Ask the Dust

Youth. Reading Ask the Dust as a very young man. The lines of the book jumping up off the page and cutting into me, leaving deep and savory wounds. It was the first time I'd read a book where a man was defined by his heart and vulnerabilities, his emotions, just as much as his fists and thoughts. The range of feeling in the novel, yet the glue of it, the thread, stayed the same. Unwavering, unbreakable. In one of my novels, which I many years later decimated to create the intro novella to a book of short stories, I praised Knut Hamsun for his book, Hunger, which is without a doubt my favorite novel, but I had to close out the paragraph in praise of John Fante, his main character, Arturo Bandini, the wild madman running the streets of Los Angeles, his heart filled with beautifully raw and inimitable sentences:

[I drove her car to Norms for some dinner, where I finished the novel. Something snapped in my head, something changed. The last line in Hunger wound the book up airtight and gave me chills. Such selfless, beautiful work. All the wonder of pain, the blood of words that dripped onto the page like rain, like breath upon a burn. The next day I sat in the same booth and read Ask the Dust. The warm colors smiled. The whole book was like swallowing the ocean. I drove home looking for his characters walking the streets.]

-The feeling of that. I often get asked about my influences, inspirations. Back to Hunger, (and ONLY the Robert Bly tranlsation - do not waste your time on anything else) I think what drew me into Ask the Dust was the fact that it was almost a more modern version of it, in Fante's own way, and written in a way an American writer could better relate to struggle, frustration, and the filtering of them coupled with fear, anger, and love. Of course, both books were originals, but the pulse of them reached me where other writers didn't. But if I had to pick one definitive moment, one place in time that a line, or lines, in this case -as I bend the rules of this challenge, but the hell with it- was reading page 20, if memory serves, of Ask the Dust. At the age when I read the book, I was just coming in to the new skin of a novelist, and reading Fante's masterpiece was a lot like reading Lolita for the first time: It was a flawless book with nothing left to add or subtract. It was purely beautiful. And the lines copied below lifted me higher than anything else had at that point, and taught me much about the written word: grew a strong platform in my mind for when it was time for youth to rip the cord connecting the teachers to the student, the fan, and to gracefully kill your idols but to bury them near for when the waters need rising and you need to remember the good things.

“So you walk along Bunker Hill, and you shake your fists at the sky, and I know what you're thinking, Bandini. The thoughts of your father before you, lash across your back, hot fire in your skull, that you are noght to blame: this is your thought, that you were born poor, son of miseried peasants, driven because you were poor, fled from your Colorado town because you were poor, rambling the gutters of Los Angeles because you are poor, hoping to write a book to get rich, because those who hated you back there in Colorado will not hate you if you write a book. You are a coward, Bandini, a traitor to your soul, a feeble liar before your weeping Christ. This is why you write, this is why it would be better if you died.”

—John Fante, Ask the Dust