Ask the Dust (1938) by John Fante

 Book Review

Ask the Dust (1938)

by John Fante

   Ask the Dust, the great depression era proto-beat novel by John Fante, was another embarrassing omission from my reading list.   Like City of Night, I'd literally never heard of Ask the Dust before it came across my radar.  When I mentioned it to my girlfriend she laughed at me and told me it was one of the books "everyone" read when they moved to Los Angeles.   Fante's portrayal of Depression era Los Angeles, with a heavy emphasis on the area surrounding the now destroyed Bunker Hill neighborhood, is an iconic description of depression era Los Angeles.

   Fante's protagonist, Arturo Bandini (this is book three of the four book Bandini sequence) would be a common type after the mid 1960's, a would-be romantic writer, seeking his muse in the lower echelons of the big city.  He finds it in the figure of a latina waitress.  Their antagonist courtship has not aged well:  He insults her race frequently and generally behaves in a way that would get him arrested and served with a restraining order in the present day.   The story ends with his unrequited love running up the wall of a marijuana addiction induced bout of psychosis in the object of his affection- talk about not aging well- as the last fifty pages turns into a "reefer madness" type scenario.

  But man, in terms of the description of depression era Los Angeles Ask the Dust holds up.  How did I make it this far without ever hearing about it or Fante himself?  This is another canon level contender- Fante could sub in for one of Henry Miller's tropics- Cancer or Capricorn.  The west coast is basically unrepresented in the 30's American lit canon beyond Of Mice and Men which is set in the farm country of California, not the city.