John Fante’s books are kept behind the customer service desk at St. Marks Books, along with Bukowski, Burroughs and all the other oft-shoplifted authors.  That should tell you something.

Wait Until Spring, Bandini, published in 1938, was his first novel and the kick-off of the four-novel “Saga of Arturo Bandini.”  Although lacking the focus and narrative skill of his next novel, Ask the Dust, usually considered his greatest (and considered by many to be one of the finest American novels), Fante’s debut demonstrates the same naturalistic voice and brutal honesty that would come to define his body of work.

Wait Until Spring, Bandini tells the story of a first-generation Italian-American family living in poverty in the depths of a miserable, cold winter in Depression-era Colorado.  The focus is on Svevo Bandini, an under-employed bricklayer and father of the Bandini clan, and his oldest son Arturo, Fante’s surrogate who would become the main character of Ask the Dust.  Svevo stumbles into an extramarital affair when he does some work for Mrs. Hildegarde, the richest woman in town.  She gives him sex but not a trace of love or genuine respect.  Arturo longs for his classmate Rosa.  When she’s not ignoring him entirely, she gives him little else but contempt.  Only Maria Bandini, wife and mother, loves them both passionately, but her love is only reciprocated fitfully.

There’s something very American about this novel and about Fante’s style of writing.  His characters might not be the brightest bulbs in the shed, but they know what they know, and they know they know it.  They’re frustrated but always longing for and expecting something better.  They dream big, fall hard and occasionally manage to squeeze a modicum of satisfaction out of the lives they’ve made for themselves.

The novel reads so quickly and easily that its complexity becomes apparent only in retrospect.  How can a boy love his mother but still cheer his father’s extramarital conquest?  Why would a man frustrated by his inability to support his family make matters worse by abandoning them?  And why would he then be so anxious to come crawling back while finally experiencing a life of material luxury?  Fante knew how closely love and hate are intertwined and how logic rarely guides human emotion.

Yet Fante’s novels were out of print for much of his life.  The man’s literary endeavors (he was also a screenwriter) did not find much respect until Charles Bukowski, his literary descendent, championed his work and helped to bring his books back into print in the early 1980’s.  Fiction about working class Italians, especially work with a Catholic sensibility, probably didn’t stand much of a chance throughout much of the 20th Century.  Passages like this, describing the thoughts of the pubescent Arturo, might not have resonated with the literary establishment at the time:

After his twelfth year the only things in life that mattered were baseball and girls, only he called them women.  He said it over and over because it was a secret sensation.  Even at Mass, when there were fifty or a hundred of them around him, he reveled in the secrecy of his delights.

And it was all a sin–the whole thing had the sticky sensation of evil.  Even the sound of some words was a sin.  Ripple.  Supple.  Nipple.  All sins.  Carnal.  The flesh.  Scarlet.  Lips.  All sins.  When he said the Hail Mary.  Hail Mary full of grace, the Lord is with thee and blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb.  The word shook him like thunder.  Fruit of thy womb.  Another sin was born.

Right on.

Wait Until Spring, Bandini probably isn’t quite big enough to support and fully explore its two primary characters, but it gives enough.  It gives more than most.  It’s no Ask the Dust, but you can see where Fante going.  The story might not seem original, the voice and treatment certainly are.  If you’ve never read John Fante, read Ask the Dust.  If you liked Ask the Dust, read Wait Until Spring, Bandini.  If you didn’t like Ask the Dust, get yourself tested for heartlessness.

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