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I, Fatty by Jerry Stahl
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If you want to know why I bothered with Jerry
Stahl's novel about Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle, it wasn't because I cared
about what really happened in the scandal of 1921, anymore than I care what's
happening in the latest scandals (take your pick) making the rounds on the cable
news shows.
No, I picked up the novel, I, Fatty, because I wanted to be engaged by a voice, any voice that had sound and attitude. The paperback copy of the book - which is what I'm peddling - has a Washington Post blurb on the cover, which says, "Jerry Stahl gives us a crash course in what the movies were, and are." Maybe. Is that the main reason Stahl wrote the novel, though? If so, why didn't he write a nonfiction work about Paramount? Stahl wrote the book because he thought Fatty Arbuckle had potential as a raconteur, and he wanted to explore that potential in a novel. Reading it is like sitting by the fire and hearing a guy who can talk and tell his story. It's the manner in which Fatty describes his troubles with his father, for example, or the way in which he tells about his Keystone Cops adventures that keep the reader's brain coming back for more. Stahl enhances the effect of having it seem like Fatty's in the room by letting him make all sorts of narrative errors, such as forgetting about a major part of his life until another part of his life catches up with it. All of a sudden, it dawns on him that he forgot, and then he has to go back and lay the groundwork. You wind up with a portrait of a guy who got a rough start with a boozehound father but who hung in there with a persistent sense of humor. The reader benefits from that humor through the story of Fatty's life in Hollywood. You can probably read the book, as "The Washington Post" apparently advises, to get "a crash course in what the movies were, and are," but I did it just to listen to Fatty talk. Review by Todd Robins, September 16, 2005
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