Here's my take:
Fante is one of those writers I enjoy
for the energy in the prose more than anything else. I might
say the same of Kerouac - there's not all that much there,
but there's just a kind of wild kintetic spirit that lures a
reader in. (Same is true of Jerome Charyn's Isaac Sidel books
- hardboiled fiction as though written by a 7 year old.) In
Fante's case it is a wild, grandiloquent, absurd, juiciness -
a wonderfully stupid defiance and drive. Compared to
Bukowski, he doesn't have quite the same astonishing capacity
for truth-telling - there's a lot of malarkey in Fante, but
it is great malarkey. Nothing that you could call Hardboiled
or Noir - Fante is rather Scrambled and Red. "On Nietzsche's
anniversary, which is my Christmas, I always get stewed,"
Fante wrote to H. L. Mencken in 1932. Bukowski called him a
'Wild and Enormous Miracle.' I think 'Magnificent Bastard'
fits the bill, but that gives you some idea of the appeal,
and the affection some of us have for him as a sort of holy
fool who - if he is not as crafted as Bukowski of Hunter S
Thompson, is also less calculating. In other words, Fante
asks you the reader to get silly, to get a bit drunk on his
words. A nearbye bottle of Vino Collapso or pitcher of
Sangria wouldn't hurt either. "Am I alone now? Poof! My
loneliness bears fruit, and there shall be a Los Angeles of
tomorrow to remember that a Voice trod these stairs, and
Benny the Gouge down on the corner of Third and Hill will
weep for joy as he telleth his grandchild that he once spoke
with a man of the ages." Definitely an American original, a
writer with great energy and humor, and one well worth trying
out.
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