Chump Change Book

Looking at the author photograph of Dan Fante -- which depicts a sixtysomething, moon-faced, grimacing bald man in a leather bomber jacket aiming a pistol indiscriminately upward while just behind him four seagulls spread their wings in a cloudless sky -- I was first struck by his intangible Martin Balsam quality, and then as is often the case with books such as Chump Change, I was revisited by the question of authenticity. (i.e., Is this guy for real?? I mean, c'mon...)

Dan Fante is the son of John Fante (Ask the Dust) who inspired Charles Bukowski who inspired Dan Fante. This chain of influence (and genetics) already announces the subgenre we're dealing with here. It's that grimy, grubby late afternoon, long-shadowed L.A. drunken squalor genre... you know, with the underage gazelle-like hookers and the colorful, angry Mexicans and the strip mall liquor stores every other block and the cheap motels with colorful 1950s-era neon signage out front and the commercial-grade low-pile carpeting in the rooms with indecipherable brownish-reddish-blackish stains in the shapes of forgotten Latin American countries. To point you in the right direction, I'll tell you that Bruno Dante, the author's surrogate (à la Henry Chinaski) -- working as a dating service salesman -- ejaculates into his customer's tuna salad in the midst of a late morning wine cooler bender. Don't ask. Context is everything.

Anyway. This book is surprisingly moving. At the end. Once you get past the dogfight, the stuttering hooker, and the fact that apparently no one bothered to proofread it before it was published. Unless 'unphased' has now been officially christened as a real word by the linguistic powers-that-be. (Like when the people who put together dictionaries finally just threw up their hands and surrendered in the face of inexorable misuse and decided they'd let 'alright' be an official word, although it isn't. See? The terrorists won). Also, jeezus fuckin' christ. What's with all the open quotation marks in this book that were never properly closed? You can't believe how incomplete this leaves me feeling. I'm still waiting -- even as I type this -- for the characters to finish speaking, but now they never will. Forever.