonymous Texan.

The blurb on the slipcover says of the characters in Thom Jones's stories, "…grifters and drifters, rogues and ne'er-do-wells, would-be do-gooders…", but I decided to give the book a try: Night Train, a posthumous collection of both published and unpublished stories by Thom Jones.

Jones became famous in his forties when he published "The Pugilist at Rest", which opens the volume. It is indeed a pretty good story. There is an interesting mix of erudition and the argot of the perennial bottom-feeder. The second story, "Black Lights", on the same theme of a washed-up boxer, goes downhill from there. I didn't finish it. I popped around the volume, and found little worth reading for more than a minute or so. I usually checked the last paragraph to see if a story or the character went anywhere. Nope.

I don't mean to say that Jones wrote badly. He spent (squandered?) his skill on getting us inside the heads of people whose head I don't like being in.

There are 19 stories from three prior volumes, and 7 new ones. Only one of the new ones caught my interest for more than a minute or two: "Diary of My Health". It is evidently autobiographical, with flights into lunacy, from the viewpoint of a 62-year-old who doesn't expect to live much longer. It describes Jones's medical issues, but how inflated or deflated I cannot tell. He lived to age 72, dying, as he expected, mainly from diabetes. He also suffered from temporal lobe epilepsy, which features strongly in many of the stories, and figures in his bursts of creativity.

There are a lot of well known writers (and many others) who almost idolize his work. Most of the writers are people whose writing I don't read, so I'll leave them all in the bubble I found them in.