books:
by Thomas Blues
The dust jacket blurbs predictably agree that Leonard Gardner's first novel is a fine book; "a metaphor for the joyless in heart," says one famous name. But the trouble is that this story about boxers who are losers because they cannot convince themselves that violence justifies their lives never fully achieves metaphor, never becomes an expression of the quality of a life we share. That is a shame, because Gardner has presented a world of unglamorized undeodorized, not sterile, violence, a potential analysis of the food our society feeds upon.
His two central characters are future-less boxers who fight not so much to become ring champions but in response to the drabness of their married lives. Billy Tully and Ernie Munger are ring failures precisely because their fighting spirit is dependent upon their domestic relations. Bitty Tully marries the beautiful carhop attracted to his success in the ring, but when he begins to lose his wife becomes indifferent to him: "he had looked to his wife for some indefinable endorsement, some solicitous comprehension of the pain and sacrifice he felt he endured for her sake, some always withheld recognition of the rites of virility." He consequently loses the desire to fight. At thirty Tully has become a full-time wino and sometime field hand. His fate is an adumbration of Ernie Munger's, the young would-be boxer Billy discovers at the YMCA. Munger, trapped into marriage with a girl he decides to love after she becomes pregnant, fears that "after marriage death was the next major event." He fights in order to justify his marriage, and after winning a pre-lim bout in Salt Lake City "he wanted to return to Fay, and to his infant son, for whom, until this moment, he had not yet been able to feel any love. Now he believed it was for them he had come all this way and fought."
What constitutes the most attractive quality of FAT CITY is perhaps the cause of the novel's failure to transcend its immediate context, in which setting and character are almost undifferentiated. The environment is the blighted world of Stockton, California - the rancid gyms, arenas, gin mills, flophouses, bus depots, exhaust fumes. The atmosphere has taken over the characters so completely that not only do they not rebel against it -hope for something better, a way out -they are barely conscious of it. After laboring in the hot fields through a long morning, Tully sits under a tree to eat his lunch, "among a humming profusion of
green-glinting flies whose source of delight, he noticed now, lay directly beside him. He had. thought the odor was corning from his lunch." With brutal yet not unsympathetic understatement Gardner catches the futility of Ernie Munger's seduction of his future wife in the steamy front seat of a car parked on the muddy, rain-sloshed banks of the Calaveras River. After the contortions, the clothes-hauling, the rubberized contact, Ernie "realized he had experienced the ultimate in pleasure."
In Tully and Munger imagination has never been born. Their manager, himself a married man who is happy only in the reeking gymnasium trying to believe that his stable of nags is fitted with stallions, unwittingly pronounces their epitaph: "they had succumbed," he thinks, "to whatever in them was weakest, and often it was nothing he could even define. They lost when they should have won and they drifted away." Their weakness is then* imaginative dullness, a sin for which they cannot be blamed, combined with their physical knowledge of the reality of violence. They sense that hitting or getting hit changes nothing, that the essential quality of their lives remains the same, that the emptiness does not fill in. And somehow FAT CITY should have given the reader to believe in Ernie Munger and Bitty Tully as human beings different from him only in that they have unknowing discovered that violence cannot change the quality of the life that seeks to justify existence by it.
We know that America a a violent nation, and we like to believe that the violence is down there in the ghettoes, in motorcycle gangs, in the hearts of psychopaths and assassins. We abhor it, take karate lessons, hide pistols in the dresser drawers, lock all the doors and windows to keep the muggers in the streets where they belong, then turn on the television sets to invite the killers in. The deep horror of the violent strain in American life is not merely our fascination with it, but our insistence on domesticating it so that we can enjoy it in our own homes. We watch the bloodless murders and painless muggings. In slow-motion instant replay the linebacker cripples the quarterback.
We look through the very gunsights and stand at the very window from which the ghostly Oswald shot the President. A scholarly rifle expert holds the gun, but all America can vicariously pull the trigger when the stand-in car and dummy Kennedy engage the cross-hairs. TV violence is painless, unreal; it has to be so
HYPNOSIS
ARCHIE L. LEVELL---CONSULTANT
for control of:   smoking, weight, insomnia,
study habits, fears,  sleep, nail biting ,
stuttering, drinking,  relaxation, habit control,
tensions dial 254-3214 or 255-1503
the audience can cooperate with the illusion that violence somehow fills the emptiness of its life. Gardner's novel about violence is honest because he has seen the uses men make of it and the utter futility of the effort. But he has not managed to reveal that the weakness in Tully and Munger is shared by an entire
Fat City
society. His prose effectively evokes, but at the same time isolates the ruined world his people move around in. In so sharply delineating this world Gardner also isolates it, without metamorphosizing it into metaphor, into a world that he should not have allowed us to believe is other than our own.
Saturday Night, College Town, South, Young Fellow Not Much Style, Waits for Score, in Earmuffs
He not Black. He no Maoist. He no parachutist. He no filmmaker. He got no Porsche.
College town hard on Who Mamma make live in dorm And take taxi after twelve, Commies and perverts.
But he trying: street corner cool, Hands deep in pockets, Smokes big cigar in earmuffs.
Here come tight chinoes and pointy-toed shoes!
Here come bell-bottoms and square-toed shoes!
Just what he think, you reckon?
Chicks take off muffs to kiss ear?
He got vocabulary cards in pocket, this fellow.
Real fancy town think him
Andy Warhol in dis-guise,
Strom Thurmond in dis-guise,
Second convolution nouveau no-suckv sex dealer,
Sodomist smoking away smell of sheep shit.
But not here:
This Boone Country.
This Wildcat Country.
Our coach win game
For boys in Vietnam.
Then score comes, score of game
From round mouth of girl comes,
And muff smile,
He suck big cigar and blow
Both sides big smokey man smile,
For score of game good, he happy,
Team win, he awful happy,
Beat meat in dorm room happy now,
Whole town happy, horns toot,
Coach hero, whole town
Go home beat meat happy now!
James Baker Hall
IIIIIIIUIUIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIHUWHUI
mtUUIttHIUIMMItHlrHHtUI.....IHtllltim
I BURKE'S CLEANERS
| 116 WEST MAXWELL ST.
Â¥     (formerly Crolleys)
DEC. SWEATER MONTH
39£ each | SHIRTS 25£ each, folded or on hangers §
The Afro Boutique
4th and Race Streets Lexington, Kentucky 40508
Wholesale and Retail Clothier
African Imports Men and Women Cosmetics Records
Afriean Clothing is on sale at the Afro Boutique as well as clothing worn by the participants in the Miss Black Lexington Pageant. The two seamstresses are employed by the store.
First of Its Kind in the Bluegrass " 345 Race Street
Hours: 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. " Phone 255-1503
Visit The Record Shack " 572 Georgetown Street
Features " Records " Tapes " Cosmetics " Jewelry and Record Accessories.
Murray (Bud) Grevious and Archie (La) Levelle admire a sculptured bust.   Grevious and Levelle are co-owners and incorporators of L'Afrique Enterprises, Inc. They operate the Afro Boutique and the Record Shack.
blue-tail fly
IS