This is a big night for John Fante, and for his son, Dan, who is proud of the old man, even if he doesn't often say so. Dan needs to be in the right mood to speak well of John, and tonight you can see in his smile, he's in the right mood. Tonight Dan is setting aside the bad memories, the sorrow and rage and resentment over John, for a few hours. For as long as any son can set aside such things.
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Where Father Ends and Son Begins
John Fante drank and raged and wrote some of the best prose to come out of L.A. J.R. Moehringer talks to his son Dan, who drank and raged and is determined to write some of the best prose to come out of L.A.
THE GENERATIONS ISSUE
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Friday May 05, 2006 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 1 inches; 41 words Type of Material: Correction
Dan Fante: In last Sunday's West magazine story on writer Dan Fante, it was incorrectly reported that Fante's grandfather had stabbed and killed a man in a barroom brawl. The man was stabbed and critically injured, but he survived the attack.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Sunday May 21, 2006 Home Edition West Magazine Part I Page 7 Lat Magazine Desk 1 inches; 40 words Type of Material: Correction
In the article on Dan Fante ("Where Father Ends and Son Begins," April 30), it was incorrectly reported that his grandfather had stabbed and killed a man in a barroom brawl. The man was stabbed and critically injured but survived.
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Many consider Dan's father the best novelist Los Angeles has ever produced. In spare, gleaming prose, John painted a city that was nasty and harsh, but also shot through with magic--part land mine, part gold mine. "Los Angeles, give me some of you!" John wrote in the 1930s, while starving in a downtown flophouse. John's Los Angeles, where it was normal, even noble, to be a loser, where you could be down to your last nickel and still preen like a diva, won him a cult following, including Charles Bukowski, who famously called John "my god."
Of course, most of the actors and producers attending tonight's premiere of "Ask the Dust," the film version of John's masterpiece, wouldn't know John if he fell in their laps. They're here for the booze-and-schmooze. Nor would they recognize Dan, which amounts to the same thing, since Dan is a dead ringer for the old man. (In Dan's vernacular it's "the old man," rarely "my father.") Dan, 62, not only looks like his father, but writes books like his father, and wants to follow in his father's footsteps. That is, some of his father's footsteps. Certain of his father's footsteps lead directly to the grave.
The Fantes are a remarkable tandem: One of the few father-son acts in American literature, they are profoundly different, and yet they have more in common than some twins. Like his father, Dan loves fast cars, mean dogs, good books. Like his father, Dan can hold forth on all the classic masculine subjects--boxing, baseball, poker, pretty women. Like his father, Dan can give off an air of menace, with a gravelly voice and a large tattoo and eyes that narrow suddenly into the kind of scowl that precedes a knife fight. And yet, like his father, Dan can also be deeply sentimental, and terribly fragile. Tonight, for instance, Dan is still smarting over a slight suffered earlier in the day, when a publicist called his last novel "depressing."
