‘That’s enough. Now this book is yours’. This is how Charles Bukowski ended his introduction to Ask the Dust, John Fanté’s second novel, the third chronologically in the Arturo Bandini saga. The Bandini books are most commonly sold nowadays in the full quartet, with Bukowski’s introduction before the first novel, Wait Until Spring, Bandini. Half way through this novel the reader truly begins to resonate with that statement; the book reads so quickly, and is so emotive that in the second half you feel yourself slowing down in an attempt to hold on to the story and the pristine thoughts of a fourteen year old boy, just before it slips into the dispirited voice of a menial worker in The Road To Los Angeles, the second part of the saga.
First published in 1938, Wait Until Spring, Bandini relates the story of an impoverished Arturo Bandini, John Fanté’s alter ego – an Italian immigrant in Colorado. He steals penitently from his mother, Maria, whom his father, Svevo, frequently abandons. Arturo misbehaves in his class and it is here where he falls in love with a girl called Rosa. Fanté’s portrayal of his mother is deeply affectionate, though not apparent to his fourteen-year-old self. He, his two younger brothers and his mother visit their Catholic Church every Sunday, and the story conveys an elegant comparison of his mother to the Virgin Mary, who ‘had already interceded to the extent of a splendid husband, three fine children, a good home, lasting health, and faith in God’s mercy’. Yet the blatant ignorance of Arturo, blindly wishing to follow Svevo in his abandonment of Maria, is humbly confessed by Fanté to applaud his mother’s faithfulness.
Fanté is often associated with Bukowski, and whilst the works of both include tales of asperity and bitterness, Wait Until Spring, Bandini also speaks beautifully the common teenage idealism, expressed through Arturo’s infatuation that lights up his troubled upbringing: ‘Save for the roar of his heart, he was dead’. Whereas Bukowski’s novels are blunt and to-the-point, leaving the reader to construct the intricacies, Fanté provides remarkable descriptions that seem even more special when enveloping the grunts of a poor immigrant of fourteen: ‘he started to run, the wind in his face stinging him, flecking him with fresh, new thoughts’.
Arturo also loves to play baseball, but in a snowy Colorado Winter he has to wait. Wait Until Spring, Bandini, as well as expressing the familial struggles and poverty of the lives of immigrants in 1920s America, it pertains to the fresh, new thoughts of a roaring heart that is familiar to adolescents of early 20th and 21st Centuries; all are essential in a classic coming-of-age-novel.
Words by Ewan Marshall