I hadn’t heard of it, or the author, but after reading this NPR review by Hector Tobar, I put it on my To Read list (along with The Third Reich, which I mentioned the other day).
People think of Los Angeles as a city without a past. But as a native Angeleno, I stumble upon the relics of its history all the time: the rails of our long-ago vanished street cars embedded in the asphalt, for example, and the mostly vacant towers of stone in our Old Banking District.
There are many novels that can give their readers a sense of what it was like to live in that old L.A., a city of men in fedoras and women in broad-shouldered dresses. But it’s John Fante, largely forgotten outside Los Angeles, who best brings the passion, the possibility and the hurt of that glamorous city to life, specifically with his 1939 novel Ask the Dust.
More at the link.
Kathy
I heard a review of Ask the Dust on NPR yesterday.