Chump Change ('rebel Inc' S.) - Softcover

Fante, Dan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0862419581 ISBN 13: 9780862419585

Publisher: Canongate Books Ltd, 2000

Synopsis

Chump Change is a largely autobiographical novel and as such is a moving homage to the author's father John Fante, the acclaimed LA novelist who so heavily influenced and inspired Charles Bukowski. Chump Change tracks three crazy weeks in the turbulent, alcohol-bingeing life of Bruno Dante as he awaits the death of his father, Jonathan Dante, a talented fiction writer who in later life sells his soul for Hollywood gold. The result is a harrowing descent through a Hollywood hell that roars with anger at the falseness of American values and is both deadpan hilarious and deeply moving.

About this title

Review:

Dan Fante's debut novel Chump Change is an alarmingly frank and funny tale of a damaged man and his attempts to come to terms with his dying father's unerring fall into the void. Dan's alter-ego Bruno Dante, an intelligent, angry alcoholic, is mourning his own life and his father's tragic demise. His father Jonathon Dante sold his soul to Hollywood rewriting empty scripts when he should have been filling the world with the brutal poetry of his novels (Exactly as, in real life, Dan's father, the superb Los Angeles' writer John Fante (so beloved of Bukowski) had done).

Bruno can't cope with the fact of his blind, limbless father lying in a hospital refusing to actually die so, between losing himself in mindless, immoral sales jobs, he tries to lose himself in the mindless stupor of an almost continual "Mad Dog"-inspired drunken binge. Hooking up with a teenage whore, stealing his brother's car, and running from the hospital afraid to confront the reality of his family life, Bruno is a seriously messed up individual. But the novel, a roman à clef, is the articulation of Dan Fante's own attempts to come to grips with both the squandered and ignored prose of his woefully underrated father and his recent death, and is clearly the moving testimony of a devoted son. It is a paean to John Fante the writer, and a pained shriek of love. Part of a projected Bruno Dante trilogy (which includes the excellent Mooch) Chump Change is a testament to the restorative power of writing and to writing's power to portray both desolation and restoration. --Mark Thwaite

Review:

"a brutally honest, sometimes poisonous raging against the system, God, Los Angeles, life in general and the alcoholic's plight in particular. It was also funny, satirical and touching, yet without sentimentality." (Scotland on Sunday)

"Uncommonly well written and has an almost fatal fascination." (The Herald)

"careering from from mishap to disaster in a series of darkly comedic vignettes involving a flea-bitten bull terrier named Roco, a runaway teenage prostiute whose chronic stutter can only be cured by booze, and an interlude working for a telephone dating agency in which Bruno sabotages his career prospects by seducing his first client. Chump Change is a book which drags the reader through every sweat, tremor and degenerate convulsion of the alcoholic's existence." (Daily Telegraph)

About this edition

• Publisher: Canongate Books Ltd
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 0862419581
• ISBN 13: 9780862419585
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 192