Pulse
Mr. Jones heightens the sense of unease with a style that favors sparsity and acoustic alertness ... The sensory details are hyperattentive to noise ... These are stories that one reads with the ear as much as with the eye.
Told with a compelling immediacy and intensity, and with the quality of returning to a memory ... His powers of noticing are native yet neutral, bringing precise, vivid life to his stories without dictating moral responses to the reader. Jones makes the reader see and feel the scene ... He inhabits the fleetingness of our human moment in the larger scale of nature and time, while illuminating and latently asserting the essential value of our struggles with the physical world, each other and ourselves ... Drama arises from the freshness of witness and the flawless placing of action in the narrative ... The book as a whole makes a strong case for the centrality of the short story to the reading of fiction, and the reading of fiction as a place and a practice where sense and empathy can flourish.
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Jones’s style is at once spare and dense; his characters think and act in lines stripped of excess yet they contain worlds ... That subtle alertness to the word fur and its echo in the fir trees of the forest through which the man stumbles underline the complexity of Jones’s prose ... Visceral and unrelenting ... He has developed an impressionistic style in which nature provides an allegorical hook on which to hang stories that leave readers to intuit rather than be shown a deeper truth ...
In Pulse, it doesn’t always work; the story “White Squares” feels under-developed, packing less of a punch than the other tales. But it underlines how powerful Jones’s writing is in the rest of the collection.
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