Leonard Gardner (1)Rezensionen

Some of the most stunning prose I have ever read. Some of it is truly stunning, like being punched in the head repeatedly, and hard. This tale of the boxer's life is really a story about masculinity and race, and about the desperate search for ways to feel special when simply being White and male are no longer enough. The threats of pain and harm and even death are insufficient to keep these men on the margins from the one thing that makes them feel powerful for a moment. There is a forward by Denis Johnson where he says basically that everything he has written is him trying to write something as good as this. I can see the link to Johnson's work quite clearly, though Johnson's voice is still his own. I won't read a better book this year. The perfect iteration of what this set out to be.

ETA a few quotes

After his first sexual experience: “Still he was uncertain. He wondered if everything had gone as it should. Was that all there was to it? Perhaps it had been celebrated out of proportion because there was nothing else to live for.”

About that same woman whom he ends up with: “Profoundly moved, he kissed the lax waiting mouth with exquisite unhappiness.”

From a sad alcoholic Tully hooks up with talking about her history with men of different races: “The white race is in its decline. We started downhill in 1492 when Columbus discovered syphilis."

The best quotes for me are those about Stockton and about being in the ring. I will leave everyone to find those on their own.

A beautiful book. Gardner uses the noir aesthetic to great effect, but goes much deeper into the individuality and motivations of each character than the typical book in this genre does.

"It filled him with panic. To such devotion, such sacrifice, he felt rejection would be unbearable, that to quibble at all would be an unthinkable cruelty. Profoundly moved, he kissed the lax waiting mouth with exquisite unhappiness."

3.5
***
edit.
Second read was so much better.

The setting is Stockton California, in the 1960s, as the story follows two amateur boxers, one nearly washed up and the other on the rise. A nice snapshot of a time and place, with clean, neat prose. I was reminded of Steinbeck, as I was reading it. This slim novel quietly packs a punch.

probably the ugliest and most beautiful book about boxing and desperation ever written.

Fat City is an impressive, well-wrought exploration of the struggles of two boxers in Stockton. I found Gardner's understanding of the psychology of masculinity, particularly around rites of passage, to be insightful and provocative. I'd be curious how the circumstances of poverty and mobility of living on the fringes of society would look like in today's milieu and whether or not there'd be such opportunities to squander as Billy Tully does in the story.

Emotionally brutal.
Whatever small rays of light and hope open up in the story momentarily are instantly drown out in bleak darkness.

Billy Tully, 29, divorced, "afraid of a crisis beyond his capacity" which is basically his life, feels washed up as a boxer. He works as a fry cook until fired and has to resort to field labor. Billy lives in flophouse hotels, where "his neighbors all seemed to have lung trouble."

Ernie Munger is a younger boxer with potential, newly married with a child on the way. Both men are trained and managed by Ruben Luna. Early on you get the sense that none of the three are ever going to have success, in boxing or life. But it doesn't bring the story down. Leonard Gardner elevates it with his writing. He's one of those select writers that you read very carefully because every word counts. Tully at one point dresses in "a red sport shirt and vivid blue slacks the color of burning gas." Gardner even makes onion harvesting poetic.
"Occasionally there was a gust of wind and he was engulfed by sudden rustlings and flickering shadows as a high spiral of onion skins fluttered about him like a swarm of butterflies."

Apparently an influential work, and rightfully so.½

Some great books one reads quickly because the story surrounds you. This one read slowly, maybe even aloud because the words and sentences are too good to let go off. Yeah, the story resonates with anyone who struggles.

Fat City? Fat chance, in Leonard Gardner’s grim, sometimes funny, novel of dreams chased and dreams lost in the streets, fighter’s gyms, fields, bars, and residential hotels of Stockton, California.

The two main characters, boxers both, stumble from one burden to one hope and back to others again. It is a novel where what’s at hand—fist fights, drinks raised, short hoes wielded, lovers groped—doesn’t put a tight grip on the reality that’s desired, and the desire itself isn’t sure to persist into the next situation that always comes round, whether in the ring or the compass of one’s days. Resolution and ambition, when they arise, are subject to chance alterations in circumstances not known to the individual, with influences alien to their realization.

That’s not to say the women and men of the novel lack all insight or responsibility. But when a self-audit discloses an abhorrence of one’s own “unfathomable stupidity,” the possibilities narrow. Also, one hopes, the delusions.

Midway through the story, city workers cut down the shade trees of a park so that the derelict won’t find in it comfort for their rest. Such actions intensify the sense of impasse, the sense of standing outside a building where the work of life could become productive, where one might enter if only the entryway were not so perpetually guarded. It is in the working through of these situations and days that the novel resides. In telling it, Gardner conveys a reality that hits hard.

Emotionally raw and honest to a degree I did not expect from a "boxing novel". It switches between uncomfortably described grit and obliquely structured parables, and the overall effect is almost musical, like hearing jazz that doesn't fit the chorus-solo form you expect.

Rock meets bottom in this visceral tale of boxers, young and old, making it or failing to at the edge of possibility. Billy Tully is washed up at 29. Divorced and reduced to day crop work in the California heat, he dreams of one last chance but knows in his heart that one chance was always more than he ever had. Ernie Munger is 18, still a kid without a professional bout, but Billy thinks he has potential and introduces him to his old manager. They travel different paths, both looking for some kind of meaning in the ring, or out of it, both filled with hope but drowning in despair. And both finding, in the end, what they think of as their due.

It is easy to see why, in an introduction by Denis Johnson, this work is held out as a model of gritty realism. Johnson claims that everything he’s ever written has been an attempt to match the effortless realism that Gardner attains here. High praise indeed. I might not see the truth that Johnson does at the sharp end of a 16-oz glove. But I recognize that Gardner stands in line with Steinbeck as a master of descriptions of work, both in the fields of California and in the ring. These men are workers in a heavy trade no worse than others and no better. And so inevitably the gritty realism melds seamlessly into elegy and romance.

Well worth reading.

A decent book about manhood. The novel tracks three men -- 2 boxers and their manager -- in southern california in the fifties. Ernie is a young, up-and-coming kid discovered by Billy Tully, a 30 year old who gave up the sport two years prior but now must work fruit and vegetable fields to make money. Billy is the core of the novel and he's pretty unlikeable, but still sympathetic. He's really just upset that he let his life as a boxer go.

The dialogue is good, if a bit forced in places. The chapters jump POV. ultimately, it's a satisfying book that suggest charles bukowski with more style and more hope.

Fat City is astoundingly good, and Leonard Gardner, like Harper Lee, ranks among the great one-novel novelists. His prose is as close to perfection as one could imagine: tight, economical, yet packing a powerful descriptive punch, his dialogue ringing with verisimilitude. Describing the travails of two boxers--one up-and-coming, and one past his prime yet hopeful of a comeback--in 1950s Stockton, California, this novel will appeal to anyone who enjoys true-to-life stories featuring three-dimensional, fully realized characters. It should also please those who enjoy books about "the sweet science," as well as Bukowski fans and "hard-boiled" fiction enthusiasts.

Fat City is astoundingly good, and Leonard Gardner, like Harper Lee, ranks among the great one-novel novelists. His prose is as close to perfection as one could imagine: tight, economical, yet packing a powerful descriptive punch, his dialogue ringing with verisimilitude. Describing the travails of two boxers--one up-and-coming, and one past his prime yet hopeful of a comeback--in 1950s Stockton, California, this novel will appeal to anyone who enjoys true-to-life stories featuring three-dimensional, fully realized characters. It should also please those who enjoy books about "the sweet science," as well as Bukowski fans and "hard-boiled" fiction enthusiasts.

I would kind of rate this short novel by Leonard Gardner as a minor masterpiece. As far as I know it is his only published work--and dates back to 1969. One wonders what he has been up to since. It revolves around two boxers--one a 29 year old former pro (Billy Tully) having just gotten into a barfight and one punched his opponent out cold gets the idea that maybe just maybe he retired too early. Tully is mostly depressed--his beautiful wife having left him after his career blew up and he settled for becoming a short order cook. The other is a young kid--18 year old Ernie Munger--tall for his weight but very quick. The two of them meet up in a Y and Munger's quickness and reach are more than Tully can handle. Tully recommends he make a career out of it and Munger who is basically directionless decides to give it a go. What follows is disaster after disaster for Tully who carries a torch for his ex-wife and can't get his boxing career untracked mostly due to depression fueled by resentment towards his manager and alcohol and the fact that he is just not that good. To make ends meet he's often seen picking fruit and vegetables with migrant workers. Munger does better --loses his virginity, wins most of his bouts (not all), gets married but really may when all is said and wind up on the same treadmill to nowhere.

What is really remarkable about Gardner as a writer though is the empathy for his characters, mixed with a sly and very understated sense of humor which seeks out almost unerringly the pathetic in their lives. One also almost gets the sense that Gardner himself once upon a time might have stepped between the ropes to fight an opponent or even walked the same fields as the migrant workers. The detail of the futility of the existing lives in this rather short novel (183 pages) is all there. The short clips he makes out of the boxing scenes are extraordinary. The boxers continuing almost on auto-pilot after being hurt--or all of a sudden finding themselves looking up from the floor at the rafters not having a clue how they got there.

For Ernie's first fight:

'At the bell, Ruben (the manager) was standing behind Ernie just outside the ropes, facing a short negro with bulging arms and a mohawk haircut. Then, sitting on the ring steps besides Babe (cornerman), their heads on the level of Ernie's dancing feet, Ernie's new gold trimmed white robe still over his arm, Ruben experienced the first waning of confidence. He saw in the negro's opening blow a power that was undeniable, that was extraordinary. It was a wide hook slung to the stomach under Ernie's jab; and as instantaneous strategic judgements were occuring in Ruben's mind, Ernie was struck under the heart with a right of resounding force. Ruben then felt a foreboding. Though Ernie maneuvered with a degree of skill, there was an aspect of futility in it all. When he reached out with both gloves to block a left, Ruben's hand went into his sweater pocket for the ammonia vial and a right swing landed with an awesome slam on the lean point of Ernie's chin. He went down sideways along the ropes, toppling stiffly in the roar, and hit the canvas on his back, his head striking the floor, followed by his feet. His eyes stared momentarily, then closed as his body went rigid.'

And here is one on Tully after he picks up a girl at a bar who at first reminded him of his ex-wife.

'When they went out together he was fondling her curly head. And he was in control now, talking rapidly to allow no interruption, trying to circumvent all possible subjects for contention in order to remain in favor. At the door, during a crescendo of trumpets and guitars, he glanced back over his shoulder in leering triumph, but no one was looking at him. A cooling breeze had risen. The sky was clear; the Big Dipper tilted over Center Street. Tully realized how drunk he was when he stopped on the sidewalk for a kiss and, eyes closed, pleased at finding he was taller, lost his balance. Oma had surged against him, and as they walked on, his arm across her back, hers at his waist, she continued to lean against him, forcing him towards walls and store windows.'

There is something close to Carveresque about this book and it's too bad that Gardner has not given us something other in the last 38 years but sometimes it's best to take what one can get at least when it is as good as this one.½

This book might seem a bit dated today. With Charles Bukowski, and the beats filling shelves many will not see out Gardner. But I must see, you should. Fat City is written with an easy that is unmatched. The book's realism is effortlessly written and effortless to read. The world Gardner has created is so "matter-of-fact" that when the story of Billy and Ernie is over it is not easily forgotten. The 1970's movie is also worth seeing, but read the book first.