John Fante: His Novels and Novellas (review)

Catherine Kordich’s monograph presents John Fante as a major, though undervalued, American writer of the thirties (as well as of the seventies and eighties): “On the basis of his lyrical prose and the sparkling emotions of his psychologically articulate but careening characters, Fante must, without question, be recognized as an outstanding American author” (133).

Through detailed studies of Fante’s novels, Kordich asserts their value as realistic depictions of the Los Angeles-Southern California milieu and as treatments of the problem facing a first-generation writer torn between the influence of the old-country culture of his parents and his own desire for Americanization. But there are problems in this limited approach. For instance, Fante seems most interesting for his failure to resolve the conflict between art and American values of material success and for his novels in the thirties, whose characters have accepted the American ethos of unbridled individualism, thus placing them (and Fante) in opposition to the more socially conscious left-leaning writers of that decade.

Moreover, Kordich fails to confront the racism and sexism in Fante’s work and (to the extent it’s relevant) in Fante himself. A journal entry of 15 January 1940, for example, speaks derisively of the California Filipinos, about whom he was contemplating writing a novel, tentatively titled The Little Brown Brothers: “They are, I feel—at least the California Filipinos—pretty stupid, but education has been denied them. European civilization is not for them.” Fante’s second novel, Ask the Dust, is too often marred by sexism and racism, sometimes described unconvincingly as self-deprecating irony. Fante’s views and representations, however, are more complicated than short quotations suggest, and they might have been fruitfully examined. An examination of how Fante came to hold such views and—more important—the effect they had on his novels would have deepened Kordich’s analysis and added to our knowledge of a certain type of male psyche and how historical conditions inflect it. Kordich’s decision to ignore these directions inevitably makes her book somewhat superficial.

It is not hard to see Fante’s appeal to an audience characterized a few years back as the “Angry White Male.” The resentment and anger of Fante’s characters are the perpetuum mobile of his novels. Up to a point, these characters serve Fante well, but his failure to treat them from a perspective of sufficient distance (as does, for example, his most important admirer, Charles Bukowski), or to sufficiently historicize them, limits his achievement, as the same failures limit Kordich’s book.