SOURCE: Bloom, James D. “Cultural Capital and Contrarian Investing: Robert Stone, Thom Jones, and Others.” Contemporary Fiction 36, no. 3 (fall 1995): 490-507.

In the following essay, Bloom explores the role of music in Jones's stories.

Both the appeal of the Doors to Anne Browne and many others and the discrediting implications of their legacy that concern [Robert] Stone reverberate in Thom Jones's 1993 story sequence The Pugilist at Rest, which Stone honors in selecting the title story for The Best American Short Stories, 1992. Jones seems as attuned as Oliver Stone to the idolatry that has surrounded the Doors since Jim Morrison's death in 1971 and features their songs and their enduring youth-culture cachet throughout the book, but at the same time he evokes the aspects of their legacy that the Hollywood version downplayed.

The preferred narrator throughout The Pugilist at Rest speaks in the first person and, according to one reviewer, keeps...