Leonard Gardner’s Fat City illuminates the allure of the impossible California dream. Ernie Munger and Billy Tully are two middling but successful boxers in Stockton in the late 1950s. At 18 years old, Munger is a promising up-and-comer, “a natural athlete.” At almost 30, Tully is a drunk has-been whose “life seemed near its end.” Neither is satisfied. Neither is going to be a champion. Fat City is about the long, slow sigh of insignificance and the tension of replacement.
This article appears in Issue 31 of Alta Journal.
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Gardner writes with affection for his native Stockton, setting the fighters’ tale against the “stunted skyline…a city of eighty thousand surrounded by the sloughs, rivers and fertile fields of the San Joaquin River delta,” where many good boxers have failed to become great. Both Munger and Tully find themselves trying to make a buck as agricultural day laborers. Tully holes up at the on-the-nose Hotel Coma. Content only to chase, never to possess, both sour on girls who come into their lives bringing expectations and obligations.
Gardner brings us into a sad, squat town and fields where dreams go to die: “In the reeking entrances of vacant storefronts, men in overcoats, sitting on flattened cartons, looked out with rheumy eyes.” Of course, Tully drinks away his chances of a comeback. Of course, Munger is tied down too young and doesn’t reach his full potential. Gardner’s deft sentences reveal the mark that the dream leaves. This is a California where “catastrophes seemed to whisper just beyond hearing.”•
Heather Scott Partington is a writer, teacher, and book critic. She is a regular contributor to Alta Journal and a board member of the National Book Critics Circle, where she serves as fiction chair. Her writing has appeared in publications such as the New York Times Book Review, the Washington Post, USA Today, the Los Angeles Times, and the San Francisco Chronicle. She lives in Elk Grove, California.
