I, Fatty, by Jerry Stahl

An imploding star of the silent screen

Seeking an escape from a home life dominated by his father's physical and psychological abuse, eight-year-old Roscoe Arbuckle finds it in the theatre: "The home you get when you don't have a home you feel at home in." A year later, following the death of his mother, Roscoe takes a train to San José, where his father and brother are running a hotel.

Seeking an escape from a home life dominated by his father's physical and psychological abuse, eight-year-old Roscoe Arbuckle finds it in the theatre: "The home you get when you don't have a home you feel at home in." A year later, following the death of his mother, Roscoe takes a train to San José, where his father and brother are running a hotel.

On arrival, Roscoe discovers that his father has sold the hotel and left town. "I always figured that's why people liked the movies. They could see terrible things happen to you. But since they were watching at the nickelodeon, they couldn't catch your bad luck."

Terrible things continue to happen to Arbuckle throughout Jerry Stahl's novel, which tells the silent film star's story. His father might desert him, but bad luck never does.

Although uncomfortable with his nickname, "Fatty" Arbuckle laps up the laughter and applause. Finally someone loves him, albeit a house full of strangers. At 21, Fatty is headlining in Long Beach, with working in "flickers" still out of the question. But, falling in love with the actress Minta Durfee, he needs a source of income fast. So before you can say "lights, camera, action", he's swallowing his pride and churning out one-reelers, but at the same time altering the course of cinema history.

Not only would we have no Fatty without Arbuckle, but arguably no Little Tramp either. Charlie Chaplin pockets the 25 dollars that Keystone boss Mack Sennett gives him to buy himself an outfit. Fatty comes to the rescue: "I slipped him one of my too-tight derbies and a pair of pants that ballooned on him." He gives him a pair of shoes as well, which Chaplin wears on the wrong feet. "That's when I knew he really was a genius."

Arbuckle becomes a huge star, the first screen actor to earn a million dollars a year, but his success is a house of cards in a land of earthquakes. Seething with self-loathing, Fatty turns to alcohol: "When I wasn't drinking to get drunk I was drinking to kill the hangover." A spider bites him on the knee and - one incompetent doctor later - Roscoe is a smack-head. With a manager advising him to declare only a quarter of his income and a studio boss happy to see him framed for rape and murder, Fatty has little hope of avoiding ruin and devastating unhappiness.

What keeps Stahl's novel off the biography shelf is the first-person narrative. Wisecracking, poignant and frequently hilarious, the voice never cracks. I, Fatty may lack the imaginative audacity of cinema novels such as Steve Erickson's Days Between Stations or Theodore Roszak's Flicker, but in terms of its getting under Fatty's skin and creating a truly sympathetic hero in a series of tight spots, it's without equal.

The reviewer's novel 'Antwerp' is published by Serpent's Tail

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