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Fat City
Like actors in a Greek drama, Gardner's characters find redemption in their struggle with inevitability
Leonard Gardner novel Fat City reads like a Greek tragedy with the reader as audience fully aware of the fate that awaits each of the characters. Yet just as with the dramas of antiquity, so too does Gardner’s characters distinguish themselves in their struggle to endure. "‘Hoping never done nothing,’ says Buford Wills. ‘It wanting that do it. You got to want to win bad enough to win.’" The same can be said of Fat City’s characters in their own private daily battles.
Fat City was written in 1969 and set in Stockton, just under 90 miles due east of San Francisco in California’s lush Central Valley. In its detailing the arduous lives of day-labor farm workers eking out a living from the bounty of the rich California earth the novel reads like a John Steinbeck work. Gardner’s characters are drawn with such detail that the reader quickly realizes the trap each has become mired in.
Billy Tully, the book’s main character was once a professional heavyweight prizefighter. He keeps telling himself he’ll get back into shape and start fighting again. It’s not too late, yet his almost obsessive fantasy or reuniting with his wife, who dumped him after a lost fight, drives him to drink and away from any real hope of fighting his way back into the professional ranks.
"Tully had not had a bout since his wife had left him, but last night he had hit a man in the Ofis Inn," Gardner writes. "What the argument involved he could no longer clearly recall, and he gave it little thought. What concerned him was what had been revealed about himself. He had thrown one punch and the man had dropped. Tully now believed he had given up his career too soon. He was still only twenty-nine."
At the story unfolds, Tully meets Ernie Munger at the YMCA in Stockton, where Tully had gone hoping again to return to boxing. The two decide to go a round in the ring. The out-of-shape Tully sees in the young 20-year old Munger the making of a fighter and sends him to see Rubin Luna, Tully’s ex-manager.
In Ernie Munger, the reader sees the young version of the aspiring Tully. Naïve to the world around him, Munger is unable to see his future in Tully’s shattered life. The reader is not told what drove Tully into fighting, only that boxing is Tully’s one way out of a life of day laboring in the Central Valley. In Munger the reader sees a young man alienated from his family and drawn into the ring as a means of defining himself as a man.
"He saw has father seldom, and though his mother was home all day, Ernie’s association with her had long been only perfunctory," Gardner writes. "‘…Why don’t you leave if you don’t like it,’ he said to her one day in answer to a complaint encompassing the house, his father, his sister, himself, the entire town; and then her stricken face had filled with anguish not only for what he had said but for the inconsiderate act of existing."
Rubin Luna is the trainer who takes the young Munger and begins to turn him into a boxer. Luna is a man looking for his own redemption in a fighter that he nurtures from nothing into a main-event contender. It is a dream that keeps his daily life of family and work—he drives a forklift on the docks—from overwhelming him. (Stockton is an inland seaport connected to San Francisco Bay by the San Joaquin waterways.)
Gardner describes one of Luna’s fighters dying in the ring, of the guilt Luna felt for pushing the fighter when he knew the mortal danger the fighter was risking. As Munger is knocked out for the first time, Luna remembers the lost fighter. "But now under the ring light Rubin experienced the same dread, and as he massaged Ernie’s arms with unhurried hands, his face distressed but not frantic, he felt the hopeless folly that was his life."
Fat City is a story of men caught in dead-end lives struggling to escape and doing so in the only way they know, fighting. Boxing is the metaphor for their struggle. Though each character is condemned by their own actions to a fate of their own making, there is great beauty in this work. The author’s skill is extracting a compelling story out of these men’s struggle to endure.
John Huston made the book into a movie based on a screenplay written by Gardner. Stacy Keach played Tully. Jeff Bridges played Ernie and Nicolas Colasanto played Rubin Luna. A box office failure, the film was critically acclaimed and gave Huston’s career the momentum to flourish in the 1970s with better-remembered works.
If you hunger for a good literary read, Fat City will not disappoint. It has the quality of most well written works: it does not diminish with age.
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