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Full of Life, by John Fante
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In the definitive biography of John Fante, English and film studies professor Stephen Cooper explores the life of a man whose muse was Los Angeles.
- Sales Rank: #981424 in Books
- Model: 957723
- Published on: 1988
- Released on: 2002-05-31
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.94" h x .37" w x 5.88" l, .45 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 161 pages
About the Author
John Fante began writing in 1929 and published his first short story in 1932. His first novel, Wait Until Spring, Bandini, was published in 1938 and was the first of his Arturo Bandini series of novels, which also include The Road to Los Angeles and Ask the Dust. A prolific screenwriter, he was stricken with diabetes in 1955. Complications from the disease brought about his blindness in 1978 and, within two years, the amputation of both legs. He continued to write by dictation to his wife, Joyce, and published Dreams from Bunker Hill, the final installment of the Arturo Bandini series, in 1982. He died on May 8, 1983, at the age of seventy-four.
Most helpful customer reviews
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful.
How could there be so much beauty in the world?
By Aco
This is a beautiful book, in the fullest sense of the term. Practically autobiographical, Full of Life tells the tale of Fante and his pregnant wife, Joyce, as well as his father and mother. It is beyond anything, a message of beauty, joy, wonder, astonishment, blissfulness, impending fatherhood, family and love.
Written in a most direct and simple style, Fante expresses very succinctly the emotions of a soon-to-be father, and the rises and falls of being married to a woman who is pregnant for the first time. His trepidation, her alterations at the hands of hormonal shifts and their fluctuating connections to each other, make for a sweetness, pervasive throughout the book, that inspires the deepest of respect for marriage, coupling and home.
When a surprising home accident occurs, Fante decides to venture to his parents home in the Sacramento Valley, from Los Angeles where he and Joyce live in their newly purchased house. His father and mother, the very image of emotional, visceral, animated Italian immigrants, welcome and cajole him, as his appearance is unanticipated. Papa Fante was for many years a bricklayer, and John hopes to engage him in help for his own home, unsure of the high costs hiring out will bring. After some dramas, Papa and son return to L.A., where the coming child brings together Joyce and her father-in-law, leaving John to struggle with issues of marriage, son-hood, fatherhood, and Joyce's new found religion, as if alone.
In the end, Full of Life is an interesting, beautifully written, funny, sweet story of family, in the best sense. The emotions of everyone involved, the observances of scathing insecurity which Fante makes of himself and those around him, the sense of warmth and hope, make this a superb experience. Another terrific time with the Great John Fante.
14 of 14 people found the following review helpful.
"Full of Life": full of good writing
By Michael J. Mazza
"Full of Life," the novel by John Fante, is told in the first person by a character named, curiously enough, John Fante. This is one of many details in which the character's life mirrors that of the author. But whatever the degree to which "Life" is autobiographical, this is a very engaging, well-written novel.
The narrator of "Life" is an Italian-American writer living in Los Angeles with his pregnant wife, Joyce. As the novel follows the course of Joyce's pregnancy, John deals with Joyce's shifting emotional moods, her growing interest in Roman Catholicism (from which John himself has fallen away), and termite infestation in the house. All of this is further complicated by John's problematic relationship with his father Nick, a retired bricklayer who isn't shy about sharing his own strong opinions about family life.
This book is truly full of life: it is a richly realized blend of comedy and drama, and is peopled by a vividly realized group of characters. I especially loved old Nick Fante: stubborn but loving, devoted to his family and to his craft, and a rich source of Abruzzian folk beliefs.
"Life" is also noteworthy as a novel which really takes religion seriously, acknowledging both the emotional power and problematic nature of Roman Catholicism for many Italian-Americans. "Full of Life" is ultimately a very moving story of family ties, and a noteworthy contribution to the multi-ethnic literary heritage of the United States.
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
Artless candor, and a great religious novel
By D. G. Myers
Originally published by Little, Brown in 1952, "Full of Life" was Fante's third published (fourth written) novel. Upon its publication, the critic Joseph Henry Jackson warned in the Los Angeles Times that it was "in danger of being underestimated." And that is exactly what happened. Even in the fifties, the novel was probably better known as the source for the 1956 film starring the incomparable Judy Holliday. Released by Columbia Pictures, it was directed by Richard Quine, who later made "Sex and the Single Girl" and How to Murder Your Wife. Although its screenplay was written by Fante himself, the film removes the Catholic subplot from Fante's novel and drains it of (most) its Catholic meaning.
John Fante (the narrator bears the author's name) is a thirty-year-old writer with three novels under his belt. He lives in "that jumbled perversity called Los Angeles, right off Wilshire Boulevard," with his 24-year-old wife Joyce. She is pregnant with their first child. And they have recently bought their first house.
One morning when he is upstairs in the bathtub, Fante hears a scream ("a theater scream, Barbara Stanwyck trapped by a rapist"), and he rushes downstairs to find that Joyce has fallen through the termite-infested kitchen floor to the ground three feet below. Strapped for cash, Fante decides to return home to the small town of San Juan in the Sacramento Valley and enlist Papa, "the greatest bricklayer in California, the noblest builder of all!" "He'll do it for nothing," Fante crows.
It's not that simple. An exile's return never is. Mama and Papa are first-generation immigrants from Abruzzi. They offer their son food, prayer, advice. Now, Fante has tried his best to shed all evidence of his Italian ethnicity, including his Catholicism, and to assimilate into L.A., where he enjoys "the temper of our time," "the snarl of cars and the hooting of busses." He angrily rejects his parents' beliefs and practices: "Superstition," he says. "Ignorance." But when Papa agrees to return with Fante to L.A., he brings the superstition and ignorance with him.
The clash between Fante's modernity and Papa's traditionalism turns the L.A. house upside down. Papa takes one look at it and will have nothing further to do with the kitchen repair. "That's no job for me," he says. "Get a carpenter." He is a stonemason. What he wants is to build Fante and Joyce a new fireplace--a massive structure of Arizona flagstone, six feet high and ten feet across. "For my grandson," Papa says, dreaming of Fante's unborn child. "It'll last a thousand years."
Fante is opposed, but Papa finds an unlikely ally in Joyce. Although she is seven months pregnant, she throws herself into the project. She mixes the mortar for Papa: "All day long she prodded the mortar with a hoe, kneading it, stroking it, adding water. She was like a child making mud pies." She shovels sand into the mortar box, carts it indoors. Fante is appalled. "Keep this up and you'll have a miscarriage," he warns. "Won't hurt her," Papa disagrees. "Back in Abruzzi, woman works right up to the last day, washing clothes, cleaning house, fixing the land." "Look, Papa," Fante says. "This isn't Italy."
But it is. By building the massive fireplace, Papa transforms the house into an Italian sanctum. And its influence upon Joyce is deep and unsettling. She begins to find herself drawn to the Church of Rome.
At first Fante is amused, dismissing her religious stirrings as a phase of pregnancy which will "pass as soon as her figure returned." Joyce had always been an atheist, which made things easy for him. He knows how hard it is to be a good Catholic. "To be a good Catholic," he muses, "you had to break through the crowd and help Him pack the cross." Joyce is serious, though. She reads her way from Chesterton and Belloc and Thomas Merton and Fran�ois Mauriac to canon law, Aquinas, Thomas � Kempis, St. Augustine, the papal encyclicals, and the Catholic Encyclopedia.
She takes instruction, and four days before her child is born, she enters the Church. Fante immediately feels the change in her--"a maturity, a quality of womanhood not associated with her pregnancy; a tradition, rather an identification with Mother Church, with the Church's high reverence for women. . . ." He tries to join her, but finds that he is not ready for confession. Papa attempts to force him. "Get in there." He pushes his son toward the confessional, but Fante clings to a pew and refuses to budge.
Because of its artless candor, Full of Life is the most probing account I have ever read of the religious return. Fante is honest about his doubts, but he is equally honest about the highs and lows, the joy and tedium, of Catholicism. He does not withdraw from the religious experience into a well-armored skepticism. As a consequence, he finds himself surprisingly moved to tears by the ceremony in which Joyce is accepted into the Church.
The novel eschews any ambition to be "profound." Its surface appears to be shallow, quick-paced, dialogic rather than discursive. It does not worry theological problems; it strokes the ordinary nap of domestic intimacy. But it also knows the depth of intimacy which religious feeling opens up and reveals. There are other reasons to prize the novel. Italian-American novelists like Mario Puzo, Hamilton Basso, and Paul Gallico may have achieved a larger readership, and poets like Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gregory Corso, and Diane di Prima may have received more respectful critical attention, but no one has ever improved upon Fante's portrait of the tension between two generations of Italian-Americans and the mixed-blessing debt that the second owes the first. Precisely because of its humor and lightness of tone, "Full of Life" is that unexpected thing--not "The Power and the Glory," but a great religious novel that appears out of nowhere, while you thought you were watching "Father Knows Best" or "I Love Lucy."
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