Nicholas Lezard's choiceFictionReviewA classic story about pugilists and poverty in 1950s California hits hard nearly five decades on
Many writers are drawn to boxing, though often with a tendency to express the milquetoast’s awe at the fighter’s power, or to gloss over the bloodiness and pain of the sport – to see it as primal spectacle.
Fat City is no such book. It will not make you feel like taking up boxing; nor, unless you are unusually morbid, will it make you want to watch a fight. “Backed into a corner, he was attempting to clinch when a blinding blow crushed his nose,” etc.
First published in 1969, and set a decade earlier, Fat City is Leonard Gardner’s only novel. He has written short stories good enough for the Paris Review – which means very good indeed – as well as scripts for NYPD Blue. The film adaptation of Fat City was directed by John Huston, well and faithfully, in 1972. You have the feeling that the anodyne and cliche-packed sequence of Rocky films was launched partly to get the sour taste of Huston’s film out of Hollywood’s mouth.
The book is, of course, not just about boxing, but about what it was like to live in Stockton, California, at the end of the 1950s. Life there is not much fun now – only 70 miles from San Francisco, but a galaxy away in terms of glamour, Stockton is ranked among the 10 most dangerous cities in the US – but it was even worse then. The novel shows us a world of dingy bars, of “cadaverous” Chinese pork-slinging cooks, of first girlfriends married because their loss of virginity meant pregnancy, and of living in hotel rooms that make the soul weep.
Shoes squeaked by outside the door. Reviewing old certainties and mistakes, Tully gazed down at the magazines. Finally he reached for the Modern Screen and propped himself up with his head between the rods of the bed. On the magazine’s cover was an extravagantly smiling starlet in a bathing suit with a pencilled dot over each breast and a scribbled cleft at the crotch. The coughing went on across the hall. It was time to change hotels.
Tully is a 29-year-old ex-boxer, who decides one day that he has still got it. A quick trip to the local gym, where he is out-fought by an opponent 10 years his junior, puts that notion to rest for a while. The youngster, meanwhile, tries to go professional: he is the one who gets his schnozz flattened in the quote above.
And that, basically, is the message of the book: that if you follow your dreams, they can end up spread all over your face. Tully tops – or picks – onions to make ends meet: that doesn’t sound fun, either. Then again, we learn that in the hierarchy of casual agricultural labour in mid-20th-century California, topping onions ranks above lettuce-thinning or pea-picking. “I’m an onion‑topping fool,” says one over-enthusiast, more than once.
As you may have worked out, the title is bitterly ironic. Fat City, in African-American slang, was a place, like Cockayne, of mythical bounty; Gardner saw the phrase scrawled on the wall of a San Francisco tenement and decided that was the title for him. The author, himself Stockton-born, knew whereof he wrote; and he writes well, his book becoming over the years – it gets reprinted every so often – a touchstone for young Americans keen on appreciating pure, clean prose. How could one improve on “vivid blue slacks the color of burning gas”? (American spelling is retained throughout: good.) The description itself flares up like burning gas, because the rest of the book doesn’t often turn to outstanding metaphor. And that was what trousers were like in those days – you get the impression that they countered a life lived in harsh and unforgiving monochrome.
Fat City is published by Pushkin. To order a copy for £7.64 (RRP £8.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
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