OJ Irish
If you don’t drink or smoke, reading Sonny Liston was a Friend of Mine will make you wish you did. If, like most people, you do, then you’ll feel better about it and want to switch up to Jim Beam and Lucky Strikes immediately. Jones’ writing is what you might call ‘Zippo Prose’ – very American, very hip, hard-faced and utterly indisposable.
Sonny Liston… is, like The Pugilist at Rest and Cold Snap before it, a short-story collection. Jones is currently working on his first novel, a release which will rightly be heralded and hyped on both sides of the Atlantic, but Sonny Liston’s twelve stories – neatly analogous to the twelve rounds of a boxing match – prove once again that he will have to go some to use the form of the novel like he uses the short story.
Jones is again concerned with men – he is, after all, a male writer like Hemingway was a male writer. More specifically it is the nature of masculinity in modern society which concerns him. We are an emascalated bunch, modern men. No great wars to fight in, stuck at home with mother, rising daily to perform menial and bloodless tasks. In ’40, Still at Home’ we are shown the life of a fortysomething living at home with his cancer-stricken ma – dying with her, under one roof. Matthew is embittered, depressed, neutered: ‘I can’t do it anymore… I can’t hack it out there in middle-management hell…in your day people were still human.’ It is his mother’s death which liberates him, makes him realise he’s alive.
Alive. Human. To be alive, or to have life? Jones makes this distinction brutally transparent, especially in the tryptych of Vietnam stories which make up the book’s heart. In ‘A Run through the Jungle’, a soldier is killed by his own phosphorus grenade, burnt up from the inside. We discover this is the same GI who, in the previous story, ‘The Roadrunner’, torched to death the unfortunate bird of the title. A very biblical, very male retribution for a man who had committed ‘a low deed’.
Killing the Vietcong, however, is a sanctioned act, a legitimate outlet for manliness, something denied to the vast majority of men in modern Western society; ‘Christ! I was alive’ exclaims the narrator of ‘A Run through the Jungle’ on completing a dangerous mission to kill an NVA general. ‘Soon I would be guzzling beer and smoking reefer’, he continues. For he who dares, the reward: alcohol and marijuana these days are used to numb, to forget. Where’s the reason to get high? I’ll bet that beer and that joint tasted damn fine.
In the third Nam story, ‘Fields of Purple Forever’, a veteran spends his time embarking on swims around the world, adventures which take on mythic-heroic status, adventures of the body and soul justified by the having survived the hellish experiences of war. These guys are A.L.I.V.E in a sense which seems now to be unattainable. Reading Sonny Liston… leaves you in no doubt that this is a crying shame.
Sonny Liston was a Friend of Mine is, ultimately, a terrific read. Jones’ slangy prose crackles and smokes with the fire of authenticity, riddled as it is with drugs, blood, profanity and, above all, humanity. The cover says it all – Sonny Liston stares at you mournfully, a light sheen of sweat covering his face. The man knows brutality, but he seems at peace with himself, with the uncomplicated beauty of a life made on the ropes, in the ring.
