Books: Ask the Dust, by John Fante

Perhaps there is something wrong with me, but I don't much want to blog this book, either. Not that it was unenjoyable—it's a great book, actually, and a quick, easy read. What stymies me today is the book's utter directness and simplicity; the book isn't simple in a bad way, the writing is just. . . limpid.

Fante became a great inspiration to Bukowski, and his writing is not unlike that man's; additionally, it's not unlike Hemingway's, Miller's, and that of any other number of young men of a time when young men who wanted to write moved far away (in Ask the Dust, it's Los Angeles), got themselves a room with a typewriter, and wrote about the struggle of writing in between beers at the bar downstairs. These stories (and this story) include affairs with local women, often barmaids at that local bar (in Ask the Dust her name is Camilla, and she is a lusty Mexican whose transformation Fante evokes in lithe descriptions of her footwear), anecdotes about the neighbors (in Ask the Dust, a drunkard who prefers gin, helps the narrator steal milk, and breaks the reader's heart when he kills a calf with a jackhammer in order to butcher himself a free steak), the far away publisher and the far away family, both of which are cursed and praised for their parsimony and their munificence.

Fante is better than Bukowski (leaner) and better (here at least) than Hemingway (sweeter). He is more tender than Miller, and doesn't revel in the dark and dirty the way that Miller and Bukowski are apt to do. His words and his sentences are clean, sharp, and succinct, but they do not lose any sweetness in their efficiency. The book is sweet and sad and good.