The cynic in me says it's Jones' intensive focus on the subject of the Vietnam war (that subject now being officially distant enough for its controversies and crimes to be absorbed finally into historical mythology) that allows a fiction as powerfully raw and linguistically loaded as the best of Jones' stories to get as near to mainstream literati culture as it's gotten. If so that's a lucky accident, for while Jones writes compellingly about Vietnam his vision of the war, of militarism and of the cult of masculinity goes far deeper than any legendary renderings are supposed to go, bringing readers smack up against some of the most uneasy portrayals of the place of class tension, violence, sexual confusion, economic despair and insanity our ordinarily complacent literature has seen in quite awhile.
In Jones' war stories the experiences both of battle and of the military is continuous with the world of Jones' characters both before and after the war. This distinguishes them fundamentally from much of the most crucial anti-war fiction and film since the war (think of BORN ON THE FOURTH OF JULY, THE DEERHUNTER, COMING HOME and GOING AFTER CACCIATO) in which the traumatic transitions from Middle American civilian life to the military and from NAM to an utterly transformed American social scape is the dramatic pivot.
The characters in stories like "Break on Through" and "The Black Lights" have been traumatized all their lives, whatever their social class, usually white lower middle gone downwardly mobile. Whether Baggit, a convicted murderer let into the Marines under the auspices of a special recon unit, commander Andy Hawkins, chief psychiatrist at the neuropsych ward at Camp Pendleton and every bit as tormented as his patients or the aspiring boxer who is the lead character of the collection's title story (a "Rocky" deconstructed) all Jones' most memorable characters are misfits in the most profound sense. The surrealistic CATCH-22 cut with NAKED LUNCH brutal absurdities they survive and the lonely self destructive binges and black outs they stumble through after the war are ultimately distillations of the rest of their lives, admitting of the most luminous intensities and ugliest edges, though never allowing for the conceptual clarities or achieved wisdoms of the traditional short story " epiphany".
Maintaining an essential and not uncourageous ambivalence, Jones explores the ambiguous, overjammed memories of the war neither as epic symbols nor as the occassion for didactic sermonizing but rather as a personal/cultural Rorschach test dissolving frozen images of the past into dynamic, subtly shifting, continually (and disturbingly) changing relationships between past and present. While we're on the upside, when Jones is on his mark there isn't a single writer in the U.S. today as easily attuned to the polyglot of speech dialects through which mass consciousness streams. Nor has there been one in awhile (cyberpunks included) who could integrate the idioms of hard rock into complex prose.
That's the good news. Problem is when he gets very far away from either Vietnam or Boxing (the two can never be successfully disentangled in reading his work) Jones turns abruptly, lamely and inexplicably into another narcissistically clever sophomore workshopper, and not even a particularly good one at that. In the weaker half of this schizophrenic book Jones' raw energy turns to dull polish. The authentic anguished frenzies of his characters' voices get processed through the commercial meatgrinder and churn out just the way you figured they would all be before you opened the book, powerlunch blurbs, curriculum vitae, jacket money shot (vet, boxer, Hemingway retro stud).
Once one's done appreciating all there is about the real stuff, one gets caught in the thicket of the 60% or so of this book that's bogus bricolage, pure patchwork quilt of pastiche, offbeat, predictably "colorful" characters smothered in mime, tight, flawlessly overstudied, overcooked irony. " Mosquitoes" is the best of these exercises, a satire of upscale Vermont hippie culture by a narrator who's a weird (and if you're in the right mood entertaining) morph of Charles Bukowski and Rush Limbaugh. Most of the rest don't fare nearly as well, being characters (a yuppie woman publishing exec, metal head highschoolers) Jones' language will never inhabit through a million workshop days and nights and merely reflects and refracts glibly and badly.
The very perplexing question THE PUGILIST AT REST provokes is, now that entree to THE NEW YORKER and valorization by the new generation at the workshop is assured, will Thom Jones' talents evolve or fritter themselves away in too easily praised formulaic retreads. It's a good disturbing question, the one only a very good writer (and Jones gives indications of being more than that) is likely to provoke.