Dreams From Bunker Hill

by John Fante (1983)

1/10

An ugly, pointless, and incredibly dated book, which makes me wish I had never read anything else by Fante after his magnum opus Ask the Dust (which I nevertheless insist everyone should read).

Here we have basically a repeat of the similarly bad The Road to Los Angeles, which Fante declined to publish in his lifetime and frankly should have remained unpublished. It’s the same sociopathic and cowardly protagonist, abusing people (especially women) with little internal life/motivation to speak of. But it’s all the more disappointing than Los Angeles because it is not the first but the last book of Fante’s career, coming from the mind of an elderly and allegedly mature writer, and willingly offered for publication

What happens in this book? Doesn’t really matter. Just a bunch of episodes of him getting into and out of situations, the “out of” usually by sabotaging himself, behaving like a child, and/or generally treating people like shit. The most memorable thing is probably all the critiques of various womens’ asses.

I wrote the below in my Wait Until Spring, Bandini review, and it’s worth repeating here. I’d strongly recommend that everyone read Ask The Dust and The Wine of Youth, and then nothing else, ever, by John Fante. Let me be your martyr, having suffered through all of his oeuvre so that you don’t have to.

This is disappointing in a way, as I read Dust and wanted Fante to be my writing hero, this unknown, underappreciated artist whose brilliance only I and a handful of enlightened others could recognize. After reading his two previous books I’m suspecting that Dust is more lightning in a bottle, the convergence of a perfect set of circumstances — brilliance, frenetic energy, maturing as a writer, truly comprehending the material — that produced a single, staggering work of genius.