Full of Life
A Biography of John Fante
by Stephen Cooper
North Point Press, 496 pp., $30
When Edmund Wilson wrote a famous essay about California writers in 1940, “Boys in the Back Room,” he included James Cain, William Saroyan, and John Steinbeck. He did not, however, include John Fante — an inexplicable exclusion, given Wilson’s curiosity and tastes, and a typical instance of bad luck for Fante, whose best novel, Ask the Dust, was published in 1939. Cooper’s biography never puts it in so many words, but Fante had an incredible ability to fuck up. He could be the poster boy of writerly procrastination — from drinking to gambling to golfing to simply wanking away his time in unaccountable ways near a TV set. If James Cain, as Wilson says, is the “damned soul” of Hollywood, Fante is his counterpart in L.A., with his consciousness of how false the WASP-y Southern California surface was. This biography suffers from the convention that puts a person’s family at the center of his life. With Fante, the center of his life was his liquor-mediated friendship with fellow writer Carey McWilliams. Fante generally liked being with “the boys,” and held to that pattern into his 50s. It is, perhaps, unfair to expect Cooper to find a way of encompassing this material in his biography, but one would like to know more about the seedy strip joints and mixed bars between L.A. and San Francisco where Fante spent so much time. Cooper doesn’t go there, but he does tell us how Fante somehow missed acquiring the reputation he deserved, which is essential information for Fante fans. Full of Life: A Biography of John FanteStephen Cooper
This article appears in December 1 • 2000.