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: