E-Verse Top 100 Cool Novels #87: Ask the Dust by John Fante

by Ernie on 01/04/08 at 9:18 am

Number 87: Ask the Dust, John Fante (1939). The first real Beat, Fante had it stylistically over most of those who would call themselves “beat” in the following decades (most of whose books were painted purple with the brush of Thomas Wolfe). Fante had a precise and easily comprehended influence on Charles Bukowski, a problematic Beat in much the same way D.H. Lawrence can be considered a problematic British modernist. After reading Fante’s Bandini trilogy of novels about a first-generation young, ambitious, down-and-out writer in LA at the tail end of the Great Depression, it is difficult to read Bukowski the same way again, and certainly not as a innovator of any kind. Fante captures the excitement and easy despair of youth and links the ecstasies of sexual discovery with the torturous Catholic guilt that follows young Bandini’s attempts to transform himself into a man, a real man, “a famous writer.”

John Fante Fante describes LA as both glamorous and decadent, layered in dust and lit by flickering neon, morally bankrupt yet filled with promise. He intersperses the restless, confused action of the novel with biblical descriptions of the desert dust, the eternal wasteland, coming to reclaim the flimsy and evanescent works of man. The novel ends with love unfulfilled and a broken prodigy hurling his book, inscribed to a woman he would never see again, into the dust. Powerful stuff, and now the subject of a big-budget Hollywood movie that looks to be the death of it. Incidentally, Fante went on to write many movies for Hollywood and hardly resembled the innocent, dreaming young Bandini by the time his career as a novelist was resuscitated and he became a public figure, partly through the zealous championing of mid-career Bukowski.