Word: fats
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...lived near the municipal picnic area in Fairbanks, Alaska, where I was camping for a time this summer. Patty's sister Yvonne is 14; she has a bullet necklace too, and a jacket with all her National Rifle Association marksmanship patches on it. Yvonne is fat, homely, and in a junior high school way, very feminine. She wants to be the first woman fighter-pilot in Vietnam, and after that, to be a General. Yvonne can hit forty-seven out of fifty bulls-eyes from fifty feet with her 22. She talks about running away from home if her boyfriend...
...intuitive neurasthenic heroine is really a self-inquisitioner who pares away one after another of life's enigmas without revealing a single motive for her crime. The plaints she registers against the cousin-housekeeper are that she was silent, efficient, clean, ate and slept well, and "was too fat for the house." This is rather like the killer in Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart, who murdered his victim because he could not stand his clouded blue eye. With power and wonder, both Poe and Duras show us that an act may be most distinctively human and lifelike...
Ronald Neame's direction plods along like your fat Uncle Harry in a snow drift, and includes such boggling episodes as Scrooge's descent into Hell (which looks to have been inspired by the astronauts' descent toward Jupiter in 2001). The script, music and lyrics are by Leslie Bricusse, whose previous contributions include Dr. Dolittle and Goodbye, Mr. Chips. After this fiasco, Bricusse should become as forgettable as the music he writes. The chorus of one of his tunes from Scrooge runs something like "Thank you very much, thank you very much. Thank you very, very, very...
These lines of character development, of growth not only foreshadowed but violently curtailed by external pressure, are what Fat City is about. In a series of sharply-etched vignettes, Gardner captures not only the spirit of his characters but the atmosphere stifling them: the turgid California sun beating down on the backs of sweating laborers, greasy blackness pervading a gas station lube room, ammonia and blood coating the floors of locker room and arena...
...depth of Gardner's observations, however, and the acuteness of his understanding demand something more from him. With material as potent as Fat City's, an author keeping his own sense of bitter outrage under wraps relinquishes his right to poetry. One keeps hoping that Gardner will let himself go, will hurl himself into his work as Agee did in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, will see himself in his characters' plight, and implicate his readers in a necessary moral rededication. This doesn't happen. But Gardner's first remains a fine and sensitive novel, and a courageous...