Boxing Genre’s Latest Lacks Punch

Five years ago, to the musky cheers of gladiators and fans of fistic fiction, Thom Jones climbed into the literary ring and released a barrage of 11 short stories titled “The Pugilist at Rest.” A contender for the National Book Award, the collection introduced the Jones hero--a Golden Gloves champ and Vietnam vet, who, having let his guard and his zipper down too many times, finds himself punch-drunk with either epilepsy or sex, reduced to a diet of Schopenhauer and phenobarbital.

Although an occasional woman gets star billing in a Jones story, it’s the guy tales that command the most authority, many of them set in the frozen wasteland of northern Illinois, a landscape devoid of either beauty or irony. The perfect day for many of Jones’ heroes, not surprisingly, is 22 hours of uninterrupted sleep.

After an excursion to Africa in his next book of stories, “Cold Snap,” Jones has returned to the scene of his earlier triumph. The title story on Jones’ latest card, “Sonny Liston Was a Friend of Mine,” brings up the youthful incarnation of the hero, Kid Dynamite, a welterweight with a virginal sweetheart, a cancerous stepfather, a tough old grandma who gets up at the crack of dawn to make him egg sandwiches to fortify his early morning runs, and a perennial nemesis named Reine. Vietnam may be in the Kid’s future, but for now, his focus is on beating Reine in a Golden Gloves semifinal and knocking his stepfather’s doubt down his throat.

It’s the late ‘50s, and it’s Chicago. And, indeed, the story has the smell of the muscular days of Rod Serling and Paddy Chayefsky. Which is fine, but unextraordinary. There is a punch-by-the-numbers smell to the plot that provokes more of a yawn than a cheer.

And, indeed, this latest collection is full of unextraordinary versions of stories that dazzled in Jones’ earlier book. One wonders whether the pugilist has rested, not on a block of granite or a folding chair, but on his laurels. A Marine reconnaissance team called “Break on Through,” introduced in “The Pugilist at Rest,” makes several reappearances in “Sonny Liston.” Yet each appearance impresses less and less, and the sum adds little more to Vietnam War literature than “Saving Private Ryan” did to World War II. The best is the last and the longest. In the great tradition of boy-meets-girl-in-the-neurology-clinic (the hero has epilepsy, of course), “You Cheated, You Lied” throws young William together with a long-legged blond with a wandering eye named Molly Bloom. Tossing lithium to the winds, the pair sets out for a dreamy California of endless sun and ironman sex. But madness and surfing and a former Miss Hawaii and half a dozen sailors eventually have their way. Paradise is lost, but not hope. Despite an ending in which the sex-crazed James Joyce namesake quotes Samuel Beckett, Jones pulls off a Hollywood finish that would raise James Dean and Natalie Wood from the dead.

The writing is hardly extraordinary, but the plot works and gives promise of a stamina that Jones has yet to display--the ability to take his hero past the three rounds of the short story into the full fifteen of a novel.