Books: A laugh from the darkest depressive pit

Sonny Liston was a Friend of Mine

by Thom Jones Faber pounds 9.99

Marine, boxer and mental hospital caretaker, epileptic, diabetic and mental hospital inmate (schizophrenia, misdiagnosed), Thom Jones twists his extreme experiences into fiction of obdurate optimism in his third short story collection. There's no definitive tone or era he calls his own. A trio of Vietnam stories switch from the jacked-up, jargon-heavy, disciplined prose of men under fire to the rippling jive-talk of a present- day veteran. "40, Still at Home", the jet-black tale of a middle-aged slacker and his cancer-ridden mother, adopts arch, over-educated wise- arsery. Skip to "Daddy's Girl", and it's a rural nonagenarian's uninflected reminiscing. But Jones's world is still unmistakable. Wayward narrative energy, whiplash swerves of tone, an obsession with the chemically aided edge of human experience (adrenaline, testosterone, prescribed medication - take your pick), the spectre of mental and physical incapacity, and the ability to mine an unbowed laugh from the darkest, depressive pits - these are the things in Jones's work that ring true.

Though his present-day tales are attuned to appropriate levels of irony and self-obsession, of static lives falsely brightened by fizzing, flip talk ("Soooper Fraj-A-Lizzz-tik-X.B.-Al-eh-doe-shuz! All right now! Yah- sir! Hahaha," buzzes a slacker), Jones's sympathies lie with an older world, where physical adventure was sought, and suffering was part of the ride. In "Daddy's Girl", a 60-something man, telling old friends of the night when he lost his car, his coat, his job, his girlfriend, and almost his life, lets his listeners weep with laughter at his ludicrousness. In "My Heroic Mythic Journey" and "You Cheated, You Lied", love puts two boxers through the mincer. The first is perforated by bullets from a femme fatale but counts himself lucky for the lessons he's learned. The latter, an epileptic, is dragged through mental hospitals, the high life and Hawaiian beach bliss by a suicidal nymphomaniac. At his lowest ebb, he calls himself "a Job who had no moral lesson to offer the rest of humanity ... Job in the lower case", and his sufferings are Biblical. But, led on by his lover's insatiable appetites, careering through near-death disasters, he somehow bounces back for more. These are stories drawn in part from hardboiled fiction's beaten wisdom ("Fell in love. Bleach-bottle blond with a cheating heart. I couldn't help it") and more especially from Jack Kerouac, in the restless spongeing and squeezing of experience. Writer and written are both creatures of appetite.

There are other, still less fashionable influences - Seattle's slacker satirist Peter Bagge, and perhaps his mentor, Robert Crumb. There is more here, though, than off-cuts from earlier styles, or from Jones's own admittedly extraordinary life. First of all, there's his attention to the physical. Whether stretching time as a dazed boxer struggles through the aftermath of a punch, or focusing on flecks of another man's semen in a lover's pubic hair, knowledge here is carnal first. From these immutable facts - the thwap of bodies colliding, sweating from fear or stinking of sex - characters are fated. Intentions are foiled by instinct. As one says after a Vietnam firefight, "It's a lot like hitting yourself over the head with a hammer. It really feels good when you stop, and beyond that there's no point or moral lesson to be learned whatever." It's this which allows Sonny Liston's more anarchic moments, as when a teenage boy's silver- screen epiphany is followed by abject swallowing of the cinema manager's semen. And yet, Jones does find comfort in such arbitrary fates. It's in the calmness of a bullet-riddled boxer's crippled life, the acceptance by an unemployed man of crumbs of happiness. No matter how blackly, hilariously horrible the consequences, the lesson Jones brings back from the limits of exertion is to take what we can get, and be thankful.