Customer Reviews

Fat City (California Fiction)

5 star:		(21)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Billy Tully and Ernie Munger are two young men living in the Northern California delta town of Stockton. Their world is the violent one of boxing, but their struggles for survival are more universal than just any conventional story about men battling professionally in the squared circle. You do not have to be a fight fan to appreciate this arresting work.

Leonard Gardner has followed the rule of thumb laid down years ago of "Write what you know." Gardner grew up in Stockton and knows the lower middle class world he describes with graphic brilliance. He was an amateur boxer, giving him a knowledge of how men struggle to survive in that competitive and highly dangerous world.

Gardner's story craft is straight out of Albert Camus, in many ways reminiscent of his epic novella, "The Stranger." His descriptions of dingy bars and dreary hotel rooms ring with clarity, transferring readers to a world of existential survival where some cling to hope while others have long since given up.

Tully was on the verge of being a contender but lost a major fight, hit the bottle, and quit boxing. He got a job as a short order cook. After going to the local high school gym to work out he meets Ernie Munger. At 18 Ernie is eleven years Tully's senior. He becomes so impressed by Munger's moves that he recommends that he visit Lido Gym and look up his former manager. When Munger begins boxing amateur Tully's interest increases and he is motivated to launch a comeback.

Tully and Munger seek extra money by working as field pickers under a broiling sun. Tully finds temporary romance with Oma, a woman he meets in a bar with such a propensity for alcohol that he moves out of her dingy hotel room and back to his own, warned by his manager that she will destroy his concentration as he prepares for a main event bout in Stockton. Meanwhile Munger impregnates a young local woman, marries her, and with additional incentive, turns professional.

Gardner wrote the screenplay for the electrifying film version directed by John Huston, which starred Stacy Keach, Jeff Bridges and Susan Tyrell. It matches the tenaciously gripping, Camus-like existential reality of the book.

Leonard Gardner's short novel, "Fat City", set in Stockton, California in the mid-1950's, appeared in 1969. Gardner wrote the screenplay for the movie, directed by John Huston, in 1972. The book remains in print in a series of novels based in California called "California fiction". I came upon this book by chance. It is little-known but a treasure.

The book is about boxing and low life, faded dreams, lack of prospects, booze, rooming houses, failed relationships in a small California town. The two primary characters are Billy Tully and Ernie Munger. Billy at age 29 is a washed-up fighter who has lost his wife and several jobs and is sinking deeply into alcohol and oblivion. Ernie is 19 years old and a boxer who may have potential. He marries a young women named Faye, after getting her pregnant, and takes up the ring as a professional in order to support his wife and child.

The paths of the two men cross in the gym at the beginning of the book and their careers take parallel courses. Billy had lost an important fight in Panama some years earlier when his manager, Ruben Luna, forced him to travel alone to Panama in order to save on expenses. He makes an attempted comeback at the age of 30 and actually wins a decision in a brutal match with an aging Mexican fighter. He returns to fighting to try to save himself from depression over the loss of his wife, his lack of prospects, and his loneliness.

Ernie Munger is young and works at a gas station. Although he has some boxing potential, his skills appear limited. As had been the case with Tully years earlier, Ruben Luna sends Munger out of town, (to Las Vegas) for a fight to save on the expenses. This is Munger's first professional fight which proves more successful for him than did Tully's fight in Panama.
The book ends darkly, but with a hint of the possiblity of personal growth and true independence for Munger.

The descriptions in this book of bars, of women, of cheap hotels, of the training for fights, and of the fights themselves is compelling. This is a strong picture of boxing at its seamiest which yet captures the fascination that this sport holds for many -- myself included.

There are also many scenes in the book of the life of seasonal, agricultural workers in northern California. One of the most memorable portions of the book occurs when Tully and Munger sign on for day work in picking nuts. Tully climbs upon a ladder on a tractor and beats the nuts from a tree with a stick where they fall on Munger's head as he gathers them into a bag. The rage and the frustration of both men is palpable.

Gardner writes with a spare understated style which does not moralize. The characters and their experiences speak for themselves. It is highly effective.

There is a picture here of despairing men with small visions but also a real sense of underlying humanity, of hope, and of valuable, if fallen ideals. This will be a rewarding novel for the reader who wants to go slightly off the routine path.

It really is. I have read, I'd guess, 250-300 novels by contemporary writers since I read a glowing review of FAT CITY in a San Francisco newspaper years ago, sometime in the early 1970s, and bought the novel, mainly because I was brought up in San Jose, California, and wondered what could a writer find in the humble tank town of Stockton to write about. When I finished reading it I just looked out the window, so moved was I by the characters in the novel, and by Gardner's storytelling prowess. And to this day -- going on 28 years later -- I swear that I have not read a contemporary novel that has affected me as profoundly as FAT CITY did, and still does whenever I reread it, which is every year or two. Gardner's craft is wonderful to read -- the cadences of his sentences are gorgeous; you find yourself wanting to read it out loud to yourself, just to relish the drum beat of the syllables. (The only other writer I can think of who constructed sentences that way in English is Joseph Conrad.) Gardner's understanding of his characters, and of human nature, makes you shake your head and smile, even as his characters are blindly reeling toward sad destinies. This is American literature of the finest kind -- and though Gardner has not published a novel since FAT CITY in 1969, I know that a whole lot of people hope that he will again. He has the gift and this novel is proof.

Short novel, published in 1969, about two boxers, Billy Tully, who is 29 and down and out, and Ernie Mugger, who is 18 and up and coming, two versions of the same man, in some respects. Terrific skilled prose, short chapters, switching points of view between these two main characters and an assortment of other minor characters. The author takes you inside the characters' deepest despair or elation. How simple the author makes it look, one thinks, reading this book. But of course it is not. The prose is precise and honed, and looks easy only after who knows how many drafts. There are only 18 or 19 short chapters, and much of the novel is dialogue. But somehow one comes away with a panoramic view of Stockton, California, this woeful place, and the people the inhabit it - the immigrant fruit pickers, the bartenders and bar girls, the hobos on the street. The descriptions are compact and dead-on. About Billy Tully's hotel room: "All his neighbors had lung trouble." One could quote sentences from this book almost at will, the prose is so spare and perfect.

That the author never published another book, and that this was his first, is incredible. To write this cleanly and confidently, he must have practiced and studied for years. Yet to never do it again.

Like a boxer who has complete confidence in every move he makes, Gardner constructed a novel about small-city life that never takes a wrong step or strikes a false note. The setting is the northern California town of Stockton; the subject is the ordinary men and women operating on the fringes of society: living, working and drinking hard, they face a life of limited opportunity, yet somehow they persist, refusing to be defeated by the many obstacles they face.

The main characters are boxers: Billy, who at 29 is all but washed up, decides to try it in the ring one more time. Ernie, young and confident, enjoys limited success, but it's clear his future in the ring is limited at best. Between bouts they take day laborer jobs in the fields and orchards that support the Stockton community. The scenes that describe the work in the fields and the bus trips to small-time fights are beautifully drawn in spare, unsentimental prose of the highest order.

This novel is a classic of American realism. Gardner catches with uncanny clarity the drudgery of the work required to keep our land of plenty churning out the goods that we expect and take for granted. Its general tone is bleak, yet that tone is leavened with a deadpan humor and -- most importantly -- a genuine respect for his characters.

It's unfortunate for us as readers that Gardner didn't write more. On the other hand, he accomplished much with this work, and I believe that we can find his influence in contemporary writers such as Thom Jones and Elwood Reid.

I first read Fat City in 1970, not long after publication, and again recently(a first edition, no less!)and this brilliant novel only gets better with time. This is the novel Hemingway was never able to manage after The Sun Also Rises. Only on the surface is it about boxing.The novel foreshadows the work of Raymond Carver and Russell Banks, but is much more powerful and beautiful. Certainly Gardner is an enigma (no second novel) but like that other "one-timer," Harper Lee, he has produced nothing but perfection, a lesson more novelists should learn.

I read Fat City sometime in the mid-sixties, when it was first published, and was immediately captivated and envious of Gardner's powerful style and talent. If you appreciate and admire Hemingway or Steinbeck you will likely feel the same about Gardner, who, unfortunately, has not published anything since. Perhaps this small gem of a book was the only one he had in him. Even so, this novel is a remarkable accomplishment and may well become an American classic. What intrigues me the most in this work is that Gardner gets it all down right--the sights and smells and sounds of the seedy streets and flophouses; the drifters and dingy diners; the sweaty gyms, barsweeps and whores and how it is to work as a stoop-laborer in the fields, especially the true-to-life characters inhabiting the pages. Fat City is simply a well-crafted execution of art throughout and is as pleasurable to read now as when I first picked it up years ago.

"Fat City" is a novel that delivers an uppercut of grit, sadness and human endurance to the reader. Harsh, powerful, and poignant this novel is beautifully rendered in taut prose. It is remarkable how in theme and style Gardner's writing resembles the paintings of the 1930's artist, George Bellows, who also depicts the struggles of boxers and urban poor both in the blood speckled ring and in tenement strewn wastes of American cities. Bravo Gardner, you have your equals in Selby, Melville and Hemingway! But one wonders why this talent has not come into the ring another time and graced his readers with another novel?

Fat City is a short book, so I'll write a short review. You can get a plot synopsis from the other reviewers. This is high-quality noir territory. It is 180 pages of boxing, booze, lousy jobs, poisoned relationships, and flophouse squalor. It perfectly captures the characters' desperation and hopelessness. If you are looking for a tough, lean, gritty read, then look no farther.

Fat city is a book that took place in Stockton California in the 1950's that follows the broken lives of several men who are brought together from boxing. This book is written by Leonard Gardner, a boxer himself during the 1950's. As you read through the pages a story of the lives of different men unfolds.
Billy Tully is an out of shape boxer who gave everything up because of long losing streak and the painful divorce with his wife. Living off of almost nothing he decides he wants to go back and try to fight. While training he meets a young boy named Ernie Munger who has a natural talent for boxing. Ernie wants to be a boxer so bad that he trains day and night letting nothing get in his way. In the middle of his career he gets his girlfriend pregnant but tries his hardest to stay in the life of boxing. While following the characters in their lives this book goes though the struggle of each man and illustrates how they react to their failures. In this story the women are the cause of problems between all of the unhappy boxers; a problem that cannot be fixed.
Some chapters in the story are dedicated to small parts of other men's lives such as the trainer and the opponent, letting you understand the story from both sides. Although these men are brought together by boxing the book is about these men doing what they can do to survive. From boxing to farming this book accurately covers the actions taken to survive. Although the book can be slow at parts over all it is a quick read.