PRIMAL MATTER

By John Skow

Thom Jones' justly praised first book was a collection of strong, hard-edged short stories called The Pugilist at Rest. The title was descriptive. Most of the characters were onetime boxers or soldiers, and there was a quality of rest -- of fate and damage accepted -- to the predicaments they described. The stories in the author's second collection, Cold Snap (Little, Brown; 240 pages; $19.95), are at least as powerful and as gritty with existential courage. But they are also rowdier, messier with life.

The author's line of sight has shifted, maybe broadened. A theme that recurs is of white medics in Africa. Heroism here consists of crumbling into alcoholism, drugs and depression as slowly as possible, and with as much grace. Occasional joyousness is real but fragmented. The narrator of the title story is a washed-up doc, fired from his African aid mission and back home in the U.S., who is taking his depressed and institutionalized sister for an outing. They kid around about death and heaven, then veer into cheerfulness: "I'm thinking that I'm gonna be all right, and in the meantime what can be better than a cool, breezy, fragrant day, rain-splatter diamonds on the wraparound windshield of a Ninety-eight Olds with a view of cherry trees blooming in the light spring rain?" For a few minutes, they both believe it.

Such characters are out of balance, but they aren't grotesques. The best story of this impressive collection gives us the gallant last moments of a severely crippled, middle-aged white woman and her lover, a funny, bop-talking black thief. It is their loving last phone conversation, as they say goodbye before separately committing suicide. For a writer to pull this off utterly without mawkishness is astonishing. And jolting; what's common among mannerly short-story writers is to leave the reader, in a muted last paragraph, with a carefully polished pebble of irony. Jones leaves a chunk of primal matter, painful to hold, thrown up from volcanic depths.