THOM JONES — COLD SNAP

Image: author photo

The fictional world of Thom Jones is full of traditionally masculine situations. Boxing. The impact of military conflict on the psyche. Adventures in rough country. There’s some cultural tourism, too, like when he writes from the perspective of an Indigenous Australian woman. All of which makes it clear to me that his work is a tough sell right now. And for this reason, to read Thom Jones makes me feel conflicted and more than a little sad; I suspect, prodigious talent though he was, he will be edged out of the anthologies in the future for the simple fact that his writing can now be seen as more regressive than progressive. I confess that almost every sentence he published still reaches me at a gut level, and I love that. He had a knack for writing from the perspective of a person just barely holding it together, and writing of small victories against a fully developed landscape of doom and failure. He was the real thing. I hope people still read him.