Ask the Dust Review

“It tasted pretty much like coffee, but it wasn’t worth the nickel,” thought struggling writer, Arturo Bandini as he sat in a Los Angeles diner, inhaling a cigarette and praising Joe DiMaggio, all the while avoiding the looming reality of paying his overdue rent to the landlady at the Bunker Hill Hotel. “Either I paid up or I got out...”

In just the first couple paragraphs of his novel, Ask the Dust, “pre-beat” author John Fante paints the intricate portrait of an Italian-American writer (much like himself) dealing with the everyday battles involved with living amidst the only financial era in American history that is arguably worse than that of our own: The Great Depression. Clearly, there are vast differences between the times (i.e. a nickel today would barely get you a coffee bean, much less an entire cup) but the irony exists in the crisis that lies within each, from the recognizable troubles of a starving artist in this 1930’s tale to the grim reality of our present day job market.

Fante’s Ask the Dust is a ballad to daily life in the City of Angels performed through the manic mental and emotional processes of his main character, Bandini. Many strange encounters occur throughout the novel involving drinking, women, racism and poverty, all skillfully woven within a mixture of Bandini’s internal and external conflicts. After a couple days of following Bandini in a chaotic pattern of abiding hardships and bizarre interactions, we find our main man sipping another unworthy cup of coffee down at the Columbia Buffet. Here, he encounters Camilla Lopez, a Mexican waitress who he is both fascinated with and disgusted by. “She was a racial type, and such she was beautiful, but she was too strange for me.”

Nevertheless, Bandini was entranced and naturally, he proceeded to take the steps that any logical man attempting to impress an attractive woman would take. In utilizing the foolproof method of picking up women, Bandini begun by shamelessly criticizing her footwear, then to liven things up, he added in a bit of directed racial slander and finally, to seal the deal, he intentionally spilled his coffee, ensuring he left a hot mess for her to clean up. Needless to say, Camilla was hooked.

These backward antics continue between Arturo and Camilla (and eventually a few additional characters) throughout the entirety of their unconventional, tumultuous, dysfunctional, hostile and obsessive love/hate relationship. However, their interactions are as substance-less as their motives are confusing. As much as the plot is undeniably adorned with profound insights and overarching themes regarding substance abuse as well as the racist tone of Los Angeles (and perhaps the entire country) at the time, the characters’ actions are severely lacking in purpose, ultimately rendering them to seem quite excessive.

Conversely, Fante’s writing style is in no way lacking or excessive, but is a rush of literary brilliance. Fearlessly, Fante throws caution along with sentence structure to the wind, and what remains is an imaginative, eclectic (at times manic) array of thoughts purposefully arranged on the page. His tone is witty, clever and incredibly honest, while his writing is fast-paced yet still intricately crafted with detail. Above all, Fante manages to be passionate and sincere without using sweet, sugary anecdotes. Aside from its flaws, Fante’s indisputable talent as an author shines through, and for me Ask the Dust was definitely worth the 279 nickels.