Fat City

Leonard Garnder's 1969 novel about small-time boxers in Stockton, California, has achieved the status of a classic. That would not have happened to a realistic account, a la Zola, of fruit-pickers and barflies. Garnder instead manages to intensify the characters' entirely natural dialogue into, at times, epigrams. He takes a cast of strivers on the low and middle rungs of a bleak place and imbues them with the sunniest optimism imaginable. The boxing trainer Ruben Luna might stand for all of them when he admits to anxiety about his fighters, who mostly lose or quit, but never despair. Gardner does not sentimentalize or condescend in this book full of life, hope, and heartbreak. John Huston's 1972 film of the novel, also written by Gardner, is equally excellent.