An L.A. story, and its author's too

JOHN FANTE'S "Ask the Dust" is among the ur-texts of Los Angeles literature, a book that, nearly 70 years after its initial appearance, still offers a vivid portrait of the city's life. Although hardly the earliest Southern California novel (that would be Helen Hunt Jackson's 1884 romance "Ramona"), nor even the earliest \o7modern \f7Southern California novel (Carroll and Garrett Graham's "Queer People," the first real Hollywood satire, came out in 1930, and Fante released a previous work, "Wait Until Spring, Bandini," in 1938), "Ask the Dust" helped frame a new sensibility, by turns cynical and innocent, full of rage and hope and desperation, much like Los Angeles.

Published in 1939, the same year as Raymond Chandler's "The Big Sleep" and Nathanael West's "The Day of the Locust" (and newly reissued in paperback by HarperPerennial Modern Classics), it looks at an L.A. in which glam and glitter are not just distant but nonexistent, and it is enough merely to survive. "One night I was sitting on my bed in my hotel room on Bunker Hill," Fante opens the book, "down in the very middle of Los Angeles. It was an important night in my life, because I had to make a decision about the hotel. Either I paid up or I got out: that was what the note said, the note the landlady had put under my door. A great problem, deserving acute attention. I solved it by turning out the lights and going to bed."

"Ask the Dust" revolves around a Fante alter ego named Arturo Bandini, a young writer trying to make his mark. It is, in many ways, the most common of stories, a kind of pilgrim's progress, a naif's initiation into life. Arturo writes, and worries about writing; he falls in love with a Mexican waitress, whom he can't have and (perhaps) doesn't really want. He is casually brutal, to her and to others, and yet his redemption lies in his ability to recognize -- if not mitigate -- this propensity within himself.

In the novel's most memorable set piece, he survives the 1933 Long Beach earthquake, which he interprets as divine retribution for his sins. "You did it, Arturo," the character reflects. "This is the wrath of God. You did it.... Repent before it's too late. I said a prayer but it was dust in my mouth. No prayers. But there would be some changes made in my life. There would be decency and gentleness from now on. This was the turning point. This was for me, a warning to Arturo Bandini."