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189 pp., 95c.

WHEN TWAIN, or Norris, or Bret Harte wrote of California's San Joaquin Valley, they wrote of burgeoning industry and pioneer ranchers: of a group of men who strove ruthlessly to throttle natural resources for their own profit. In Fat City, Leonard Gardner speaks only of status and decay, and a society where choices made by men are arbitrary and fruitless.

Unlike much recent American fiction, Fat City is neither a foil for intellectual exegesis, nor a didactic object lesson for humane politicos or members of the Woodstock Nation. It is simply a novel about two impoverished white boxers whose lives touch only for an instant, but whose careers frighteningly parallel each other. By remaining true to his California milieu, by neither moralizing about his characters' profession or condescending to their way of life, Gardner lays bare some ugly truths about an America which closes off possibilities for tragedy or greatness-a society which neglects the mass of its individuals, leaving them to stumble through life in a comatose state, rarely realizing life's potential, rarely realizing its existence.

Gardner's characters are not, however, the media-numbed zombies whose image bourgeois radicals never cease to invoke. They are men and women whose strengths are overcome by their yearning for acceptance, whose main fear is that they'll end up picking tomatoes for a hard-driving foreman, "being swept in among those countless lives lost hour by captive hour scratching at the miserable earth." Billy Tully and Ernie Munger are also far from the images of corrupt heavyweights fostered by Hollywood liberals like Abe Polonsky or Robert Rossen, who use boxing as an easy target-its rottenness symbolizing the festering passions of a nation. Tully and Munger are not fall guys for reformists, but men of substance, with more than a bit of sensitivity. They are even aware of their limits, perhaps too keenly: real pain comes when each realizes that the world of the ring, bounded by managers Luna and Solis, offers only ten or fifteen rounds of direct, virile action. Out of the ropes, both fighters and managers stride pitifully to find meaning and solace in love or family security, their marriages or affairs too often turning into the traditional Frankie-and-Johnny relationship of a tough mack and a hysterically "respectable" woman.

Tully, the older of the fighting pair, fights twice in the course of the novel, first with Munger in a YMCA gym and then with a shrewd Mexican before a complacent chicano crowd. Between thesetwo smallest of small-time bouts, he reflects on his past and present rootlessness, and satisfies his need for some kind of transcendent reality by reading pulp movie-fan magazines. The variety of his life is the variety of fleabag hotels the city of Stockton offers him. Drinking, desperately trying to love a neurotic lush, flashing back to times when he could have been a real contender or raised a family but for his damning insecurities, Tully finds no personal tranquillity. He moves from job to job: tops onions and sacks nuts, hoes tomato fields with Negro migrants whose silent endurance confounds and defeats him. At the end of his labors, he is no farther from torpor than when he started. The Stockton park even cuts down the shade trees under which laborers sleep in the evening heat. With irony too strong to be humorous, Tully comes closest to nature while watching a nudist colony skin-flick in a half-filled burlesque hall; by story's end, he has drifted into a wine-colored world, bearing constant remembrance of single moments of past happiness.

When Billy spars a few rounds with Ernie in the book's opening scene, the boy feels honored that he has "joined the company of men." In another age, Munger might have been a typical American golden boy, son of a tire recapper and a tireless, depleted mother, himself a gas station attendant, possessed of a muscled torso and a solemn, black-haired girlfriend (later wife) who holds back her sex until he confesses his love. But in 1969, cruising with fellow loafers past drive-ins and hamburger stands, boxing a few stumblebums for the cash it pays, Ernie is merely another case of development arrested by outdated and neglected traditions. In spite of his better efforts and youth, he is not so far from Tully's condition.

These lines of character development, of growth not only foreshadowed but violently curtailed by external pressure, are what Fat City is about. In a series of sharply-etched vignettes, Gardner captures not only the spirit of his characters but the atmosphere stifling them: the turgid California sun beating down on the backs of sweating laborers, greasy blackness pervading a gas station lube room, ammonia and blood coating the floors of locker room and arena.

For all his considerable achievement, Gardner's book does not seem a whole creation. In the manner of a hard-boiled thirties' novelist like Horace McCoy, Gardner makes his narrative voice a cruelly objective one, not committing himself to a place in the narrative, intent only on mirroring the mind of the character at hand. This makes for some instances of stunning understatement, particularly in the last pages; a still-innocent Ernie Munger hitches a ride with two might-be lesbians who stridently torment each other and use the naive Munger as a pawn in their game, personifying on a car seat a world without charity.

The depth of Gardner's observations, however, and the acuteness of his understanding demand something more from him. With material as potent as Fat City's, an author keeping his own sense of bitter outrage under wraps relinquishes his right to poetry. One keeps hoping that Gardner will let himself go, will hurl himself into his work as Agee did in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, will see himself in his characters' plight, and implicate his readers in a necessary moral rededication. This doesn't happen. But Gardner's first remains a fine and sensitive novel, and a courageous one. As to the title phrase itself: it may signify both prosperity and indolence. The tragedy of Fat City is that in the society it chronicles, one does not offer relief from the other.