pickA fantastic boxing novel that's not really about boxing at all. A funny and often sad portrait of poverty, dashed hopes, self-sabotage, and ennui born of the feeling that your best years have passed you by before they ever even really began. This is one of those tiny, near-perfect books, and if not for the abrupt, seemingly arbitrary ending this would be a five-star pick for me.
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1. The usual balance of work, cleaning, school events, and trying to carve out some time to write.
2. That's a good question. I used to do it seemingly naturally, and now I can barely do it at all.
3. Stockton, CA in the late 1950s.
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He lived in the Hotel Coma - named perhaps for some founder of the town, some California explorer or pioneer, or for some long-deceased Italian immigrant who founded only the hotel itself.
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1. Bluebeard (Kurt Vonnegut)
2. Fat City (Leonard Gardner)
Tag @RaeLovesToRead @MegaWhoppingCosmicBookwyrm @CBee @dabbe @BarbaraBB
pickEasily one of my top 10 favorite books which Huston made into one of my top 10 movies. To refer to it as a book about boxing is to sell it short. It‘s about intersecting lives and how we occupy space with people at one time and then head out along our path. It‘s about brilliant dreams and our drab realities. It‘s a quick, concentrated, satisfying read.
pickGardner's debut follows Billy Tully, a former boxer who never made it, & Ernie Munger, an up and coming athlete with a lot of promise. While the novel is ostensibly about two characters, as Munger is a stand in for Tully's past, it is essentially one biography. Although the two characters are athletes, Gardner's focus is frequently on the various menial, mostly degrading, jobs they have to endure to make ends meet. Raging Bull by Steinbeck.
"'Manny Chaves,' he whispered, 'had the clearest piss of any man I ever seen. He'd take a specimen and the piss in that bottle would be just as clean and pure as fresh drinking water'" (34). There's a reason we all love Gardner's dialogue. Pic: John Huston on the set of Fat City (1972).
Fat City | 
