Ask the Dust

John Fante
1939
Rating: 6

Ask the Dust is an uneven novel, with a healthy dose of nice writerly flourishes that are bogged down by patches of melodramatic and cartoonish plot and character development. I’m glad I read it, in part because of where it sits in the body of American literature, in part because I’m interested in the history of Los Angeles, and in part because Fante did have talent as a writer and story teller. I’d recommend the novel to anyone who is interested in the history of Los Angeles, not sure I would recommend it to a general reader.

I went into the novel cold, which is how I prefer reading a novel for the first time. I knew only that he lived in and wrote about Los Angeles.

One of the interesting aspects of the novel for me was considering its influences, as well as how it related to the work of other novelists who followed. It reminded me a bit of Notes from Underground in that it is a novel that’s very focused on the psychological issues of its protagonist; the protagonist’s conflicting and sometimes self-defeating impulses, as well as his self-loathing.

There were a number of uses of the word “clean” as an adjective that seemed to reflect a strong influence of Hemingway. “Strong,” too. Like The Sun Also Rises, Ask the Dust is about a love triangle comprised of damaged people, and explored the themes of frustrated sexual desire. And, as with The Sun Also Rises, the protagonist to a certain extent gets caught up in the whims of the woman he desires. In both novels the woman wears the pants in some ways relative to the male protagonist.

Fante was a significant influence on Charles Bukowski, who mined a similar milieu for his work, the down and out in Los Angeles. It was also interesting to think about whether or not Ask the Dust qualifies for the Noir label, in that the protagonist is deeply flawed and is also alienated within the society he inhabits.

Fante’s work additionally made me think of On the Road, although I don’t know if there was any cross-over. If there is an essay or two out there about Fante as a precursor to the Beats, I’d like to read that essay.

And then of course there is The Long Take, with which Ask the Dust shares the most DNA in terms of subject matter and setting.

One of the challenges with reading the book for me was trying to figure out what to make of the characters’ racism. The protagonist, Arturo Bandini, his Mexican-American love interest Camilla Lopez, and Camilla’s love interest are all racist, as is the woman who runs the flop-house who won’t rent rooms out to Jews.

As a reader I’m still trying to work out exactly how or when a novel crosses over from being about racism to being racist. Ask the Dust occupies a strange grey area between those two poles. There are different ways that an author can signal that s/he and/or are writing about racism to criticize and condemn it. Racist characters can be presented as unlikable villains; victims of racism can be presented as complex but broadly sympathetic. But people are complex, and so are issues of race, so nuanced approaches to the issues of race are appropriate.

Fante in his novel telegraphs that he as a writer recognizes the harms of racism. Bandini at one point attempts to explain his racist verbal outbursts toward Camilla by claiming that he himself, as an Italian American, was the victim of racist abuse in Colorado, where he was from. So the protagonist is troubled by his racism. However, his apparent rejection of racism is fleeting, as he continues to hurl racist abuse at Camilla after his exposure to racism is detailed in the story.

The arc of Camilla also seems to support the idea that Ask the Dust is an anti-racist work, as the story demonstrates the toll the racist and sexist abuse takes on her.

But this all gets fairly complicated, as Camilla is … there are sort of two strands to that drive the story forward: Bandini’s attempts to become a successful writer, and his infatuation with Camilla. Over the course of the story, Camilla, in the final third of the book, transitions from being merely a passive love interest of Banidini’s into more of a dynamic and active character in her own right. However, the camera in the story remains fixed on Bandini at all points, so her experiences are filtered through Bandini, and they are secondary to his development as a writer. Racism then does not receive serious exploration as part of the protagonist’s development.

Additionally, there is weird race- and gender-related stuff between Bandini and Camilla that Bandini fails to recognize as troubling. In the midst of a sexual liason with a Jewish woman whom he uses as a stand-in for Camilla, he fantasizes about Camilla as a Mayan princess, but he is Cortez the conqueror. The goal for Arturo seems to be domination rather than something like love.

It is a convoluted stew. At the end of the day I think the best I can say about Ask the Dust on the issues of race and gender is that it’s a mixed bag.