PARTISAN REVIEW
567
old-fashioned naturalism that lacks energy, seemingly has no place
to
go. Like the derelict fighters and fruitpickers of Stockton, California that
he
writes about, he would no doubt deny that there is any place to go.
There is a short haunting chapter in
Fat City in
which the men without
jobs for the day are moved out of the town square while tree surgeons
come
in
and cut down every blighted tree, leaving the homeless leftover
men out
in
the glare of the sun. The passage has a powerful
impact
and
metaphoric invention that Gardner denies in most of the novel leaving
us
with
a tight deterministic story reminiscent of the
thirties
and strongly
at odds
with
his splendid style. This oblique
description
of a young
fighter's mother could never have been written by Steinbeck:
Short, impeded by her flesh, spreading and sagging from fifty
years of gravity, hotcakes and pies, she showed on her face an al–
most constant expectation of mistake and mishap. Earlier in his life
he had countered her worried
curiosity
with shouts of defiance. Now
he eluded it
with shifting
eyes, shrugs and a completely unanimated
face. After
his
first day at the Lido Gym he had taken a bottle of
liquid
make-up from the accumulation on her dressing table, and
with it he hid his bruises from her as he and his sister, who had
recently married with no advance warning, had long ago learned
to conceal their private lives. As he grew older he had begun to
feel that it was no longer
his
father but he whom she held respon–
sible for a life that seemed to him perfectly natural for a mother.
"Why don't you leave if you don't like it," he said to her one day
in answer to a complaint encompassing the house, his father, his
sister, himself, the entire town; and then her stricken face had
filled him with anguish not only for what he had said but for the
inconsiderate act of existing.
The revelation is beautiful and precise: it seems obvious that Leonard
Gardner's first novel shows great strength, a technical accomplishment
that would be first-rate
if
he would allow himself the larger strokes of
some controlling and meaningful ideas.
Another recent novel which fails to exist outside of its own limited
circumstance is
Going Down
by David Markson, but unlike
Fat City
it is an outrageously empty book written in a series of pretentious
styles - fake Faulkner, fake Hemingway, fake Markson.
It
is about a
crowd of dreary aging dropouts who fortunately for the good old
U.S.A. all go to Mexico to carry on their silly lives which cannot pos–
sibly have any meaning for us.
Going Down
(hopefully the lending
libraries will think it means traveling South of the border) is about a
menage
a
trois,
two eager women and a diffident stud, who climactically
get themselves into positions too impossible even for the dreamlike terms
