566
MAUREEN HOWARD
boy is not an afterlife, but a gesture in words of love, of a momentary
transcendence that belies the damned nature of humanity. Lieutenant
Catto knows that he has fashioned his own destiny more than most men
and must live with the scaled down unromantic vision.
On the other hand, General Hooker who orders the execution
is
straight from the familiar high romance of the military:
His manner . . . as well as his words, told me that his mind was
oppressed with the thought that Lincoln's humanity had thwart–
ed his career; that if the general had been permitted to shoot de–
serters and sleeping sentries when he had the Army of the Potomac,
he would have won the war and become a national hero, instead
of slipping down the ladder.... In some way it is a relief to him
to sacrifice this boy.
Bear in mind that the romantic incumbent in the White House saw the
movie
Patton
for the second time the night before he decided to go into
Cambodia. A frightening fact - and equally frightening is the fact that
Stephen Becker's
When the War
is
Over
is the sort of modulated book
that will go virtually unnoticed in these strident times.
It
would make
a wonderful movie, not questionably ironic like
Patton,
but a rich, mov–
ing film like Kubrick's
Paths of Glory
which it strongly resembles.
The writing in Leonard Gardner's
Fat City
is excellent but the
book never gets beyond its own sphere. Whatever similarities there are
between the difficult, defeating world of the small time prizefighter and
some larger world are never made available.
Fat City
has the moving
detail and accuracy of Dreiser without the scope. Reuben, the fight
manager, cynical, passive, pretty much defines the negative action of
the novel:
When Tully wanted to fight again. Reuben believed he would
come back to the gym. Until he did, he could only wait. But he
did not hope. He had given up on him once already and been dis–
appointed by too many others. As if in rebellion against his influence,
they had succumbed 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. Over the years he would see one
around town. A few he read about in the newspaper - some fight–
ing in other towns for other managers, one killed on a motorcycle,
one murdered in New Orleans. They were all so vulnerable, their
duration so desperately brief, that all he could do was go on from
one to another
in
quest of that youth who had all that the others
lacked.
Gardner's novel is a strange combination of brilliant style and an
