Here goes my 200th book report since joining Goodreads.



And my introduction to the fiction of John Fante is Ask the Dust, his 1939 novel considered by some scholars and educators to be one of the best works of fiction set in the Great Depression and the best set in Los Angeles. Superlatives like those could work against the book's vitality, which is palpable. Fante's narrator--destitute twenty year old boy Arturo Bandini struggling against hunger, wanting and creative resistance--lacks the worldl

Here goes my 200th book report since joining Goodreads.



And my introduction to the fiction of John Fante is Ask the Dust, his 1939 novel considered by some scholars and educators to be one of the best works of fiction set in the Great Depression and the best set in Los Angeles. Superlatives like those could work against the book's vitality, which is palpable. Fante's narrator--destitute twenty year old boy Arturo Bandini struggling against hunger, wanting and creative resistance--lacks the worldliness of John Steinbeck's Depression-era men and would've done well to read The Grapes of Wrath and grow up. His story is as bare as a cupboard, but Fante's language and the atmosphere he conjures are breathtaking.



I was passing the doorman of the Biltmore, and I hated him at once, with his yellow braids and six feet of height and all that dignity, and now a black automobile drove to the curb, and a man got out. He looked rich, and then a woman got out, and she was beautiful, her fur was silver fox, and she was a song across the sidewalk and inside the swinging doors, and I thought oh boy for a little of that, just a day and night of that, and she was a dream as I walked along, her perfume still in the wet morning air.



Then a great deal of time passed as I stood in front of a pipe shop and looked, and the whole world faded except that window and I stood and smoked them all, and saw myself a great author with that natty Italian briar, and a cane, stepping out of a big black car, and she was there too, proud as hell of me, the lady in the silver fox fur. We registered and then we had cocktails and then we danced awhile, and then we had another cocktail and I recited some lines of Sanskrit, and the world was so wonderful, because every two minutes some gorgeous one gazed at me, the great author, and nothing would do but I had to autograph her menu, and the silver fox girl was very jealous.



In reality, Arturo (or Arthur, depending on how prejudiced the person he's introducing himself to is towards Italians) is five months off the bus from Boulder, Colorado, chasing dreams of becoming the Great Writer he knows himself to be. He checks in to a room in the Alta Loma Hotel in Bunker Hill, in the center of downtown Los Angeles, with little more than one-hundred fifty dollars in his pocket and big dreams in his head. Arturo carried two suitcases, one full of copies of a literary magazine edited by his hero J.C. Hackmuth, who has published a short story Arturo wrote titled The Little Dog Laughed. No one in the hotel seems to care, too busy eroding by sun, hunger or dust.



Down to his last nickel, Arturo makes his way to Spring Street and a bar called the Columbia Buffet. He becomes fixated on a Mexican waitress named Camilla Lopez who serves him the worst cup of coffee he's ever tasted. Their romance hardly blossoms along the lines of mutual respect; Arturo projects his own self-loathing onto Camilla, who in return is often angry that the vigorous writer cannot be the man she loves, bartender Sammy Wiggins, who longs to publish western stories but is ailing from tuberculosis. Arturo is pursued by a desperate older woman named Vera Rivkin who becomes the inspiration for his first novel. Wanting to celebrate his success with Camilla, fate steps in.



So this is where she lived! I smelled it, touched it with my fingers, walked through it with my feet. It was as I had imagined. This was her home. Blindfolded I could have acknowledged the place, for her odor possessed it, her fevered, lost existence proclaimed it as part of a hopeless scheme. An apartment on Temple Street, an apartment in Los Angeles. She belonged to the rolling hills, the wide deserts, the high mountains, she would ruin any apartment, she would lay havoc upon any such little prison as this. It was so, ever in my imagination, ever a part of my scheming and thinking about her. This was her home, her ruin, her scattered dream.



The writing in Ask the Dust is so intoxicating, so filled with ardor and longing--whether it's righteous or completely misplaced by our boy narrator--that I couldn't help but fall under its spell. With little more than his imagination and a typewriter, Fante sketches Depression-era Los Angeles as vividly as the three greatest L.A. movies--Chinatown (1974), Blade Runner (1982) and L.A. Confidential (1997)--were able to do with an army of visual artists. Fante also knows the tempests brewing under the skin of both the aspiring artist and the amorous, socially awkward male--often one and the same--and conveys the life and times of both demographics memorably.



Ask the Dust comes up short of complete satisfaction due to a couple of things. There's the length, which I'd peg at 50,000 words, nearly novella length. This is accounting for the threadbare nature of the story, the unwillingness of Fante/Bandini to really explore Camilla, Sammy, Vera, or anyone else in Los Angeles. This is a book about a boy's angst first and a city second, with characters further down the list. There's also disconnection between Arutro and Camilla where a novelist like Steinbeck might've developed a connection. The target demographic for Fante might be budding (male) authors or those with an interest in historic Los Angeles. These are my demographics.



One of the novel's fans was Robert Towne, the Academy Award winning screenwriter of Chinatown who called Ask the Dust the greatest novel ever written about Los Angeles. In 2006, a long-simmering film version adapted and directed by Towne was released. Starring Colin Farrell as Arturo Bandini, Salma Hayek as Camilla and Idina Menzel as Vera, it suffered a fate similar to Billy Bob Thornton's 1999 adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses as a sober love story mismatched with idealistic imagery. It is in Fante's book where his descriptions thrive. I didn't ask any questions. Everything I wanted to know was written in tortured phrases across the desolation of her face.