John Fante 'Ask the Dust'

It's easy to see why Bukowski loved John Fante ("Fante was my god") - the brash, young idealist Arturo Bandini holed up with a 5c bag of oranges in his Bunker Hill hotel room, hiding from the landlady and drunk on dreams of literary greatness between hangovers of self-loathing is a sort of prototypical Bukowski, and with its drug and alcohol-tinged fantasies, its intimate, off-kilter intensity and its antiheroic masculine energy, Ask the Dust prefigures many of Bukowski's thematic/stylistic concerns as well. It is a nonstop, freewheeling rant about life in the margins in 1930's LA, with intensely poetic, backlit edges and a deep emotional undercurrent that pulls you into the dark heart of the story before you even know what's happening. It's fascinating, completely original, authentic. Arturo and Camilla are unforgettable characters. They are contrary, difficult, and buzzing with static energy, with heat - there is a sort of scorched innocence about them. And it's funny too, overflowing with wild flights of hubristic fancy on the part of the great Bandini, lover of man and beast alike ... Here's a typical passage:

"I pulled the huge door open and it gave a little cry like weeping. Above the altar sputtered the blood-red eternal light, illuminating in crimson shadow the quiet of almost two thousand years. It was like death, but I could remember screaming infants at baptism too. I knelt. This was habit, this kneeling. I sat down. Better to kneel, for the sharp bite at the knees was a distraction from the awful quiet. A prayer. Sure, one prayer: for sentimental reasons. Almighty God, I am sorry I am now an atheist, but have you read Nietzsche? Ah, such a book! Almighty God, I will play fair in this. I will make You a proposition. Make a great writer out of me, and I will return to the Church. And please, dear God, one more favor: make my mother happy. I don't care about the Old Man ..."

Apart from the wonderful comedic voice, there's some unusual writing in there, a subtle way of saying things differently; it gave a little cry like weeping. The book is saturated with that sort of writing, just a hair off regular; I went to the restaurant where I always went to the restaurant; it's conversational, familiar; where there were friends and friends; but always well crafted, often beautiful; the days of plenty - plenty of worries, plenty of oranges; and not without its moments of perfection; her eyes like crushed grapes; faces like flowers torn from their roots and stuffed in a pretty vase; the white line in the pavement leaped up ahead of us like a burning fuse ...

As a sustained piece of interior monologue it is especially interesting, cleaving close to the hidden shape of a private life in all its absurdity and zeal. It's what seals the comedy into the text, but it also makes us identify with this flawed and brazen character and care about his fate. The treatment of his internalized racism (something he must confront in his relationship with Camilla, who he denounces variously as spick and greaser) is exquisitely handled for all its volatility, and the conclusion is astonishingly moving, and satisfying in a symbolic way, with the gesture of the novel flung deep into the desert. If you opened the book at the end and started from there, you would be as intrigued as Bukowski was with the beginning when he stumbled upon the book in the LA Public Library and felt like he had, as he says in the introduction, found gold in the city dump. Fante's concerns could be said to encompass the city dump quite profoundly, and like Bukowski after him, he has found his gold there and fashioned it into a miniature charm.