The Pugilist at Rest by Thom Jones (1993)

These 11 stories are full of heart. They're also full of sweat, drugs, puke and booze, but somehow those very real substances, and the real lives of struggle and venom and pity and shards of beauty they illumine, do not feel gratuitous. Jones is clear about his characters' vision of life. In the main, they are tough people, who battle demons and each other, and the vagaries of their bodies. They are not overly intellectual, gentle dreamers, or tortured emotional artists. I like his insistence on their point of view, and the fact that they are represented by him with a full weaponry of interests, angles and obsessions. They echo his own I'm suspecting, with the philosophy of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche figuring large in several instances. Part I consists of full-fight war stories from the time of Vietnam; Part II involves what I would call an exploration of the lives of very physical 'hams' of both genders; Part III covers sadness and culpability in the back lots of life; and Part IV casts up two elegies to dreamers of different kinds. Jones' prose is taut and to the point and not poetic in any obvious way. Occasionally, as in the penultimate story A White Horse, he doesn't attend sufficiently to the all-vital ending. But I guess because this collection is a long way outside my usual comfort zone, and yet enmeshes me in the lives of its people completely, I find myself fascinated and claimed by it.