I remember reading somewhere that Lawrence (Felt) keeps a copy of ‘Ask the Dust’ under double plastic covers - which pretty much sums the book up . The hunger and the rage of youth. The magnificent obsession, the angst and growing pains which never seem to stop. It’s the only novel for the guy in the band who never quite made it. ‘Brotherhood of the Grape’ was Fante’s penultimate novel (for some reason it’s only in the last year that it’s had a UK release) and it’s a much more mature work. While that’s not to say it’s better, there’s a real depth and understanding to this which sails above just about anything I’ve ever read. Sometimes it reads like music, if that makes sense.

Henry Molise could almost be Arturo Bandini. Older, jaded, wiser, more sure of himself but still trapped in a world he didn’t create and struggling to come to terms with the things he can’t control. He writes now, but there’s always a feeling that things haven’t quite worked out the way they should have. His ancient mother and alcoholic father are fighting like dogs, the rest of his fractured family are doing their best to avoid them and Henry ends up working for his dad on a final, doomed (really doomed) job building a smokehouse in the Californian hills. And that’s it. But the characterisation and dialogue are what Fante is all about. The old man Molise is so believable that when I closed my eyes I could see that polish electrician who briefly growled his way through my life a full 15 years ago (and I really hoped that miserable shit was gone for good).

This book is full of passages which could shine as short stories in themselves. A short reflection on the kindness of women - involving death, a bald nurse with padded breasts and some energetic sex is as vivid as Arturo Bandini’s reminiscences on the Adriatic sea. The father’s hallucinatory decline and the son revisiting his sins isn’t painted in broad strokes on a huge canvas. Like all the best stuff it’s picked up in the tiny details of everyday life. The cooking, the pointless squabbles, the lies, the greed, the disappointments and the nonsense. The drunken self delusion. And it’s funny, grotesque and moving like life. Fante writes Molise in the first person, full of self depreciation and wry asides - at times it’s almost self reflexive - and it’s so well done you just want to laugh out loud.

Someone once said that the ideas in Asimov’s work were like a river full of leaping salmon. This teems with simple human experience thrown out with the kind of pure, brutal honesty that most art can‘t quite manage (and that includes a lot of the good stuff). John Fante is a brave writer and this is one of his best.

Stuart Blackwood is 30 (odd), was born in Newarthill and lives in Glasgow. He supports Motherwell FC, has an MA in Economics and Philosophy and likes William Bell (the singer), Bukowski & Fante, Eric Arthur Blair, Negativeland, Eric Hobsbawm, politics, philosophy and ambiguity. He dislikes Alan Bloom and Francis Fukuyama, U2, categorization and Violence.

© 2006 Laura Hird All rights reserved.