John Fante is oft considered the real deal, a Los Angeles writer of genuine talent; as far as I can tell, this reputation is based entirely on the word of one man– Chuckie Bukowski– and one novel, Ask the Dust, viewed by Bukowski as a kind of founding document of his own career. I bought Ask the Dust a few months ago– before I knew it was the centennial of Fante’s birth– because of this fabulous post about the apartment in which the book was writ. (Caveat emptor, my sweet darlings, cuz it’s got a few photos of human feces smeared about the floors.)

Having read Ask the Dust, I am now left wondering if anyone other than Bukowski bothered reading past the first twenty pages– yes, it’s nice enough to have an evocation of 1930s Bunker Hill, but that river quickly runs dry, leaving the parched reader with a clunky novel that provides answers to questions everyone has since forgotten. The characterization, such as it is, has one laughing at the author’s seeming ignorance of any human interaction, ever, and the last third of the book contains the worst drug writing that I’ve had the misfortune of reading. We’re talking straight-up, genuine Reefer Madness.

The plot of the book, such as it is, revolves almost entirely around the protagonist’s pursuit of a young Latina woman named Camilla Lopez, a Frankenstein’s Monster of cliches stitched together with misogyny and racism– she’s a Mexican pretending to be white, she’s a hophead lost to the perils of maryjane addiction, she can’t love the author’s stand-in cuz she loves another man who doesn’t love her and she’s an awful whore or some bother like that– that lumbers through the book, ever in danger of being chased by peasants into a burning windmill.

One might forgive the novel its flaws if they read as period anachronisms– after all, ain’t that Heaffy and Caffy jes’ so lifeylike tho’ they speke ne diff’runt from yous and I– but Fante isn’t simply of his period, he’s a victim of it, utterly unable to rise above gutter literature of the late Thirties. It’s a testament to Hank Aqualung’s hold over Los Angeles’s post-Chandler vision of itself– or perhaps the fact that no New Messiah has Arisen amidst chanted Hosannahs and resounding Hallelujahs– that the nodding head of a drink besotted pervert, himself not an especially astute student of human behavior, could elevate a period obscurity into a work deserving 100 year celebrations.