Word: munger
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Film: "Union Maids," startling account of women organizing in the thirties. Munger Living Room...
...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 the festering passions of a nation. Tully and Munger are not fall guys for reformists, but men of substance, with more than...
Tully, the older of the fighting pair, fights twice in the course of the novel, first with Munger in a YMCA gym and then with a shrewd Mexican before a complacent chicano crowd. Between thesetwo smallest of small-time bouts, he reflects on his past and present rootlessness, and satisfies his need for some kind of transcendent reality by reading pulp movie-fan magazines. The variety of his life is the variety of fleabag hotels the city of Stockton offers him. Drinking, desperately trying to love a neurotic lush, flashing back to times when he could have been a real...
When Billy spars a few rounds with Ernie in the book's opening scene, the boy feels honored that he has "joined the company of men." In another age, Munger might have been a typical American golden boy, son of a tire recapper and a tireless, depleted mother, himself a gas station attendant, possessed of a muscled torso and a solemn, black-haired girlfriend (later wife) who holds back her sex until he confesses his love. But in 1969, cruising with fellow loafers past drive-ins and hamburger stands, boxing a few stumblebums for the cash it pays, Ernie...
...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 a world without charity...