SOURCE: Tayler, Christopher. “Dancing with Despair.” Times Literary Supplement (19 February 1999): 22.

In the following review, Tayler provides a positive review of Sonny Liston was a Friend of Mine.

Sonny Liston Was a Friend of Mine is Thom Jones's third foray into his familiar territory of mental illness, bodily trauma, boxing and “the Nam”. Here, relationships tend not to work out (“she unloaded four shots from a 38-caliber revolver into my thoracic cavity, hit me in the knee and creased my ear with the sixth shot”), and the prospects of employment are grim. Apart from violence, sex, profanity and alcohol, the more gregarious characters turn to “windowpane” acid, hash and cocaine (“an overrated drug, no better than a triple espresso”), while the merely domestically doom-struck rely on “codeine #4s”, morphine tablets chased with Xanax, or else “Extra-Strength Excedrins, a couple of Advils, and a deuce of Canadian 222s”, washed down...