The Road to Los Angeles

John Fante The Road to Los Angeles (1936)
It wasn't until I happened across this one in the second hand book store that I realised Fante had written a number of novels centred around Arturo Bandini, his fictional struggling novelist. This one features a much younger Bandini than Ask the Dust, and it's a very different novel, its tone seemingly informing Bandini's lousy personality. Where Ask the Dust maintains a sense of realism which patently inspired and is comparable with Bukowski, this one is just plain wild. My guess is that this younger Bandini represents a vicious satire on more or less every writer Fante ever met, and I recognise the type, much to my regret. These days he can't stop himself from name-dropping in all those endless repetitive posts on Twitter about who he's submitted a pitch to this week as though the rest of us have any reason to give a shit, or another blog post about what it's like to be a writer, or writing tips from the guy who can barely form an original or cohesive sentence as he vanishes up his own arsehole over and over and over. He's all plans and announcements and declarations but no action. He's got a literature degree and he may be just twenty-two but he already knows fucking everything and will happily tell you where you're going wrong, drawing on the great wealth of his worldly experience in fucking Sussex.

I said to Mona, 'Bring me books by Nietzsche. Bring me the mighty Spengler. Bring me Auguste Comte and Immanuel Kant. Bring me books the rabble can't read.'

Mona brought them home. I read them all, most of them very hard to understand, some of them so dull I had to pretend they were fascinating, and others so awful I had to read them aloud like an actor to get through them.

I've known and even been edited by this barely coherent shithead*, so it's massively satisfying to watch Fante rip the piss out of him for 155 harrowing pages. It's horrible, but absolutely necessary, and I need more by John Fante.

*: Relax, Stuart. I don't mean you.