Ask the Dust is one of those novels that makes you resent whatever took you so long to find it. John Fante writes Depression-era Los Angeles with a voice I didn’t know I was missing: Steinbeck’s precision without the distance, and Kerouac’s unbridled humanity without the self-indulgence. The result is a book that feels both crafted and desperate, which is also a fair description of its narrator.

That narrator is Arturo Bandini, a young Italian-American writer from Colorado who has arrived in LA with one published short story to his name and a suitcase full of copies of the magazine it appeared in. He lives in a crumbling hotel on Bunker Hill. Broke, lonely, grandiose, and cruel, he is one of the realest and most alive characters you will encounter in American fiction.

Most of us maintain a workable distance between the person we actually are and the person we fantasize about becoming. You might daydream about writing a great novel while knowing, day to day, that you work in a cubicle and write on weekends. That gap is survivable. It might even be productive–it’s what gets you to the desk.

For Bandini, the gap doesn’t exist. Fantasy has swallowed his identity whole. “I am Arturo Bandini, the writer” isn’t something he’s working toward. It’s an ontological claim he makes on the strength of a single published story, and he needs it to be true the way other people need oxygen. The fusion is what makes him capable of writing at all, but it’s also what guarantees the whole edifice will eventually come apart.

Belief and the Believer

How does Bandini sustain this? He’s broke, nobody in Los Angeles has heard of him, and he spends most of the novel failing to produce pages. The world is not exactly rushing to confirm his self-image. In Lacanian terms, the evidence of the Real–of life as it actually is, indifferent to his grandiosity–is everywhere, pressing in on all sides. By any honest accounting, Bandini is not a writer. He is a kid from Colorado with one story in a magazine. Much of the first section of the book involves Bandini waffling between imagined interviews with journalists covering his success and sobering clashes with reality. About his claim to be a writer, he says:

It wasn’t really a lie; it was a wish, not a lie, and maybe it wasn’t even a wish, maybe it was a fact, and the only way to find out was to watch the mailman, […] ask him point blank if he had anything for Bandini. But I didn’t have to ask after six months at that hotel. He saw me coming and he always nodded yes or no before I asked: no, three million times; yes, once. (14)

And yet despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, he holds fast to his belief. This is possible because he has an editor named J.C. Hackmuth, the man who published Bandini’s first story, “The Little Dog Laughed.” We never meet him. He never appears in person in the novel. But his autographed photo hangs over Bandini’s writing desk like a shrine, and Bandini writes him letters that alternate between wild boasting and abject confession. It’s easy to read past this detail, but I think it’s one of the most structurally important things in the book.

I have mentioned in a prior post the work of philosopher Slavoj Žižek, in particular his argument that belief is always held in the mind of the Other. We don’t really believe things on our own; we believe because we believe that someone else believes. Žižek illustrates this with a joke: a man in a mental hospital is cured of his delusion that he is a grain of seed. Released, he immediately runs back inside, terrified. “There’s a chicken out there,” he says. “He’s going to eat me.” The doctor reminds him he now knows he’s not a grain of seed. “Sure,” the man replies, “but does the chicken know?”

This is Bandini’s predicament exactly. He can tell himself he’s a writer all day, but the telling only works if there’s someone out there who also believes it. Hackmuth is that someone. The fact that Hackmuth is absent–remote, almost divine, encountered only through correspondence–is not incidental. The Other is most effective when he’s not around to disappoint you. As long as Hackmuth remains at a distance, his belief in Bandini can remain total and unqualified, a kind of faith that wouldn’t survive direct contact with its object.

The Grey Flower

Enter Camilla Lopez.

Camilla is a young Mexican waitress at the Columbia Buffet, and Bandini falls for her with the same totality he brings to everything. Their courtship–if you can call it that–is a mess of mutual cruelty, need, and confusion. But what matters for Bandini’s arc is not the love story itself, it’s what Camilla comes to represent.

As Bandini falls deeper into his obsession with Camilla, something happens that I think is the key to the novel: his fantasy of being a great writer and his fantasy of attaining Camilla begin to merge. Success with Camilla becomes indistinguishable from success as a writer. She comes to signify everything he’s lacking–not just companionship but vindication, arrival, the proof that the gap between who he is and who he dreams of being has finally closed.

That gap can’t be closed, however, and the novel shows us this in a scene of remarkable honesty. After a day at the beach, Bandini is in the car with Camilla, holding her, on the verge of fulfilling his fantasy of her… yet he fails. He tells us that “something like a grey flower grew between us, a thought that took shape and spoke of the chasm that separated us. I didn’t know what it was” (68). At just the moment when satisfaction seems most attainable, an emptiness falls on him.

“What it was”–and what Bandini can’t name–is the structural impossibility of desire itself. In Lacanian psychoanalysis, desire isn’t something that can be satisfied by obtaining its object. Desire is constituted by the gap between the subject and the object. The gap isn’t an obstacle to satisfaction; it’s the very thing that generates the wanting. You don’t desire Camilla and then, upon getting her, feel complete. You desire Camilla because of the incompleteness, and getting closer doesn’t close the gap–it reveals it.

The grey flower is that revelation. Bandini has come as close as he will ever come to what he wants, and what he discovers is that proximity doesn’t produce fulfillment. It produces a chasm. He has moved, without knowing it, from a practical problem to a structural one. The structural problem has no solution, but it does have consequences.

The Earthquake

Bandini is now stuck. He can’t reach Camilla, and even if he could, the grey flower would still grow between them. His fantasy of her has hit a wall that no amount of effort can breach.

Enter Vera Rivken. Insane, destitute, and physically scarred, Vera doesn’t have the makings of an object of desire the way Camilla does. She shows up at Bandini’s hotel room uninvited and demands that he love her. She is desperate and real in a way that Camilla–at least, Camilla as Bandini has imagined her–is not.

When Bandini later visits Vera in Long Beach, something crucial happens: he sleeps with her, but only by pretending–with her active cooperation–that she is Camilla. On the surface, this looks like more of the same: another fantasy projected onto another woman. But I think something subtler is going on.

With Camilla, the fantasy was total; Bandini couldn’t distinguish the fantasy from reality, which is why the grey flower was so devastating. With Vera, he knows she isn’t Camilla. He is pretending, and he knows he is pretending. For the first time, the fantasy is being held as a fantasy–at arm’s length, consciously, rather than collapsed into reality.

Lacan has a term for this: the traversal of the fantasy. It doesn’t mean the fantasy disappears. It means the subject comes to see the fantasy as a fantasy, rather than mistaking it for the way things are. This is what Vera allows Bandini to do–not because she’s better than Camilla, or because the experience with her is more authentic, but because the conditions of the encounter force the fantasy to announce itself as fantasy. He can’t pretend someone is Camilla without acknowledging, somewhere within himself, that she isn’t.

But the traversal doesn’t happen through Vera alone. The morning after he has slept with Vera, he is walking on the beach, experiencing something like an epiphany, when the Long Beach earthquake of 1933 hits. The ground itself gives way, buildings collapse, and people die in bloody horror.

When reality exceeds your capacity to process it, the first move is always to force it back into a story. Bandini’s first reaction is to interpret it as divine punishment for sleeping with Vera–which is a wildly symbolic reading of a geological event, demonstrating his desperation to reassert the fantasy-structure after a rupture.

But the earthquake can’t be fully forced into a story. It’s too big, too literal, too indifferent to Bandini’s drama. He flees back to LA not knowing for sure if Vera survived, and he never sees her again. This is an ugly detail, and Fante doesn’t soften it. The psychic cost of surviving the rupture is the abandonment of any real relation to the person who made the traversal possible.

The earthquake without Vera is just trauma–a random catastrophe that shatters things without providing the subject any new relation to fantasy. And Vera without the earthquake might have let Bandini go on pretending indefinitely, holding the fantasy at arm’s length but never being forced to let it go. Together, they accomplish what neither could alone.

Vera opens a crack in the fantasy-structure by letting Bandini experience the fantasy as fantasy, and the earthquake blows that crack wide open. What emerges from the wreckage is not a man whose fantasy has disappeared–fantasy never disappears–but a man who can no longer fully inhabit his delusions. As he puts it, “They were myths I once believed, and now they were beliefs I felt were myths” (96).

And so Bandini returns to LA and does something he hasn’t been able to do for most of the novel: he writes. Not the grandiose masterpiece he fantasized about, but a novel about Vera–about what actually happened. He takes the rupture of the fantasy–the intrusion of the Real–and forces it into language. This is what Bandini was striving to do all along: taking what exceeds meaning and making it into a story.

Bandini becomes, in fact, a published novelist, finally living up to his earlier delusion. But something crucial has changed: he has arrived at this not as a man who believes he is a great writer, but as a man who knows the distance between himself and that fantasy. He’s an aspirant now, not an oracle. He can no longer return to the naive state where the fantasy and the identity were one, where a single story in a magazine was proof of genius. He is aware of the gap, and now that he is aware of it, nothing can appear to fully close it ever again.

What Awareness Costs

We see this most clearly in Bandini’s relation to his own success. When “The Little Dog Laughed” was published, it was proof that Arturo Bandini was who he said he was. The novel’s publication, by contrast, arrives with a kind of flatness.

My book came out a week later. For a while it was fun. I could walk into department stores and see it among thousands of others, my book, my words, my name, the reason why I was alive. But it was not the kind of fun I got from seeing “The Little Dog Laughed” in Hackmuth’s magazine. (162)

This is not a minor aside; it’s the whole structure of the novel laid bare. The first publication hit so hard because the fantasy-identity was still intact. Seeing the first story in print wasn’t just satisfying, it was confirming.

But by the time the novel comes out, Bandini has been through Vera and the earthquake. The gap between fantasy and identity has been exposed as real and permanent. He can see himself clearly enough now to know that a book in a department store, even his own book, is just a book in a department store. The publication satisfies less because it means less–which is, paradoxically, the healthier position. But health and ecstasy are not the same thing, and Bandini knows what he’s lost.

The Inevitable Return

One of the most psychologically brilliant points in the novel is that it is precisely at this moment that Camilla reappears. Despite everything–the traversal, the earthquake, the novel’s publication–fantasy reasserts itself. Camilla comes seeking help for Sammy, the bartender she actually loves, and Bandini, caught up again in the old desire, obliges.

This is not a regression; once again, it’s a structural feature. The Lacanian subject is always projecting itself forward as fantasy. The gap between who you are and who you imagine yourself to be never disappears. You can become aware of it, you can learn to work within it, but you can never close it, neither through achievement nor the cessation of fantasy. It will always produce new objects of desire, new promises that this time the gap might finally shut.

What follows is a cascading series of misadventures with a rapidly deteriorating Camilla. Her addiction and physical decline mirror, in the real world, what Bandini has already discovered in his mind. The object of desire cannot sustain the weight of what we ask it to carry. It always shrinks, sickens, and reveals itself as finite. Camilla’s final act is to walk into the Mojave Desert and disappear. She doesn’t die in any way Bandini, or we as readers, can confirm. She simply stops being there. The ultimate object of desire becomes the ultimate void.

Into the Dust

And so we arrive at the novel’s closing act. Bandini drives into the desert to find Camilla, but she has disappeared into its emptiness. He takes his published novel–the book he wrote about Vera, the book that made him a real writer, the book we’ve been reading ourselves–signs it with a dedication to Camilla, and throws it into the sand.

What does this mean? I think Fante is doing at least two things at once, and he’s not interested in letting us choose one over the other.

The throw is an act of longing. Bandini is reaching for Camilla in the only way he has left, by offering her the deepest expression of himself. The book is the thing he made out of his suffering and his talent and his willingness to sit down and write when the fantasy had cracked open. To throw it after her is to say: this is what I am, or the closest I can get to what I am, and I’m giving it to you.

But the throw is also a renunciation. The desert will outlast the novel, and Bandini knows it. The sand will swallow the book the way it swallowed Camilla. Bandini says, “You could die, but the desert would hide the secret of your death, it would remain after you, to cover your memory with ageless wind and heat and cold” (164).

Whatever meaning he made (and he did make meaning; the book is real, it exists, we’re reading it), that meaning is fragile, temporary, and subject to the same structural incompleteness that haunts everything else. To throw the book into the desert is to acknowledge that even the work of art, even the thing that survived the traversal, the earthquake, and the long ugly process of actually writing, cannot close the gap. Instead, Bandini flings it into the gap itself.

Whether Bandini discovers this as acceptance or resignation is a question Fante refuses to answer, and I think the refusal is the point. We have spent two hundred pages inside this man’s head, listening to him narrate himself in the first person, and we feel by the end that we know him as well as a reader can know anyone. But the last gesture is opaque. We can’t tell what it means to him. His subjectivity, which seemed so transparently on display through the whole novel, turns out to have been guarding something we can’t quite reach. There is a gap, you might say…

Rating: 9/10. Highly recommended. If you want to understand what it feels like to be young, ambitious, and wrong about almost everything, this is the book.