Fat City

As I examine the unpacked books I have brought back to Las Vegas from my storage locker in L.A., I’m pleased to note that most of my prized editions made the cut. Once a day I go through the shelves of books to examine what treasures I unearthed; this evening the true find was a 1969 Third Printing edition of Leonard Gardner’s powerful novel Fat City.

I hate to reduce Gardner to the level of one-hit-wonder novelist but, well, that’s what he is; he hasn’t produced another novel since this California classic. The opening page is evocative enough to cement his writing as first-rate:

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He lived in the Hotel Coma — named perhaps for some founder of the town, some California explorer or pioneer, or for some long-deceased Italian immigrant who founded only the hotel itself. Whoever it commemorated, the hotel was a poor monument, and Billy Tully had no intention of staying on. His clean laundry he continued to put back in his suitcase on the dresser, ready to be hurried away to better lodgings. He had lived in five hotels in the year and a half since his wife left him. From his window he looked out on the stunted skyline of Stockton — a city of eighty thousand surrounded by the sloughs, rivers and fertile fields of the San Joaquin River delta — a view of business buildings, church spires, chimmneys, water towers, gas tanks and the low roofs of residences rising among leafless trees between absolutely flat streets. Along the sidewalk under his window, men passed between bars and liquor stores, cafes, secondhand stores and walk-up hotels. Pigeons the color of the street pecked in the gutters, flew between buildings, marched along ledges and cooed on Tully’s sill. His room was high and narrow. Smudges from oily heads darkened the wallpaper between the metal rods of his bed. His shade was tattered, his light bulb dim, and his neighbors all seemed to have lung trouble.