Reviews for Chump Change

The average rating for Chump Change based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2020-02-25 00:00:00 David Aleman "'Think dyin's rough… Dyin' ain't shit The hard part is living While the dying's going on.' --Something I heard TJ say." Bruno Dante's self-inflicted knife wounds to the stomach are still healing when he is summoned back to LA to join the vigil of siblings watching his father die. As the tensions and stresses become too much for him to bear, he starts to drink again, becomes obsessed with his father's dog Rocco, and wakes up naked in a stolen car with a homely underage hooker, missing his wallet. This is what happens when he dances with Mad Dog wine. "For me a run on Mogen David was like starting to fuck a five hundred pound female gorilla. All choice is gone. The gorilla lets you know when it's time to quit. Sweet wine is like that." LA is just not good for Bruno, too many memories, too many debaucheries, too many irritations surrounding his almost famous father. His father gave up writing novels to suck at the Hollywood screenwriting tit. Writing for money instead of passion had eroded him, like the diabetes that was taking his body parts one piece at a time. He was frustrated, volatile, and cuttingly abusive. "The Dante I was remembering was more prick, less poet." So he is stuck with a dog who is obsessed with a putrid gopher and a hooker "whose passions were penises and books." Her favorite writer is William Faulkner, and when she is drunk, she starts talking like a character from one of his books. Okay, she is a royal pain in the ass, underage, which could prove a problem, but how often is a guy going to run into a gal who talks like a Faulkner character? Needless to say, things get much, much worse for Bruno as he drives around LA, sloshed out of his mind, in his stolen car, trying to escape the responsibility of watching his father die. He finds a copy of one of his father's novels that he hasn't read in decades. The prose brings him to his knees. Dan Fante has a lot in common with Bruno Dante, starting with the heavy drinking problem and ending with a serious problem with his father. His writing style is certainly more influenced by Charles Bukowski than it is by his own father, John Fante. There is no pretense here...Dante...Fante. He is novelizing his life. His father wrote four books featuring Arturo Bandini, and Dan wrote four novels featuring Bruno Dante. It is certainly an ode to his father, who was probably one of the most passionate, disappointed men in Hollywood. He could starve and write novels, or he could write screenplays and feed his family. He chose his family over his craft, and it gutted him. Dan Fante drank and fornicated his way around the world, but in the end, he came back to live and die in LA. It is where dreams are made and dreams are laid to rest. This is certainly a wild ride. There are definitely moments when he tries too hard to shock, but with all the layers of nuance regarding his relationship with his father, it makes the book even more compelling to read. I'm going the distance. I plan to weave John and Dan's quartet of novels into my reading queue over the next year. It will be a father and son sitting on a porch and having a conversation with each other. I'm just the guy in the shadows, sipping some sweet lemonade, eavesdropping on their conversation, hoping to see some bridges built over the gaps in their personal relationship. If you wish to see more of my most recent book and movie reviews, visit I also have a Facebook blogger page at:

Review # 2 was written on 2010-01-10 00:00:00 Jessica Jensen 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.