THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, August 13, 1995 TAG: 9508100680
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY JEFFREY H. RICHARDS
LENGTH: Medium: 69 lines
COLD SNAP
THOM JONES
Little, Brown. 228 pp. $19.95.
One of the best of the new short-story writers in America, Thom Jones continues his gut-punch, neo-nihilist style in this new collection. Jones, 50, did not publish a story until the early 1990s. Then came The Pugilist at Rest, his first collection of stories about the tough life, which earned him an extraordinary amount of exposure through reviews and award nominations. Cold Snap has the same sort of unusual combination of the visceral and the philosophical, but expands his range in voice and temperament.
Comparisons to Raymond Carver come quickly to mind, but Jones has a more engaged style than Carver allowed himself. In the title story, Richard, a doctor who has spent time in Africa, is a specialist on the Guinea worm, which everyone past seventh-grade remembers as the most hideous of body-invading wrigglers.
Richard visits his institutionalized sister, Susan, who botched a suicide attempt and gave herself a lobotomy with a gun. Richard himself keeps a .357 and plays Russian roulette. Yet speaking through Susan's vision of the happy life, Jones allows himself to feel for his angst-ridden cynic of a good doctor: ``We will travel from glory to glory, Richard, and you won't be asking existential questions all the time.'' For broken people, even pleasure and hope can intrude.
Africa is a subtheme underlying a number of these stories. In ``Quicksand,'' a man named Derek thinks of himself as Ad Magic, ``the celebrated direct-mail wizard for the Global Aid hunger effort.'' Like many Jones protagonists, he goes ``too far.'' His letters for money have generated beaucoup capital for the relief agency in Africa, but his life is always on the edge. He relies entirely on his brilliance.
Sick with malaria, lusting after a Danish doctor, completely cynical about the value of foreign aid, Derek swipes some Dexedrine from the clinic medicine cabinet. High, talking way too much, increasingly detested by his compatriots, he pushes himself into what looks like a suicidal seeking. That thread, finding life by embracing a mask of death, runs through almost all of these stories.
True, not every piece pushes the reader's face into the fetid jaws of old Mortality. ``Rocketfire Red'' is told by a young woman, part aborigine, in bouncy, Australian slang, and never loses its primal energy (although I admit I could not suspend disbelief enough to accept the narrator as female). Even the last story, ``Dynamite Hands,'' though grimly told, tries for some kind of affirmation, even if it feels hollow. But the stories that zing are the ones in which Jones takes us on plummeting, exhilarating rides toward self-destruction.
The quintessential Jones story is ``Ooh Baby Baby,'' about another high-flying fader, Dr. Galen Moses. He's a plastic surgeon who did one good thing in his life with a brief medical tour in Africa, but all that matters now are scores, rushes, speed. Jones brilliantly sketches through rapid-fire memory bits and quick realizations how someone careering to the brink comes to see the revised scoreboard of his life.
You might not like Jones' main characters, but you may enjoy the spectacle as they burst into flames. MEMO: Jeffrey H. Richards is chairman of the English department of Old
Dominion University. by CNB