Jones unbound

By Walter Lockwood

No Synopsis Available.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0135100658
• ISBN13: 9780135100653
• Release Date: January 1973
• Publisher: Prentice-Hall
• Length: 242 Pages
• Weight: 0.94 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 0.4" x 0.4"

Customer Reviews

"Jones Unbound" is good comedy

This is a comic first novel. Walter Lockwood went on to adapt several of his short stories for television. His film credits include "Finnegan Begin Again," which starred Robert Preston and Mary Tyler Moore. Set in Western Michigan in roughly 1970, "Jones Unbound" details the misadventures of Fielding Jones, a huge, erudite, and lustful 49 year old English professor who teaches at a college reminiscent of Calvin College ("College in the Pines"). Suddenly "unbound" after the death of his wife, and spurned by his adopted son after the funeral, Jones has nowhere to turn. On coming home after a first day back in his classes, where he has had a confrontation with the daughter of a board member, he finds a certain Miss Horton waiting "to help him through his grief." The seduction scene that follows is complicated by a visit from the dean and the board member whose daughter felt insulted in Jones's class. The dean is of course Jones's friend, and he helps Jones to narrowly miss ruin, though even this dean's tolerance almost fails when he returns to the house to get something and catches a naked and drunk Miss Horton coming out from hiding in the bedroom. Already motivated to get Jones some distance from the confrontation with the board member/father, the dean grants Jones a sabbatical, and Jones decides to set out for Colorado where his adopted son has joined a commune. On the train journey that follows, Jones meets Lilly, a promoter of birth control devices who is young enough to be his daughter. This love story is complicated by Jones's encounter with a Girl Guide leader who nearly collides with him in a Des Moines woods where he is peeing because he thinks he's alone. This is a Girl Guide leader with enough hatred of men to raise Jones's grief-stricken bumbling into something potentially ruinous in the legal battle that follows. Inevitably, of course, this novel feels dated. The man-hating Girl Guide leader, the novelty of Lilly's efforts as a birth control advocate, and Jones's own "unbound" mid-life sexual escapades all seem a bit musty, though the early environmental awareness in Jones's quest to Colorado, with its parody and pastiche of Thoreau, holds up nicely. Perhaps the barbed references to Calvinism and West Michigan culture are occasionally evocative of Peter DeVries, who shared some of this terrain. Yet Lockwood's style is most reminiscent of the fragmented consciousness in J.P. Donleavey's fiction. The narrative voice here allows a quick opening into Fielding Jones's mind, flawed as it is, and sympathetic as Jones is, with enough quirks to make him live. The plot is inventive and motivated clearly, but Lockwood's real strength is in his characters. Fielding Jones is one who will drag you along, with just enough pathos to keep the laughs honest, through his misadventures.