John Fante’s Ask the Dust and Fictions of Whiteness

Italian Immigrants, Whiteness, and Race: A Regional Perspective

“…Italian Americans' standing on the white side of the color line had narrative echoes, too. For instance, in John Fante's novels set in the Great Depressionera Golden State, such as Ask the Dust and The Road to Los Angeles, the fictional main character of Italian descent, Arturo Bandini, boasts of his whiteness while confronting his Mexican-American mistress, Camilla Lopez, and his Filipino co-workers (Elliott 2010;Bordin 2019, 159-166). Yet it was not only California's Italian Americans who thought of themselves as being white; they were perceived as such also by the larger society in this state, primarily becauseas Sbarboro's experience demonstrated-they were available to participate in the system of the anti-Asian exclusion (Caiazza 2019).…”

John Fante's Ask the Dust: Between art and self-dramatisation

“…Yet, various critics have been quick to point this factor out. Susanne Roszak, for example, suggests that ‘the unreliability of Fante's narrator […] becomes increasingly clear as the novel progresses (Roszak, 2016: 195), whilst Matthew Elliott asserts that ‘Arturo Bandini remains an unreliable narrator even at the end of the novel’ (Elliott, 2010: 531). But this begs the question of who the narrator is.…”