Cold Snap

Commonweal, Oct 6, 1995 by Elizabeth Beverly

The most perplexing problem presented these days by a book-sized collection of short stories written by a single author is that the truly wonderful stories--and there are almost always at least two--tend to make the other less-than-wonderful stories, those that may be simply good or even just okay, seem downright embarrassing. Why, when the writer can write something great, does he or she choose to publish something merely competent? The notable strengths of the perfectly wrought story, in which voice and vision effortlessly fuse in order to embody character and plot, are detected as crudely realized impulses in the lesser stories. The author's obsessions and habits begin to look like annoying writerly tics rather than gifts of spirit or craft. The reader's greedy desire, whetted by excellence, won't be satisfied by sentences that plod instead of startle or sing.

And amid all these doubts, the miraculous quality of the great story fades, precisely because the reader begins to learn more about the author--his habits, missteps, indulgences--than about the characters who bear witness to the author's vision. The "trick" of fiction fails--its ability to deliver us straight through language to the realm of the inexpressible, though common, experience of living. Instead of wondering about the meaning of our own lives, we begin to wonder about the personality of the person who tries, again and again, to jump-start a fantasy that never quite takes off.

Both Big As Life: Stories about Men by Rand Richards Cooper and Cold Snap by Thom Jones contain several great stories, the kind that expand the reader's world by sweeping him or her into someone else's consciousness so deftly that, for a few moments, reading about that life feels more urgent than living one's own. Quite simply, these stories are grand achievements, stories that transcend their moment of composition. But Cooper's "Going the Distance" and Jones's "Superman, My Son" are not the only stories in these volumes, and, literary merit aside, these pieces, taken along with their companions, can provide us with some insight into the creative preoccupations of the two late twentieth-century American men who wrote them.

It is noteworthy that, despite vast differences in style, despite a display of defensive tics ranging from intellectual detachment to rowdy bluster, both Cooper and Jones seem terrifically befuddled by just what it means to be male and American at this particular historical moment. And although Jones wants to grab his readers by the throat and immediately dunk them into the current of this frenzied "unknowing"--just take a trip through his opening sentences--and Cooper depends on his narratives to work by engaging his readers, intellects--just read his volume's subtitle--both writers demonstrate an almost old-fashioned hope that simple storytelling can begin to clear things up for us all.

The ostensible similarities between these authors: an interest in Africa, in boxing, in the military, belie their striking differences in style. Jones is nervy and nervous at once, sputtering and ranting, letting his mind seem to zing randomly off the surface of the stuff of life. Cooper is much subtler; no linguistic razzle-dazzle is in evidence, and almost all of the stories proceed at the same cautious, studied pace. Yet these stylistic differences can mask a profound ideological similarity: a mounting conviction that people are doomed to an awful, at times grotesque, loneliness that no amount of talking can overcome. Both men use the vehicle of the story to trace the social heritage of such loneliness and to let the reader experience just how awful and inexorable this state can feel.

For Jones, the isolation occurs at the level of the human organism. One thinks of the great Russians, Dostoevski and Nabokov. Their thematic awareness of the ability of individual consciousness to shape and infuse "objective reality" with meaning infused their own fiction with a breathless and nearly miraculous luminosity and seriousness. But Jones's grasp of consciousness has been degraded by scientific awareness; a little learning has become a dangerous, and at times boring, thing. His narrators and his characters for the most part wallow in a neuronally charged chemical bath from which there is no escape. The temporal lobe, the pancreas, the heart, secrete their own juices; human medication, legal and illegal, mixes the concoction into a brew that determined the course of one's life. Jones doesn't simply write about these states; his narrators are mired there.

And although to contemporary readers such visceral narration may sound innovative and shocking, it often sounds highly reminiscent of much of the swooning, though sincere, work of the English Romantics: Shelley, Lord Byron, Coleridge, when the opium was delivering the visions. The claustrophobic self-awareness, the narcissistic sense of naughtiness, can feel like entrapment to the reader. However, when Jones is working at his best, as in the title story, the narrator's own quirkiness displaces his creator's, and the story opens more widely and more wonderfully than its elements suggest. In fact, it is precisely when Jones's inventions begin to undermine his writerly habits that the visionary potential of his style emerges, as when the elderly father in "Superman, My Son" displays an acutely critical, yet unabashed and tender love for his wrecked son, daughter-in-law, and nephew. At a moment such as this, the reader is swept by the power of story to forge belief in basic human decency despite all despair; such grace cannot be easily accounted for.