A Man of the Ages

If the Italian immigrant experience has a presence beyond the mythic Mafia of Mario Puzo, it is through the short stories and novels of John Fante. While he has never been a highly recognized American writer, by 1940 when he was 21, Fante had already published two novels, "Wait Until Spring, Bandini" and "Ask the Dust," as well as half of his lifetime production of short stories in national magazines such as the American Mercury, Atlantic Monthly, Harper's Bazaar and Scribner's Magazine, many of which were published in his first short story collection, "Dago Red." Until recently, there was little we knew about this author's life, aside from what we could glean from his highly autobiographical fiction.

Through Fante's work, I, like other Americans of Italian descent, came to understand the experiences of our grandparents. Much of this realization comes through his great Bandini novels, "Wait Until Spring, Bandini," "The Road to Los Angeles," "Ask the Dust" and stories like "The Odyssey of a Wop." Because of Fante, I understood why my mother recoiled at the sound of words like dago and wop, words whose meanings my mother and I did not share, that had never stung me as they had her. "From the beginning," writes Fante, "I hear my mother use the words Wop and Dago with such vigor as to denote violent distaste. She spits them out. They leap from her lips. To her, they contain the essence of poverty, squalor, filth."

One of the earliest American writers of Italian descent, Fante adapted the oral tradition of southern Italian peasants to a literary culture. His sentence structure is simple and characteristic of the language used in oral storytelling that depends on memory for the maintenance of important information. He strategically repeats words, phrases and sentences to emphasize a feeling or to drive home a philosophical point. His narrative never drags and his dialogue always pushes the story ahead. In crisp, clean, accessible language, he mingles realistic images of working-class characters with the youthful romanticism of a protagonist longing for love or the accolades of success.