John Fante’s second novel, Ask the Dust, helped to catalyze a vision of Los Angeles at the moment it shook off its 19th-century origins and became visible as the city we recognize today. Unfolding on Downtown’s Bunker Hill, once an upper-middle-class enclave that, by the 1930s, had seen its mansions carved into rooming houses, the novel is centered by a Fante alter ego named Arturo Bandini, who yearns to write. “Los Angeles,” he rhapsodizes, “give me some of you! Los Angeles, come to me the way I came to you, my feet over your streets, you pretty town I loved you so much, you sad flower in the sand, you pretty town.” If a more beautiful pair of sentences has been written about Los Angeles, I have not encountered it. And yet, the strength of Fante’s novel is that it is not rhapsodic so much as realistic, portraying Bandini, as well as the city itself, in complicated ways. The character can be cruel and is nothing if not self-aggrandizing; in one notable sequence, he interprets the 1933 Long Beach earthquake as divine retribution for his sins. At the same time, there’s a clarity to the novel’s observations. Among my favorites is this, in which Bandini recalls seeing his first palm tree: “I thought of Palm Sunday and Egypt, and Cleopatra, but the palm was blackish at its branches, stained by the carbon monoxide coming out of the Third Street Tunnel, its crusted trunk choked with dust and sand.”•
This article appears in Issue 31 of Alta Journal.
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