Word: fats
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...FAT CITY, by Leonard Gardner. A brilliant exception to the general rule that boxing fiction seldom graduates beyond caricature, this first novel convincingly explores the limbo lives of three men in a shoddy California town, who cling to the ring and get nowhere...
...green hospital paint, was pretty bare except for the door that led onto the ward, an old Gauguin print, and halfway down the length of the ward, the TV. I glanced up and down the long narrow room and noticed a few middle-aged men, either skinny or fat in cheap untucked cotton shirts and chinos. Mostly they were sitting in couches or chairs and sleeping or staring at the TV. I took a seat...
...stronghold in Turin, Italy. Mr. Bridger finds it a simply wizard idea and puts up expense money. Alas, Charlie's elephantine ambitions arise from a gnat-sized intellect. His gang is so crooked that none of them can drive straight. They wreck cars, argue with each other, assault fat ladies on the Turin buses and infuriate the Mafia by treading on its turf. Throughout, Charlie's eyes remain at half-mast; his lassitude finally lulls the crooks, the polizia-and the audience. Caine and Coward play a splendid game of verbal tennis, but by the final reel...
...FAT CITY by Leonard Gardner. 183 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux...
Marks of Hell. Gardner's fight talk is brilliantly accurate. The true pathos of fighting as a subsistence trade, he shows, comes not from scheming and exploitation but from the slow corruption of courage and spirit. "Fat City," as fighters sometimes call success in boxing, is bankrupt. The long sleek cars, the sweet shock of public recognition, the feel of silk on skin is, for most fighters, pure celluloid fantasy. Their daily rounds are marked instead by steady pain and a sameness that is itself the mark of most hells...