I have had Ask the Dust in my collection for years, but you give it new significance. Bukowski said "here was a man who not afraid of emotion," which is the courage to be conflicted, and live in depth. All the more remarkable for all of our modern failings.

The Road to Los Angeles. Arturo Bandini gets a job in a warehouse, and he determines that he can be more efficient in carrying boxes...it's one of the most artfully written chapters in fictional humor. I've always used that chapter as a benchmark against which I compare my own attempts at written humor.

Nice to see John Fante showing up, but his story is well known, at least to fans of Los Angeles literature. I first read him around fifteen years ago, during my first stint in L.A.: "Ask the Dust" was de riguer reading for young literary L.A. transplants. Fante's biography is iconic of a certain type, and mixes success and failure, as all good ones do. Not all of his books are great, and he didn't fulfill his ambitions, which were to be more than merely published. But Fante has superceded Bukowski in portraying a certain kind of Los Angeles, at least for me, and if he isn't known to the masses, well, who the hell is?

Well, as I prepared to post this letter, I saw that someone else has already made the same point, but when I first moved to Los Angeles from New York a little over fifteen years ago, almost every person I met owned a copy of "Ask the Dust." Youthful snob that I was, I couldn't understand how I'd never come across a Fante novel in a New York bookstore or, for that matter, I'd never heard mention of his name. Surely, I thought, he can't be that good if he's celebrated exclusively in a cultural gulag like L.A. It took me years before I got around to reading "Ask the Dust," and it immediately became one of my all-time favorites -- in fact, the ending may be my favorite conclusion to a novel ever. It's also one of the best portraits of young manhood -- Italian-American or not -- ever put to paper. Why isn't Fante better known outside L.A.?

Of course, in recent years, readership has fallen to such lows that even in L.A. Fante's no longer as famous as he used to be. In a way, I'm sorry that "Ask the Dust" has finally been turned into a movie, especially one directed by Robert Towne. Yes, "Chinatown" was a great film, and Towne was the screenwriter, but Roman Polanski deserves as much credit for that script as Towne. But if the screen version (apparently shot in South Africa!) helps to generate a little more attention for Fante, I'm sure it will all have been worth it.

...for a genuinely delightful read. I discovered "Ask the Dust" the same year that Fante died, 1983, which was my freshman year at college. It was, ironically, through Fante that I discovered Charles Bukowski, and for that I will always be grateful. He was an extraordinary writer. It's a shame his son thinks of him the way he does.

Do you know The Good Life's "Album of the Year" (Saddle Creek)? The lyrics go:

"I was reading Fante at the time / I had Bukowski on my mind"

Great song.

Read Stephen Cooper's Fante bio, "Full of Life."

And read "The Road to Los Angeles," "Wait Until Spring, Bandini," and "Ask the Dust."

In Europe more people seem to know Fante.

Thank You Salon for bringing John Fante to my attention. I've never heard of him before.

Perhaps with two of Arturo Bandini's "sons" on the Supreme Court maybe Fante will start to resonate.