Scan barcode
A review by crispymerola
The Puglist at Rest by Thom Jones
3.0
A pretty solid collection suffering from repetitive story elements. Thom gets vulnerable, his prose is absorbing and snappy, his story subjects vary but his characters always pulse with a quiet resilience.
Once-boxers, The Doors, dead fathers (usually by suicide, usually in a mental institution), harried Nam vets, copious references to Nietzsche/Schopenhauer - nearly every story in the collection contains these elements, to the point where some of the shorts felt like inferior versions of others. When Thom clusters three Vietnam stories in the opening of the collection, it's inevitable that I'm going to analyze them in relation to one another - what are they doing differently, what are they doing better?
There are some stories in here that meandered in magical, serendipitous ways (I Want to Live!, A White Horse), and others which spiralled tragically (Unchain My Heart, Mosquitoes, Wipeout). And then, the relative duds. None of Thom's writing is boring, but it's hard to feel much when he leans into his shtick and refuses to budge. All the war stories, 'As of July 6th...', even Rocket Man, to an extent - they felt unsurprising, sitting next to stories which utilized similar themes to greater effect.
Once-boxers, The Doors, dead fathers (usually by suicide, usually in a mental institution), harried Nam vets, copious references to Nietzsche/Schopenhauer - nearly every story in the collection contains these elements, to the point where some of the shorts felt like inferior versions of others. When Thom clusters three Vietnam stories in the opening of the collection, it's inevitable that I'm going to analyze them in relation to one another - what are they doing differently, what are they doing better?
There are some stories in here that meandered in magical, serendipitous ways (I Want to Live!, A White Horse), and others which spiralled tragically (Unchain My Heart, Mosquitoes, Wipeout). And then, the relative duds. None of Thom's writing is boring, but it's hard to feel much when he leans into his shtick and refuses to budge. All the war stories, 'As of July 6th...', even Rocket Man, to an extent - they felt unsurprising, sitting next to stories which utilized similar themes to greater effect.