Ask the Dust, by John Fante

Sometimes when you discover some obscure piece of acclaimed literature that you’ve never quite heard of, it turns out to be a secret masterpiece. Other times, it turns out to be pretty clear why you’ve never quite heard of it.

Unfortunately, my first review blog falls into the second category. The book in question is Ask the Dust by John Fante. I heard a compelling interview with Fante’s son on NPR (90% of all my stories/conversations begin with me saying, “I heard a story on NPR about…”). I was intrigued because I’d never even heard of John Fante, and apparently he was a writer of some renown and is still fairly highly regarded. He lived in southern California in the 1930s, and Ask the Dust has a distinctly pre-Beat feel; lyrical, poetic, artistic, irreverent and counter-culture in its own way. It is the story of Arturo Bandini, a desperate young writer living in poverty in Los Angeles, trying to live the ascetic artistic life. He’s in love most of all with the romance of writing and the artistic life, but his writing career (as well as his romantic advances and attempts at artistic authenticity) are all routinely stymied, plunging him into increasing despair and self-loathing. Eventually he falls in love with (or in hate with? honestly, it’s a little hard to tell) Camilla, a Mexican waitress who both attracts and repels him, and together they descend into a strange love/hate/poverty/desperation downward spiral that threatens to destroy them both.

It sounds compelling…but for some reason, this book just fell kind of flat for me. I enjoyed it and it kept me reading, but it just felt quietly unremarkable. It is more about character (Arturo Bandini truly is a memorable protagonist) than plot, and more about an artist coming to terms with himself and the world than about romance, but somehow it just didn’t really come together. I ended the book torn between wanting more, and wanting less – like it should either have been cut down to a short story, or broadened into a more developed novel (its short…about 160 pages in my edition).

It was interesting to me, though, as kind of a bridge piece. You can feel the consciousness of the Beat writers of the next generation waking up in this work. As someone who went through quite a Kerouac/Beat phase in college, I found it really interesting to see who came just before them. I don’t know it to be a fact, but I’d guess that Kerouac and his contemporaries read Fante, and identified with the tortured artistic soul of Arturo Bandini. Fante, though, was born a generation too soon…his attraction to counter-culture is too tepid and prude. Bandini, though he’s supposed to be a kind of off-the-grid independent iconoclast, comes off as a bit quaint; he’s horrified and tortured, for example, when he has consensual premarital sex (with an adult woman!) because it is adultery. Compare that to Ms. Ferrell’s next-generation Lolita. And one character’s dabbling in marijuana is portrayed with all the sinister brimstone judgementalism we would apply to meth or black tar heroin. Fante wanted to break out of society’s cloister, it feels…but not too far.

Originally, I was going to say the feel of Fante’s writing was “like a lost love-child of Jack Kerouac and Raymond Chandler.” But that wasn’t quite right. And it was also just a little weird. Then I tried “an uneasy blend between Henry Miller and John Steinbeck,” but that was even worse. So I’ll have to be content with conceding that Fante is a little tricky to describe, and that I need to read more female authors.

I do love Fante’s language, though. If you like the free verse, lyrical abandon of the Beats, you’d like Fante. To give you a feel: “Los Angeles, give me some of you! Los Angeles come to me the way I came to you, my feet over your streets, you pretty town I loved you so much, you sad flower in the sand, you pretty town.” And another: “This was the life for a man, to wander and stop and then go on, ever following the white line along the rambling coast, a time to relax at the wheel, light another cigaret (sic), and grope stupidly for the meanings in that perplexing desert sky.” Good stuff.

So in the end, I would classify Ask the Dust as fun, but not required reading. If you’re really into Beat writers or want to broaden your experience with the modern American canon, Fante might be a great choice. If you’re looking for a must-read classic for your reader’s resume, this is one you could probably skip.