Category: underappreciated books
“Tetched by Thaddeus Rutkowski is a fitting second punch follow-up to his debut novel Roughhouse, which also straddles the startling fine line between pleasure and pain. Erotic pleasure. Erotic pain. But this is not a playful foray into S&M–though it takes as many risks–Rutkowski’s journey is much more complex than that as he unravels both psychology and sexuality through one of the most memorable of protagonists: an awkward biracial youth who escapes the small town repressions (and oppressions) to explore the big city ones. Only the thick-skinned will resist the urge to flinch; and the meek will find it difficult to leave this enticing book of unconvetional lust and love. By the end of this novel, the real world will seem a little less shocking, and, thankfully, a little less dull. I highly recommend both these titles that connect preadolescence to adulthood in a most unusual and intelligent way.”
Rigoberto González is the author of four books, most recently the controversial children’s book Antonio’s Card. The recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship and a contributing editor to Poets & Writers Magazine, he is currently associate professor of English and Latina/o Studies at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
“One night I was sitting on the bed in my hotel room on Bunker Hill, down in the very middle of Los Angeles. It was an important night in my life, because I had to make a decision about the hotel. Either I paid up or got out: that was what the note said, the note the landlady had put under my door. A great problem, deserving acute attention. I solved it by turning out the lights and going to bed.”
This is how Arturo Bandini introduces himself in John Fante’s 1939 novel, Ask the Dust. I’ve read the book several times, and with each re-read, I stop after this opening paragraph. This go-at-it, I tell myself, I’ll know what to make of this indifferent, slack writer who constantly refers to himself in the third person. But soon after, Bandini not only surprises me but also forces me to empathize with him.
Addressing himself, he says, “…you were born poor, son of miseried peasants, driven because you were poor, fled from your Colorado town because you were poor, rambling the gutters of Los Angeles because you are poor, hoping to write a book to get rich, because those who hated you back there in Colorado will not hate you if you write a book. You are a coward, Bandini, a traitor to your soul, a feeble liar before your weeping Christ. This is why you write, this is why it would be better if you died.”
A struggling writer with only a single story under his belt, Bandini goes to LA to make it. He barely gets by, eating oranges, stealing milk, all the while waiting for word from his editor out east, Hackmuth, who Bandini sees as a God–the man who will save him from a destitute life. To complicate matters, Bandini falls for Camilla Lopez, a Mexican bar maid, who is in love with another failed writer, a bartender who is dying. Eventually, Bandini achieves literary success, but his relationship with Camilla, not to mention his notions of the writer’s life, are ultimately doomed.
Charles Bukowski called Fante’s writing “superb simplicity.” He and others, including Carey McWilliams and Robert Towne, consider Ask the Dust as one of the greatest novels published in America. Fante’s been compared to Dostoevsky, Hamsun, Hemingway, Wolfe, Steinbeck, Saroyan and Nathanial West–and deservingly so. But unlike them, his classic novel is oft forgotten. It shouldn’t be. It’s at once tender, harsh, funny, sad. Ask the Dust is a kick in the pants, an eye-opener, a lesson in humility. Whenever I start to take myself too seriously, I pick it up and within minutes I am humbled.
Hayan Charara is the author of two books of poems, The Alchemist’s Diary (Hanging Loose, 2001) and The Sadness of Others (Carnegie Mellon, 2006). His poetry has appeared in numerous publications, among them Chelsea, Cream City Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and the anthology American Poetry: The Next Generation. Born in Detroit, he lived for many years in New York City before moving to Texas. Like Arturo Bandini, he’s waiting to hear back from his agent about his first novel, Regret.
“I was thirteen the first time I read Frost in May by English writer Antonia White. I can’t even say how many times I have read this perfect novel. First published in 1933, and then rediscovered, reprinted in 1982 by Virago Modern Classics (a beautiful and unfortunately defunct press devoted to restoring the works of women authors), Frost in May tells the story of Nanda Grey, nine years old, who is sent by her convert Catholic father to receive her education at the formidable Convent of the Five Wounds.
Young Nanda is just my kind of protagonist: introverted and smart and painfully sensitive, always uneasy with herself and her circle of friends. She is also a tormented writer. At thirteen, Nanda secretly begins to write her first novel. When her work in progress in discovered by the nuns, the consequences for the aspiring author verge on tragic. Antonia White’s prose is both spare and engrossing. Her depiction of the convent’s rites, the kindness and the cruelty of the nuns, is positively fascinating, providing entry into a truly foreign universe.
White, who was plagued by both mental illness and writer’s block, continued Nanda’s story with three additional novels. Nanda Grey becomes Clara Batchelor. These additional volumes (“The Lost Traveler,” “The Sugar House,” and “Beyond the Glass”) also deserve to be read and reread. I certainly have.”
Marcy is the author of Twins, a MacDowell Fellow and the winner of the 2002 Smallmouth Press Andre Dubus Novella Award, and the 1999 Story Magazine Carson McCullers short story prize. Her stories have been published in numerous literary journals, including McSweeney’s, The Alaska Quarterly Review, and The Indiana Review, and included in the anthology Love Stories: A Literary Companion to Tennis. She is a film critic for About.com and belongs to the New York Online Film Critics Society. She lives in Astoria, New York. She is not an identical twin.
“Rarely do we get to peek into the pornography of great writers,” Castellani writes. “Not so with E. M. Forster. In fact, many readers and admirers are not aware that Forster wrote his own porn — a dozen or so short stories collected in the bawdy little volume The Life To Come.
Forster wrote these stories ‘not to express myself but to excite myself’ and knew they (like Maurice) dealt too candidly with (homo)sexuality to be published in his lifetime. Unlike Maurice, though, the stories are far from romantic or sentimental. They are brutal, eerie, ironic, damning of a hypocritical society, and more than a little twisted, even by today’s standards all without resorting to a single explicit sex scene. As in allgreat literature, the characters in The Life to Come are fully human and encounter various emotional obstacles; most of them just happen to involve illicit trysts.
You may want to keep a copy on your nightstand.”
Christopher Castellani was born and raised in Wilmington, Delaware. His parents immigrated to the United States from a small village in Italy in the years following World War II, and their experiences have been a significant inspiration. Castellani’s first novel, A Kiss From Maddalena, was published in 2003, and won the Massachusetts Book Award for Fiction in 2004. His second novel, The Saint of Lost Things, is published this month.