Successful Realism
PETRIE, M. ANN
Successful Realism FAT CITY By Leonard Gardner Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 183 pp. $5.50. Reviewed by M. ANN PETRIE Of all man's tragicomic tendencies I have always found most fascinating his...
...Tully's hopes are reinvigorated when he remembers he knocked out a man in a bar fight the night before...
...For Ruben Luna, training young fighters provides some "immunity from the despair" and boredom of his failure as a boxer, father and husband...
...They are human beings who unfortunately did not do the right things for themselves...
...None of these men are completely fooled by their illusions...
...The man lives...
...The background is filled in evenly, unobtrusively...
...The book opens with Billy Tully living in one of the many flea-bag hotels he has inhabited with such a sense of impermanence that he has never unpacked his bags...
...He reads movie magazines, identifying with the tribulations of the "stars," and broods over the betrayal that undid him...
...Leonard Gardner, in his excellent first novel, Fat City, explores the outcome in the mediocre and unfortunate...
...More to his credit, he has shown that even under such conditions ordinary men retain some control over their destiny, and the desire to improve their lot...
...Tully believes he must become "great" before anyone will find him worth loving...
...Reviewed by M. ANN PETRIE Of all man's tragicomic tendencies I have always found most fascinating his obsession with self-fulfillment through self-transcendence—without first trying to understand, improve or even enjoy his original level...
...But she gradually pulls Tully into her alcoholic world of self-disgust until she becomes so repulsive to him he cannot touch her...
...Although the work is humiliating and the conditions inhuman, there is a certain crazy nobility in the way he perseveres, crawling through the fields of the San Joaquin Valley, "bloated, aching . . . believing he could not go on even another hour...
...Gardner does not romanticize the sport, though...
...in order to go on believing in his body...
...In one scene, powerful in its understatement, a truckload of municipal workers arrive at a park where unemployed laborers are resting in the shade...
...Each chapter focuses on the struggle of a single man...
...Faye succumbs instantaneously...
...He has reaffirmed hope, not sentimentally, but with restraint and conviction...
...Ruben's refusal for selfish reasons to acknowledge the limitations of his fighters makes him a bad trainer...
...It would be hilarious if it were not so sad...
...Later, as he brags about Ernie's potential, Tully realizes he had "magnified Ernie's talents...
...men who in spite of their limitations do experience great moments...
...Without explanation or consideration, they cut down every shade-tree, leaving the men exposed to the afternoon summer heat...
...Above all, the city is cruel...
...Later the poor boy is splattered with mud and falls into the river while trying to push his car out of the mud—no doubt symbolic of his inevitable future with Faye...
...In this day, that is a tremendous creative achievement...
...At various moments each realizes the futility of the role he has assumed...
...Its life muscles are all but atrophied...
...And in his ministrations as a trainer-sometimes tender, sometimes brutal as the slosh of ice water and smell of ammonia between rounds-Ruben demonstrates a paternal care he is never able to show his own children...
...Regrettably, Gardner does not portray his women with the same depth or compassion...
...And in the process of striving, each does in some way rise above his limitations to achieve a degree of human excellence...
...Gardner selects detail to give the maximum depth of feeling, using the minimum of words...
...None of these men succeed...
...But gradually it became clear that while not innovative, Gardner has mastered a powerful technique particularly suited to his subject matter...
...Faye, Ernie Munger's girl friend, resists any true sexual involvement during their nightly necking sessions by a levee until one rainy night he commits himself to her by declaring, "I guess I'm in love...
...For different reasons, the men are profoundly dissatisfied with their lives, but all hope to recover lost self-esteem, to become "someone" and ultimately be happy, through boxing...
...At best, as seen through the eyes of the men, they are merely bovine masses of flesh, hips and breasts...
...Their relationship is consummated with a slap of thighs and a beeping horn as Ernie's foot is caught in the steering wheel...
...Fat City is a "phantasmagoria of worn-out, mangled faces, scarred cheeks and necks, twisted, pocked, crushed and bloated noses, missing teeth, brown snags, empty gums, stubble beards, pitcher lips, flop ears, sores, scabs, dribbled tobacco juice, stooped shoulders, split brows, weary, desperate, stupefied eyes under the light of Center Street...
...At the age of 29 he still considers boxing the way to greatness...
...Plagued by his anticipation of rejection, both real and imagined, he cannot relate to anyone...
...But he has not been able to box or keep a job in the year and a half since his wife left him...
...The men use them with tenderness and gratitude, but with no real understanding or empathy...
...At first, I found Gardner's omniscient, realistic style rather anachronistic, compared to the experimentation of many other contemporary writers...
...Oma is allowed to tell the story of the death of her first husband, a full-blooded Cherokee Indian, but this one tragedy does not explain her shrewishness or her destructive relationships with Tully and Earl, the Negro upholsterer who is jailed for slashing someone in a fight...
...The effect is comparable to listening to the best music: deep personal participation in multiple layers of emotion...
...At worst, these women are conniving and destructive...
...Ernie's inability to fight life on any level is reflected in the failure of boxing to make him a man...
...He does not seem to care for them as men, but only for their ability to reinforce his self-image...
...Billy Tully, the most deluded, ends most abjectly...
...For the talented and the lucky the results can be awesome, if not happy: witness civilization...
...Angry yet challenged, he encourages Ernie to train with his old manager, Ruben Luna...
...As illuminated by Leonard Gardner's love and understanding, however, these men do not seem to be losers...
...Oma, the woman Billy Tully picks up in a bar, does succeed in hanging up his clothes in the seedy hotel room they share...
...Ernie, a gas station attendant living with his parents in a sagging, silent, dull house, gladly submits to having his face battered and nose smashed...
...Betrayed finally not by people, or even by his own shortcomings, but by loneliness, success of any kind is useless to him because he has no one to share it with...
...He regards boxing as an entre to the world of men—a ritual of verility...
...Given this spirit-breaking inhumanity, it is clear why so many dream unrealistically: to reach for the happiness that is rightfully theirs...
...This novel tells the story of several ordinary men living in an ordinary city, Stockton, California, an ugly place, turgid from the waste of excess...
...Even Ernie Munger, the one most trapped by Fat City because of his willingness to settle for meager bits of happiness, manages to outdo himself as he trains: "Gagging on a dry throat, he chose some object as his finish line and, plodding up to it on weighted legs, plodded right on past...
...The women of Fat City are as frustrated and unhappy as the men, but there is no exploration of their particular condition...
...Still, Luna does understand a fighter's vulnerability and his need for someone to believe in him...
...He shows it to be difficult, violent, often repulsive, even "insane...
...Yet he does go on...
...But they go on hoping...
...At the ymca gym where he goes to work out, he meets 18-year-old Ernie Munger, who out-boxes him...
...Ruben Luna learns to give of himself...
...Thus they emerge not as fellow suffering human beings but as adversaries...
...There is a shallowness in his perpetual smile and in the gusty overestimates of his charges' abilities...
...obstacles to fulfillment, harmful, like the city and its institutions...
...He honors his commitment and builds his body into good physical shape...
...A prisoner of "the meaningless expenditure of himself . . . begun imperceptibly long ago in the name of love he could no longer feel," Luna wants to become a whole person from the achievements of others...
...When Billy Tully decides to fight again, he gets a job as a farm laborer...
...Leonard Gardner has compressed the very worst of American life into the microcosm of a city...
Vol. 52 • September 1969 • No. 17
