A beautiful, admirably plainspoken novel about two boxers whose paths cross in the shabby California town of Stockton in the late 1960s. Both men want more from life than they've been allotted, and both will be disappointed. But the telling of this disappointment is heartbreaking, as is the fact that Gardner never wrote another book.
—Patrick deWitt, The Week
Sometimes, somehow, someone gets it right. The reissue of Fat City, Leonard Gardner’s pitch-perfect account of boxing, blue-collar bewilderment and the battle of the sexes, is cause for celebration, and reflection.
—Paul Wilner, San Francisco Chronicle
A slim, taut book that has earned its status as a classic by dint of its immaculate, evocative prose, a compassionate but dour view of the human condition, and the absolute credibility of its depiction of the sport of the busted beaks...Though Fat City was written long before cellphones or the Internet, its human apparatus is state of the art. With this new edition, new generations of readers and writers will discover it, learn from it, and find both wincing pain and deep pleasure. Gardner’s achievement lives on precisely because Fat City is not depressing. The tale is dark, but it is charged with energy. It is seductive, engaging, and lit, despite the odds, by a vitality that is in itself a form of hope. We come away from it burnt clean.
—Katherine Dunn, Slate
A meditation on rugged beauty and abject degradation.
—Sam McManis, The Sacramento Bee
In his pity and art Gardner moves beyond race, beyond guilt and punishment, as Twain and Melville did, into a tragic forgiveness. I have seldom read a novel as beautiful and individual as this one.
—Ross Macdonald
Set in the bars, buses, gyms, and transit hotels of gritty, fifties’ era Stockton, California, Fat City is a perfect document, mapped and studied, the dialogue memorized, by generations of writers. The well-known film (written by Gardner for John Huston), only approaches the spare timelessness of Gardner’s prose.
—Jayne Anne Phillips
Gardner has got it exactly right… but he has done more than just get it down, he has made it a metaphor for the joyless in heart.
—Joan Didion
Really a superior performance… Gardner takes us into the bitter fancies of two professional prizefighters… the first is a has-been, the second is learning to lose. A third character, their manager, links the pair in defeat and frustration… Gardner strips them of everything except the most important thing: their singularity… of such a seemingly small gift is dignity born and success measured.
—Newsweek
Gardner…writes like a sad poet…free of clichés and sentimentality… a beautifully written book.
—Brian Greene, The Life Sentence
Gardner has laid claim to a locale that others have explored, but seldom with such accuracy and control… in a tone that is both detached and lyrical. The triumph of the book is its action. Running, fighting, loving, weeding, harvesting, these men stay in motion in order not to be doomed. So powerfully does Gardner record their actions that we recall their lives, not their defeats.
—The New York Times Book Review
Gardner’s book should be taken slowly. The chapters are constructed with great care, worked, polished and fitted like precision parts in a beautiful engine. There is a comic chapter on the physical attributes of boxers which could easily be overlooked, three pages as delicate and funny as the calmer Twain. Chapter Four, a short section ending a magnificent description of a boxer doing roadwork, withstands the closest scrutiny.
—Frank Conroy, Life
The stories of Ernie Munger, a young fighter with frail but nevertheless burning hopes, and Billy Tully, an older pug with bad luck in and out of the ring, parallel one another through the book. Though the two men hardly meet, the tale blends the perspective on them until they seem to chart a single life of missteps and baffled love, Ernie its youth and Tully its future. I wanted to write a book like that.
—Denis Johnson, Salon
Leonard Gardner wrote Fat City as a moody elegy to the wayward dreamers who fight in tank-town arenas, then retreat to flophouses and shotgun weddings, day labor and rotgut drinking binges.
—John Schulian, Los Angeles Times
[Fat City is] about everything that goes into why you would get into a ring and box.
—Backlisted Podcast
