The Softer They Fall

FAT CITY by Leonard Gardner. 183 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $5.50.

Characters in boxing fiction rarely graduate beyond caricature. The manager is an insensitive swine; for a month's supply of subway tokens he would send a fighter up against a mountain slide. The fighter, swimming up from economic backwaters, is a supreme dolt and an exploited object of surface pity. Then comes the trainer, faithful as a mutt. Behind them all sits the omnipotent syndicate, whose generals eat pheasant under glass and meticulously avoid the sauce stains.

Such figures, no doubt once true enough, are now quite dated. Today's manager is a beaverish scuffler who stays in boxing only because it is the life he knows. The fighter often tells the manager what to do. He may still be chased into the ring by the pinch of poverty and some inner reach toward identity, but he usually does not accept pain and futility for long. If he does stay in and doesn't make it, as Leonard Gardner shows in this moving and perceptive first novel, he will find the modern fight scene, though anything but richly dramatic, every bit as cruel and lonely as ever.

Unlike the army of Hemingway romanticists who cultivate fighters to show off their feel for the sport, Gardner has a real understanding of the ring and the nameless people who are scarred by it. With a poetic touch and dry swift phrasing, he has created a remarkable portrait of a marginal, subterranean world in which two fighters and a manager occupy numbing neutral corners in the struggle for life.

The place is Stockton, Calif., a city filled with a litter of lost people, most of whom pile on urine-smelling buses each morning and head for the onion, peach or walnut fields for a killing day on skinny wages. Gardner's three characters are grafted to this landscape. An aging (29) lightweight, lush and former local contender, Billy Tully grieves over his split with his wife, who occupies his flophouse dreams and gives him a convenient excuse for not fighting. Then one day, finding himself in a Y.M.C.A. gym, he meets Ernie Munger, an 18-year-old would-be welterweight and sends him to his own long-suffering ex-manager, Ruben Luna. This should be some sort of beginning. But the three are going precisely no place. Tully dries out for one more fight. He wins--but finds his victory meaningless. He wanders the streets realizing that he is a bum. The deprivation of his life is somehow symbolized by the memory of sleeping in a park with other derelicts while city workmen cut down the trees that have provided them with protective shade.

Marks of Hell. Gardner's fight talk is brilliantly accurate. The true pathos of fighting as a subsistence trade, he shows, comes not from scheming and exploitation but from the slow corruption of courage and spirit. "Fat City," as fighters sometimes call success in boxing, is bankrupt. The long sleek cars, the sweet shock of public recognition, the feel of silk on skin is, for most fighters, pure celluloid fantasy. Their daily rounds are marked instead by steady pain and a sameness that is itself the mark of most hells.

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