Fat City

I was immediately drawn into this slim book about small-time boxers in Stockton, California, trying to find some measure of respect. The sentences are terse and beautiful and contain all the desperation and struggle of small lives lived in obscure places.

Billy Tully, an older boxer, tries to restart his flailing boxing career as the novice boxer Ernie Munger is just beginning. Doubt, alcoholism, failure, rejection, hopelessness, and disintegration beset the path of both main characters, and they may share parallel fates.

There should be more books with characters like this because, as Thoreau noted, most men do “lead quiet… show more.

I first picked up this novel the year I started boxing. It follows the rough lives of Billy Tully and Ernie Munger, two boxers living in separate but parallel worlds—Tully an aging boxer fooled into thinking he can relive a few more glory days and Munger figuring out the hard lessons of what it means to lose. I love how this novel amplifies people eking out difficult lives who spend most of their time in dive bars, cheap motels, and seedy parts of town engaging with dubious, colorful characters. The writing is sparse, direct, sad, and unsentimental. Here Gardner is… show more.

Denis Johnson loved and studied this novel so much that he had to swear it off lest it give him a complex about his own writing. I totally relate. Spare and beautiful, full of wistful melancholy, Gardner’s tale about a friendship between two boxers, one on the way up, one on the way down, but both of them headed toward the same dead-end future, perfectly captures the California bleakness that I’ve also encountered when reading two other favorites, Joan Didion and Raymond Chandler.