"Naked in Garden Hills" is a novel about absolutes and inequities—Webster says this word is rare; so is the book. One of the fattest men in fiction or in the world, Mayhugh Aaron (but known simply and pictorially as Fat Man) has as his gentleman's gentleman one of the smallest, neatest, most exquisitely wrought Negroes that ever was, John Henry Williams, called Jester. They admire and cherish their contrast. (p. 4)

These two and a handful of other souls, who are no slouches themselves when it comes to the bizarre, live in the rank yellow shadows of a played-out phosphate mine in Florida; the hills of Garden Hills are the creation of a real estate developer and the garden, mass-produced in Peoria, has been brought in on a 50-truck caravan. The whole place belongs to Fat Man….

With the mine shut down, Garden Hills is in a slump...