Gardner got his hands dirty

alden_pyle

May 28, 2025

I recently read The Nature and Aim of Fiction by Flannery O’Connor. In it, she wrote:

“It is a good deal easier for most people to state an abstract idea than to describe and thus recreate some object that they actually see. But the world of the fiction writer is full of matter…Fiction is about everything human and we are made out of dust, and if you scorn getting yourself dusty, then you shouldn’t try to write fiction.”

If the strategic recreation of concrete detail to paint an evocative image is the measure of good fiction, then Fat City by Leonard Gardner is perhaps the best book I have ever read. Every scene in this book springs off the page and becomes an image in the reader’s mind.

“He ate fried hot dogs with rice in the Golden Gate Café, his shoes buried in discarded paper napkins, each stool down the long counter occupied, dishes clattering, waitresses shouting, the cadaverous Chinese cook, in hanging shirt and spotted khaki pants piled over unlaced tennis shoes, slicing pork knuckles, fat pork roast and tongue, making change with a greasy hand to the slap slap of the other cook’s flyswatter.”

There’s nothing special or flashy going on in this paragraph. What makes it good writing is simple—so simple, Flanner O’Connor suggests, that most of us overlook it: concrete detail. The shoes buried in napkins and the unfortunate-looking cook and the slap of the flyswatter. In isolation the detail doesn’t seem like that much but put together in a scene it makes the difference between vibrant writing and dull writing. And Gardner had a tremendous eye for detail.

It’s hard to convey how well this writing works through excerpts. The detail works through accumulation, each image like a spot of color on a giant canvas, so that by the end of the novel the painting is complete. Trying to show you this in a paragraph is like showing you a picture of the Mona Lisa zoomed in 300x. The beauty of the whole does not come through.

Other than his mastery of the concrete, Gardner showcases a great command of dialogue. His characters are also superb. The boxers and boxing promoters are all deeply tragic and compelling figures. But what makes the book is simply the detail. One more passage:

“A silent man took him to the airport turnoff. There, with his canvas bag at his feet, the lights of the airport in the distance behind him, Ernie waited on the gravel shoulder, blinded by the swift approach of headlights and left behind with fluttering pants cuffs. From one car something came flying in a chorus of derisive howling, striking the ground near his feet. In the lights of the following car he saw a paper milkshake cup rolling along the shoulder, and spots on the legs of his pants. A plane roared out over the desert, lights winking green and red in the black sky.”

There is such beauty, in my mind, to this kind of writing. Gardner simply lists what happens. He doesn’t even waste time trying to dress it up with lots of fancy figurative language. He simply recreates matter. Swift headlights, fluttering pants cuffs, milkshake rolling along the shoulder, a plane roaring out over the desert. Just a few concrete images and suddenly you have yourself a scene which plays like a movie in the reader’s head. Suddenly you have some of the best writing I’ve ever read.

It seems easy to write this way. It really does. For anyone reading this thinking it’s easy, I have one thing I implore you to do. Try.

J M+3

2 comments

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tokyodrifter1 year ago

Completely agree. Restraint creates true poetry; just going nuts on the page is self-indulgence. I like both methods, but the first is a lot harder to pull off.

alden_pyle1 year ago

One of the reasons I don't read that much contemporary writing is that it's difficult for me to find any of it that fits this form. From my small sampling, a lot of it seems so abstract that the concrete detail gets lost.