>Mistaken Identity

>Last month I reported that I had bought Mooch by Dan Fante among several other volumes on sale at the Green Valley Book Fair. It turns out that I thought I had purchased a book by John Fante, whose book Ask the Dust has recently been made into a movie. Dan Fante, I should have known, is the son of the late John Fante, and has published several novels and a collection of short stories, as well as poetry. Here is an interview with Dan Fante in Lummox. Oops.

I read the book anyway and provided a nice relief from the more serious stuff I’ve been reading. Mooch is pulp fiction: entertaining, fast-paced, appalling. It tells the story of Bruno Dante, son of novelist Jonathan Dante. Bruno has seen hard times and now is struggling to stay sober. He manages to get a high-paying telemarketing job which he screws up because he falls (absolutely implausibly) in love with a co-worker who speaks in a cartoonish accent and gets him into trouble. If Bruno hadn’t been a struggling writer, I probably would have quit reading, but I was hooked on page 37:

“I came to an immediate decision: fuck my writing career. My head was clear for the first time in years. I could foresee my own future. Novelists and screenwriters like Jonathan Dante died broke in L.A., humiliated, compromised. Their balls and their talent sacrificed to a ridiculous Hollywood success fantasy. No one cared about words anymore. Literature was deader than a Seinfeld rerun.”

God, I hope not. Eventually, though, Dante sends off his story to seven (glad to see he believes in sim-subbing) “high-end men’s magazines.” So I kept reading to see what would happen.

All in all, it could have been worse.

About the author

I am the author of three novels--THE LAST BIRD OF PARADISE, OLIVER'S TRAVELS, and THE SHAMAN OF TURTLE VALLEY--and three story collections--IN AN UNCHARTED COUNTRY, HOUSE OF THE ANCIENTS AND OTHER STORIES, and WHAT THE ZHANG BOYS KNOW, winner of the Library of Virginia Literary Award for Fiction. I am also the co-founder and former editor of Prime Number Magazine and the editor of the award-winning anthology series EVERYWHERE STORIES: SHORT FICTION FROM A SMALL PLANET.

Comments

  1. >LOL…I do things like this all the time. Glad to see I’m not the only one.

    Right now I’m trying to get into a John Irving novel “Until I Find You” and every page is a chore up until about pg. 19. I will perservere, but it’s a library book so I loathe the pressure. It’s also over 800 pages long. Just shoot me.

  2. >I just don’t have patience for the really long ones anymore–but the Irving is on my list (and my shelf). Maybe if someone held a gun to my head . . .

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