Word: gardners
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Gardner's characters are not, however, the media-numbed zombies whose image bourgeois radicals never cease to invoke. They are men and women whose strengths are overcome by their yearning for acceptance, whose main fear is that they'll end up picking tomatoes for a hard-driving foreman, "being swept in among those countless lives lost hour by captive hour scratching at the miserable earth." Billy Tully and Ernie Munger are also far from the images of corrupt heavyweights fostered by Hollywood liberals like Abe Polonsky or Robert Rossen, who use boxing as an easy target-its rottenness symbolizing...
...Woodstock Nation. It is simply a novel about two impoverished white boxers whose lives touch only for an instant, but whose careers frighteningly parallel each other. By remaining true to his California milieu, by neither moralizing about his characters' profession or condescending to their way of life, Gardner lays bare some ugly truths about an America which closes off possibilities for tragedy or greatness-a society which neglects the mass of its individuals, leaving them to stumble through life in a comatose state, rarely realizing life's potential, rarely realizing its existence...
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...
...considerable achievement, Gardner's book does not seem a whole creation. In the manner of a hard-boiled thirties' novelist like Horace McCoy, Gardner makes his narrative voice a cruelly objective one, not committing himself to a place in the narrative, intent only on mirroring the mind of the character at hand. This makes for some instances of stunning understatement, particularly in the last pages; a still-innocent Ernie Munger hitches a ride with two might-be lesbians who stridently torment each other and use the naive Munger as a pawn in their game, personifying on a car seat...
...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...