Scar Tissue

By John Skow

TITLE: THE PUGILIST AT REST

AUTHOR: THOM JONES

PUBLISHER: LITTLE, BROWN; 230 PAGES; $18.95

THE BOTTOM LINE: Tough guys stare back at their violent lives in these first- rate stories.

The first appearance of a very good writer, especially the sort of writer who breaks off jagged pieces of his own life and holds them up as fiction, is a tense, edgy pleasure for the reader. How fragile is the fine new talent? How broad and solid? How many fragments remain to be broken off and displayed, and after that, what will be left?

Thom Jones' first book is a sheaf of extraordinary short stories, most of them about scarred, damaged men on the far side of violence. The viewpoint doesn't vary much: a straight-on, wondering stare back through the wreckage. The narrator of the superb title story cripples another Marine in a squabble during training, survives three tours of combat in Vietnam, then, overmatched in a prizefight and too stubborn to fall down, outpoints his opponent but suffers brain damage that leads to worsening epilepsy. "What a goddamn fool," he says of himself. He wrestles with Schopenhauer and Nietzsche without improving on this assessment. In Rome he has seen the statue of a broken-nosed, middle-aged gladiator. The fighter is seated, conserving his strength. "There is a slight look of befuddlement on his face," the narrator notes, "but there is no trace of fear."

Still, is courage a virtue, or is it simply testosterone poisoning? Is remorse, which the narrator now feels, merely the result of bad health? Is God just a neurochemical event, part of the tantalizing aura that precedes an epileptic attack? A shrug is implied here. The narrator faces a chancy brain operation. "I hope I get to keep my dogs somehow," he frets. "Maybe stay at my sister's place. If they send me to the nuthouse I lose the dogs for sure."

The voice heard here, and in related stories about boxing and war, is so strong and clear that it is hard to imagine the author finding another as effective. A couple of successful experiments don't entirely settle the matter. One sketches a stud who, though he senses dimly that he may be missing something, resolutely avoids emotional entanglements with women. The other takes the familiar testosterone ride, but from the point of view of a woman who has as a lover a deep-sea diver and then, when he dies, a fighter pilot. A few more open windows are needed to widen the author's world in stories and novels to come. The case of John Irving, droning on about wrestling in book after book, comes drearily to mind, and the hope here is that Jones, a former Marine who was an amateur boxer, has said all, or nearly all, he has to say about getting punched in the nose. But for the range of this brief collection, the author's focus on tough, self-wounded guys works fine.