Bookclub: 'Fat City'
Presented by Chris Lehmann
Washington Post Book Deputy Editor
Thursday, March 27, 2003; Noon ET

Welcome to the online meeting of The Washington Post Book Club, a monthly program presented by the editors and writers of Washington Post Book World.

Washington Post Book World Deputy Editor Chris Lehmann led the discussion on this month's selection, 'Fat City' by Leonard Gardner.

The transcript follows.

Editor's Note: Washingtonpost.com moderators retain editorial control over Live Online discussions and choose the most relevant questions for guests and hosts; guests and hosts can decline to answer questions.

Chris Lehmann: Greetings, and welcome to the discussion for Leonard Garder's 1969 novel Fat City, and its portrayal of the dead-end world of amateur boxing in Stockton, CA. I suspect Book Club readers, like much of the rest of the country, may not have semipro boxing foremost in their minds at this moment, so this chat may end on the early side. But sans further ado. . . .

Crofton, Md.: Hi Chris. Thanks for the March choice of "Fat City." I remember how much I enjoyed the John Huston-Stacy Keach movie. This is a masterpiece on the order of say Jean Stafford's Mountain Lion. My question is why did Gardner end the book with Ernie and
not Billy Tully? These are characters whom you get to know pretty quickly.

Chris Lehmann: Hi, and thanks for the note. I think Gardner ends the book with Ernie mainly because he's the younger character, still groping to find something resembling a workable destiny. That's why, even though I agree he's not as well drawn as Tully is, the ending is so effective: He's just come off a qualified success in his Salt Lake City bout, only to be surrounded by a gaggle of melancholy old men loitering in a hotel lobby. I think Gardner means to suggest that this is where Ernie's destiny finally lays. . . .

Lenexa, Kan.: Mr. Lehmann: Enjoyed the novel and rewatched the film. I esp. like the verisimilitude of it all: the authentic dialogue and events--the smashed hopes of the trip to Monterey and the drive back, the Stockton-like milieu angst, the tavern-melancholia (Alan Furst says the Russians have a word for it), the human-condition pain accompanying Nietzsche's insight that "Underneath everyone must know he's in this world only once."

Part of what makes "Fat City" so satisfying is Gardner showing how the universals apply to all (ne'er-do-wells and Nobelists alike): the inescapable sovereignty of ethics (still understood today about as well as gravity was before Newton/Einstein), the haunting need to realize one's potential, the everyman's angst perhaps best reflected in the selection you quoted: "he should have known all along he was nothing..." Your thoughts? Thanks.

Chris Lehmann: Hi Lenexa (and please, it's Chris). Yes, I think the depiction of Stockton is one of the many strengths of the novel. It's something of a reviewing cliche to say that the physical environment of a novel often serves as a chracter in its own right, but it applies with special force to Fat City, where Stockton is both a haunting, menacing presence (wonderfully evoked in the seen where Ernie is running beyond its borders, only to come up short at a deadend, which, to mix genres, reminded me of the ending of the great new wave Truffaut movie, The 400 Blows).

I also emphatically second your judgment re. Gardner's ability to sound universal themes in the humblest of characters. One reason I like this book so much is that it's one of the only persuasive recent depictions of the world of manual labor, and the way that people trapped in that world respond to it. It never condescends to or romanticizes such characters, as so many self-styled "proletarian" novels do. And, particularly in the character of Billy, it shows the full force of the frustration and angst that come with even the short fall from the lowest rung of a small-town ladder. We all have some notional awareness of what such trials might be like, but Gardner makes you see, feel, hear and smell that sort of desperation--while studiously keeping mindful of his characters' ultimate dignity.

Washington, D.C.: What other books in the same genre would you recommend?

Chris Lehmann: It's hard to answer that, for the simple reason that I'm not sure what genre Fat City falls into exactly. If you're looking for realist depictions of the working world of the less-than-skilled laborer, books like John Fante's Ask the Dust or Edward Dahlberg's Bottom Dogs or Nelson Algren's A Walk on the Wild Side all are creditable examples, even though they'e all more than 60 years old. It's an interesting feature of much contemporary writing that you don't see many characters like Billy and Ernie in many novels published today--and certainly not as sympathetically rendered as they are in Gardner's hands.

If, on the other hand, you think of Fat City as a boxing novel, I'm not a good person to ask. I know a lot of writers do nonfiction work on the sport that's supposed to be good, eg. David Remnick on Ali, Harry Crewes and even Joyce Carol Oates on boxing. But I don't know that work firsthand.

Finally, if you think of Fat City as somewhat hardboiled California regional fiction (the 1996 reissue is indeed part of the University of Claifornia Press's "california Fiction" series), there's an abundance of stuff that you can read as sort of distant cousins to Gardner's fictional world--including Nathaniel West's Day of the Locust, Jim Thompson's and David Goodis's hardboiled noir work, Ross Macdonald's Lew Archer books. All those books, while not always directly addressing Gardner's upstate world of manual labor, rites of manhood passage and ambient desperation, do address the storied tragic dimensions of life in the Golden State.

Lenexa, Kan.: Nice response. Thanks. Did you like the Earl character -- his kind, quiet love and understanding of Oma? (Susan Tyrell received an Oscar nom, didn't she?) Sinatra used to tell he asked his dad once how he'd managed to put up with Dolly all those years. Frank's dad told him, "Simple. I don't talk and I don't listen."

Also, any thoughts on Tully's experience of his heartbreak for his wife (Lynn) being subsumed later by his heartbreak for Oma? I've seen the young "Chris" Lehmann introduce people on C-SPAN2. You seem like a tall, nice-looking chap. Ever have your heart broken? If more than once, did it subsume?

Chris Lehmann: Yes, I thought Earl was a very nicely drawn (if taciturn)soul, who may well be better than Oma deserves. (And yes, if memory serves, Tyrell did get an Oscar nomination for her magnificent--IMHO--portrayal of Oma in the movie. Maybe if she got a nose job, she would have won. . . .) Another strong, (alregly) silent and saintly type in the book is Ruben Luna, the Lido Gym trainer who takes Billy in and tries, unsuccessfully to get his career back on its feet. Perhaps Gardner's suggesting that such characters embody some workable accommodation with the fatalaties of Stockton--though of course Luna is pretty much as miserable as Billy, he also can live vicariously through the victories of his fighters.

As to Billy's heartbreak (and my own), i suspect Billy, like many of us, experiences love as something of a traction beam that pulls many of life's hope in its train; when it's broken, there's a seemingly infinite regress of collapse. (And conversely, when it takes hold it supplants everything--which would explain why Billy becomes so taken with Oma so suddenly after mooning so long after his first wife.) I think love, in other words, is one of the only hopeful things that Billy can still imagine, which is why he holds to it--or at least to his illusions of it--so tenaciously.

As for my own track record in such matters, well of course I have had my heart broken, repeatedly. Subsuming is a more complicated matter--though I can report that, unlike in many of the novels I like, this realm of life has worked out very happily for me; I am three years married to a charming, delightful and whipsmart woman whom I utterly do not deserve. A shout out to Ana, if she's looking in. . . .

Chris Lehmann: Well, it looks like we're out of questions, so I'll be closing up cybershop a bit early. Thanks for writing in, and I hope that when next we meet to discuss a book world affairs will neither be so fraught nor so consuming.