SOURCE: Catling, Patrick Skene. “Fight the Bad Fight.” Spectator 272, no. 8646 (26 March 1994): 36.

In the following review, Catling provides a positive review of The Pugilist at Rest.

Testosterone gushes abundantly through these short stories about death in war, deep-sea diving and disease [in The Pugilist at Rest]. Thom Jones has inherited the gung-ho tradition of Hemingway and Mailer—and improved on it. They posed as heavyweights. Jones is a light-heavyweight. Occasional flashes of ribald humour illuminate the machismo. He demonstrates that Rambo has feet of clay.

A Marine Corps veteran of Nam, Jones himself is a pugilist at rest. He survived more than 150 fights in the boxing ring and graduated from the University of Iowa Writer's Workshop with his originality intact. He gave this autobiographically reminiscent fiction, his first, the title of the statue of Theogenes, ‘the greatest of gladiators,’ who fought at the time of Homer, ‘the greatest poet...