How to Read John Fante: Bandini, Family, and Where to Begin
Arturo Bandini has found the place where his book will stand in the library. Writing it is a less advanced project. In Ask the Dust, the future author can already imagine the company he will keep on the shelves while the present tenant owes money for his Los Angeles hotel room. Start here if you want Fante at his most extravagantly self-involved. For the family that can answer a Bandini back, go next to Wait Until Spring, Bandini. For an adult son discovering how little adulthood counts at home, choose The Brotherhood of the Grape.
Fante is easy to read quickly. An unpaid bill can catch up with a magnificent fantasy in the space of a sentence, however, and the person we have been enjoying may abruptly do something we can scarcely bear to watch. Give the reply as much attention as the performance. His people often sound most persuasive just before somebody interrupts them.
A young writer with an audience in his head
In Ask the Dust, Bandini's audience can be summoned whenever the actual company disappoints him. He speaks as a young man hungry for recognition, sometimes addressing himself, sometimes regarding himself by name as though fame had already made him a person other people discuss. The unpaid rent keeps intruding on this happy arrangement.
Chapter two contains an imagined interview in which an experience he has scarcely faced is already the material of a Nobel-winning book. He has the interview ready before he has the book. Follow the changes of address and you can hear him moving between the man in difficulty and the distinguished figure who will one day explain what the difficulty meant.
Enjoy the ridiculousness without deciding too quickly how much the narrator knows about it. He can expose a past humiliation, turn it into a performance, ask for sympathy, and make somebody else look foolish in the same passage. When he describes his own embarrassment, we have something like a confession; when he explains what another person must be feeling, we have a claim to test against that person's next reply.
Keep the small sums in view. Money alters his mood with a speed that literary ambition cannot explain: a payment opens an afternoon; an expense can make the person who receives it seem intolerable. The amount tells us what he can do before he has arranged a grander explanation for doing it.
Choose the next book by the company you want
For Bandini's family: Wait Until Spring, Bandini
Wait Until Spring, Bandini can follow Ask the Dust or serve as a first book in its own right. Here we meet Arturo's father, Svevo, trudging through snow with damaged shoes. Cardboard from a macaroni box has become a replacement sole, and the macaroni itself has not been paid for. If family life draws you more strongly than an aspiring writer's fantasies, begin with this walk home.
Svevo's work as a tradesman depends on the weather. When he cannot work, wife and children live with the shortage too. Remember the shoes when pride and grievance start to sound excessive: the argument takes place in a household where an indignity can be felt through the soles of the feet before anybody speaks about it.
The third-person narration also changes who gets to exist independently. We follow the father before the son can make him into an anecdote. His thoughts color the telling, and other family members will have their own recollections to set against his. Let your attention move with them. A man who seems entirely right while we are close to him may have forgotten an incident his wife remembers very well.
For an adult return: The Brotherhood of the Grape
The Brotherhood of the Grape brings Henry Molise, a fifty-year-old writer, back into family trouble. His father, Nick, is an aging bricklayer, still accustomed to command. A building job makes Henry's involvement practical: the established son has a life elsewhere, but his father has work for him to do here.
Choose it for the peculiar embarrassment of returning as an adult to people who can restore your childhood position in a conversation. It stands independently of the Bandini books. Henry is another fictional writer; turning him into a renamed Bandini would make a tidier series at the cost of the book in front of us.
For more versions of young Bandini
The Road to Los Angeles offers a more abrasive young Bandini, with jobs, physical exhaustion, and a father already dead when the book begins. Return to it when you want another version of him, rather than an orderly next chapter in one biography. Dreams from Bunker Hill begins with a twenty-one-year-old busboy whose ambitions exceed the recognition available from his work. Choose it when you want to hear that discrepancy playing out again on Los Angeles streets.
If you prefer a four-book Bandini route from the beginning, use Wait Until Spring, Bandini → The Road to Los Angeles → Ask the Dust → Dreams from Bunker Hill. Take this as a useful progression through versions of the character. Recurring names do not guarantee that every family circumstance will fit a single continuous biography.
Publication order is different: Wait Until Spring, Bandini appeared in 1938, Ask the Dust in 1939, Dreams from Bunker Hill in 1982, and The Road to Los Angeles posthumously in 1985. The last publication date is a poor reason to save The Road as though it continued the others' story.
Where an easy sentence can become an uncomfortable read
A first impression of Bandini will need revising, sometimes within the same encounter. We may laugh at a boast, be touched by an admission, then recoil from what he does with an advantage. There is no need to make those reactions consistent by suppressing one of them. Continue until the other person has had a chance to answer.
The racial language can make that continuation painful. In Ask the Dust, the landlady's hotel rules show prejudice doing practical work: somebody decides who may belong. Bandini knows humiliation and can pass it on. His poverty may explain a vulnerability we share with him; it gives him no exemption when another person becomes its target.
With Camilla, especially, keep the spoken exchanges beside the passages about her. What does she actually say? What work interrupts her, and what can she decline? Bandini's desire is eloquent enough to fill the book, but it cannot tell us everything about the woman who has to deal with him.
Religion brings another kind of inconsistency into chapter two. A declaration of disbelief can coexist with the reflex of prayer or bargaining. Listen for the change in circumstance before trying to award Bandini a settled position on God. A frightened man can remember a form of address his confident self had just discarded.
Read through an encounter's aftermath when you can; pause if the hostility becomes numbing. Returning later to one exchange is often more revealing than continuing through another stretch of extravagant description. Someone has to pay, go back to work, or live with what was said after Bandini has finished explaining himself.
Questions before you begin
Is Arturo Bandini simply John Fante?
Bandini draws on autobiographical material, including an Italian American family background and a writer's ambition. He remains a character whose speech, fantasies, and circumstances have been arranged into fiction. In his preface to Wait Until Spring, Bandini, the older Fante describes a troubled relation to the memories contained in his first novel. His recollection belongs beside the novel, but it does not make every fictional incident a biographical fact.
Does Fante expect us to approve of Bandini?
Fante makes approval a question we have to keep reopening. Attend to the injuries left after a confession, and to the replies that survive the narrator's explanation of them. Sympathy can persist while our estimate of an action worsens. Questions about the author's treatment of women or race remain legitimate too; a protagonist's self-accusation cannot settle every question about the novel that contains him.
Why is the writing funny when the circumstances are painful?
The imagined audience is often much grander than the occasion. Bandini sees literary immortality while somebody nearby waits for payment, and Fante lets us inhabit both scales long enough to feel the aspiration and laugh at its timing. At home, relatives have the further advantage of remembering what a magnificent speaker would prefer forgotten. The joke can turn on a fact he left out.
Should I read Bukowski first?
You can begin without Bukowski. His introduction to Ask the Dust is worth reading for the story of finding Fante in the Los Angeles public library and for the influence that discovery had on his writing. It is one reader's powerful invitation. Afterward, let Wait Until Spring, Bandini enlarge the invitation: its third-person family life has a range that the young writer's first-person performance cannot represent alone.
Roth's The Ghost Writer offers an onward route into another young author's dealings with literary authority and obligations to people. Within Fante, try the smaller change first: after Ask the Dust, open Wait Until Spring, Bandini. Meet the father in the snow before you let his son tell you who he is.
Sources
John Fante, Ask the Dust. Canongate digital edition, 2008, ISBN 9781847673657. Chapters 1, 2, and 7. Charles Bukowski's introduction is included in this edition.
John Fante, Wait Until Spring, Bandini. Ecco e-book, 2010, ISBN 9780062013170. Preface and chapter 1; publisher's preview.
The Road to Los Angeles (Black Sparrow Press, 1985) and Dreams from Bunker Hill (Black Sparrow Press, 1982): opening extracts and bibliographic records.
Canongate, The Brotherhood of the Grape, publisher's description; John Fante author bibliography. Ask the Dust's original 1939 publication is also recorded in the first-edition catalogue record.
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