It's hard to talk about Fante without speaking about Bukowski. The literary-minded like to speak about Bukowksi's "discovery" of Fante in terms analogous to Bob Dylan's "discovering" a dying Woody Guthrie in a Brooklyn hospital. But the only Bukowski I've read has been "Post Office," and I didn't much care for it, so i can't really speak to the connection. And I'm generally pretty disparaging of Great Artist mythology like that, so I both can't and don't want to speak to it. Oh, and I didn't see the movie either.

Really, I find it more interesting to think about Fante in terms of moody European writers like Dostoyevsky and Hamsun. Arturo Bandini, on one hand, is this cool dharma bum who walks around LA talking about the sadness of the neon signs and pursuing dead-end relationships with waitresses. On the other hand, he has the moodiness and the desperation of the hero of Hamsun's "Hunger." Bandini doesn't revel in his poverty-- he's aware of how much it cripples him and weighs him down. It's in this mentality that the greatness of the book expresses itself. I've read countless narratives of "starving artists"-- God how I hate that phrase-- and Fante is one of the few who conveys how lonely and friendless that starvation is and how much American poverty alienates you from your family, your fellow humans, and yourself.