Chump Change

Fante, Dan

ISBN 10: 0941543234 / ISBN 13: 9780941543231

Published by Sun Dog Press, 1998

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Synopsis:

Fiction. The book follows the exploits of Bruno Dante. In New York his life is a train wreck and is turned into an upheaval when he gets the call from Los Angeles that his screenwriter father is in a coma and not expected to live. The next three weeks on the streets on the streets of L.A. will change Bruno Dante's life forever. The book expresses the bewilderment of its hero and its author with rawness, crudeness, and shock, and also serves as a very beautiful and touching homage to Fante's famous father John Fante.

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

Bibliographic Details

Title: Chump Change
Publisher: Sun Dog Press
Publication Date: 1998
Binding: paperback
Condition: Very Good