Review: "Sonny Liston Was a Friend of Mine" by Thom Jones

Going from a book that was hard to write about one that I cannot wait to talk about, Sonny Liston Was a Friend of Mine by Thom jones is staggeringly good. I read his first collection, The Pugilist at Rest Last year and still find it to be one of the best collections of short stories that has come out in the last thirty years. And I am happy to say that this collection is much better than that one. Jones writes like a double tough Hemingway minus all the posturizing macho cynical bullshit. Instead of hunting and World War I and II, it is boxing and the Vietnam War that become obsessions throughout these eleven magnificent stories. The characters in Jones’ stories always suffer horrible twists of fates either before or during the stories events, but they always find some way to weather them, even if the antidote for their despair is frighteningly counterproductive or painfully brief and short term. For these characters, nothing could be worse than death and defeat, and it is better to go forth into an uncertain future than too fall too your knees. With the exception of maybe one story, everyone in this collection is as good as any short story you are likely to read. The first story, which is the title story, deals with a young boxer whose upcoming fight to a guy he lost too last year is his only solace from an indifferent family life and the real world, which he knows will destroy him once he cannot box anymore. The ending is quite sad, but there is a strange sense of heroism in the way the fighter finishes the fight. Next there is a trilogy of stories surrounding a troop of Marines in Vietnam, which ends with the sweet little story “Fields of Purple Forever”, where the only way a surviving member of this troop can survive after the war is by constantly pushing himself to the zero-point of life, this case, by swimming the English Channel. Another great story is “I Love You, Sophie Western” where one young man’s journey toward actual love ends in violence and forced sexual favors. These stories infuse a lot more sex and gross-outs than The Pugilist at Rest, but it adds to the relatability in some strange way. Finally, the longest story here, which closes out the collection, is “You Cheated, You Lied” which tells the story of two clinically insane lovers who take a trip to Hawaii that will make even the loneliest person thankful they are single. These stories are more honest and thoughtful than almost anything Hemingway wrote, not too mention that Jones; prose would run circles around Hemingway’s. It is a shame this was the last thing Jones has published to date, because he is a true original and one of America’s best practitioners of a seldom recognized art form nowadays. Pick up any of his books and I promise you will find something great in them.

Rating: 5/5