Book Review : ‘Full of Life’ Full of Doubt, Hostility

Full of Life by John Fante (Black Sparrow: $17.50 cloth, $9 paper; 161 pages)

John Fante’s “Full of Life” first appeared in 1952. Coming, as it did, after “Wait Until Spring, Bandini,” and “Ask the Dust,” it seemed a perfect merry-go-round of good feeling--the simple tale of a man about to become a father for the first time, and the trials attendant thereon. Fante was a member of what was then a very small club; he was a Los Angeles writer and while part of his first two novels centered in Colorado, our city was there too. Fante, Frank Fenton, Jo Pagano, Hans Otto Storm. Look around for Los Angeles novelists in the late ‘30s, the early ‘40s--they were pretty much the brave sum total. And Fante was good. It was evident in every sentence; he meant to tell the truth.

But the “truth” in those first two autobiographical novels was hideous. Fante’s father, an Italian immigrant, was a brute. His mother, abandoned by her husband in one of those tales, grieved until she almost died. Their poverty was close to unbearable, and the chill, the lack of love, the loneliness that Fante portrayed, though authentic, was bleak, sad, tough to read.

Between those first two novels and “Full of Life” Fante became a screenwriter. He became solvent and found a lovely wife. He became, for lack of a better word, “American.”

And so this novel about a young couple in love having their first baby should have been a romantic comedy--as indeed the ‘50s movie made from it was. But the novelist was playing with the same cards he’d been dealt when he was born. What you get, then, when you read “Full of Life,” is the world’s bleakest romantic comedy.

Apart from Fante’s personal material, this novel is a time trip back to when mothers read Gesell instead of Spock; to the days when a pregnant mother could down double martinis and smoke cigarettes right up to the door of the hospital. It is a Nick-and-Nora Charles sophisticated world where you sleep in twin beds and stop off at Lucey’s, the cozy Hollywood hangout, after work for a highball. It is a particular world, again, an American world, and one that Fante, as first-person narrator of this story, totally buys into. He’s happy, he can do it: his wife, Joyce, is beautiful, Protestant, and kind. It’s only that “balloon,” that “blister,” that baby she’s carrying around, that makes him nervous.

When Fante’s wife falls through the termite-infested kitchen floor, he decides to go north and find his father (who made his living as a builder) to fix this unseemly hole. His wife grows “wistful, serious,” reminding her husband that once his father “beat your bare flesh with a trowel.” Fante answers, “I had it coming. I sold his concrete mixer and bought a bicycle.”

I don’t know. It’s strange reading this book again after all these years. The Italian mother, who seriously starved herself in Fante’s early novels, is here portrayed as a woman who routinely fakes heart attacks just to get attention. (But of course Fante and his father pay her no attention at all.) The father here is still a brute but he’s a comic brute, routinely demolishing half a gallon of red wine and plenty of brandy to go with it; treating his son with relentless contempt and at the same time embarrassing his son to distraction with his Old World ways.

Fictionally, then, Fante is in a classic double-bind. He has to tell the truth, that’s what good novelists do. But the truth is: his father is a terrible burden who will be both his blessing and his curse for all his born days, the very emblem of everything Fante himself was, and is trying to get away from. (Twenty-five years later, some of these same problems with alcohol, male bonding, lies told and promises broken, will come up in “Brotherhood of the Grape.” Fante was both Italian and “not-Italian”; that was his eternal material.)

But here, there’s so much displaced hostility and general weird feeling that it’s simply very hard to read this book. The fictional Fante cringes as his mother tries to embrace him. He sneers at his parents’ primitive beliefs about the efficacy of sweet basil and garlic. He’s supremely aggravated by his wife’s conversion to Catholicism and condescends to her (fictionally, at least) in the most irritating fashion--dismissing her possessions as “the many small things in a woman’s life.”

A man caught in problems of tone, in fits of ambivalence and self-loathing, a man so desperate to be taken seriously that he refuses to take anyone else seriously. These are the dispiriting features of “Full of Life.” Fante is dead now, and it’s depressing to speak ill of the dead’s novels. But this attempt at comedy is both tormented and sad, and you have to tell the truth about that.