Ask the Dust is a great book that captures a specific feeling unlike anything else I’ve ever read. The protagonist is a deeply flawed, almost perverse daydreamer, but it is his flaws that make him relatable in a way I’ve encountered in very few other places.
When I was 22, I went to China for six months as a study abroad student. I returned home for six months to graduate college, then went back to China again for almost three years.
I have a lot of great, fun stories from China. I accomplished some really cool things and I learned a lot. But I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t kind of a confused jerk during that part of my early twenties. I rapidly cycled between feelings of grandiose, wide-eyed, ambitious love for the world and relentless, sardonic, fatalistic skepticism of any good news or sincerity. This is what I saw in Arturo Bandini, the protagonist of Ask the Dust. He is a complicated, perverse character, but in him I saw a lot of myself from that part of my life.
At one point during my time in China, I started a blog. Hundreds of people read it and would often email me to tell me how much they loved it and how talented I was. I began to daydream about being a famous writer, and what that would do for me, and would dine on fantasies of fame and riches while still munching down instant ramen with scrambled eggs and going to the balcony of my Communist-era eighth-floor walkup apartment to smoke the same cheap Chinese cigarettes that the cab drivers bought.
Bandni was a writer who had big dreams and big ideas about the way life should work that often collided with the much-less-than-perfect-reality of his life. This collision–this longing for some recognition and renown–is what I found familiar. And it wasn’t limited to just my writing ambitions.
A long-term relationship I’d been in disintegrated right before my first six months in China. Technically, my ex-girlfriend and I were “on a break” when I got on the plane to Beijing, but we still spoke every day over Skype: her in Texas and me in Beijing. I was spending a lot of time with another woman who came to be one of my best friends on the trip. We grew very emotionally attached. When I found out she was dating other people I was devastated. She nominally supported my non-relationship with my ex-girlfriend but it was clear that she had a strong dislike of her.
We would have conversations where we talked past each other about how we would be the ideal partner for one another but neither of us was totally honest about it. We would go out almost every night with our group of friends then share a taxi back to our apartment building and hold hands, but never kissed or anything else. When her family came to town, I met her parents. And her Dad said it was nice to meet me, and I said she was a good friend. He said that some friends are more meaningful than others. After leaving China, my ex and I got back together, so my good friend and I didn’t speak for years because I didn’t pick up her calls so as not to enrage my (former) ex. Then one day, after my ex and I broke up for good, I called to apologize to my friend with whom I used to hold hands. She said that she understood that my ex came first, and that she’d been ready to just be good friends but I hadn’t been. And that it had hurt when I didn’t call and she had got over it. But she had already got over it, so it wouldn’t be the same moving forward.
In the book, Bandini wants so much from life, but others’ opinion of him is so important—not always in a literal sense. Often, just because he sees himself as the main character. I saw my younger self in him: in some ways I was bold and in some ways I was timid, inconsistent in either direction because I was always trying to conform to the narratives I was sketching in my mind. My inability to see what was in front of my face because of my daydreams was very confusing. I tried to do the right thing but also had so many dreams and feelings I didn’t know how to handle.
After I broke up with my ex again for the last time, I got a job with an education startup. I kept getting promoted over and over because I didn’t understand how work worked, and that if you are reasonably competent and keep saying you can do more work, most workplaces will just keep working you until you are addicted to instant coffee, chain-smoking Chinese cigarettes, working seven days a week on three to four hours’ sleep. I was an overworked English teacher embedded in a local public school who specialized in SAT Prep. While I learned a lot, I thought of myself as a titan of industry because it was my first salaried job and I’d helped the company grow so much, but I was honestly just a pretty good but replaceable SAT Prep teacher.
Toward the end of my time in China, I started seeing a woman because she liked me and I was incredibly lonely. After a very brief time together I broke it off. My mental health was getting a little sketchy, and I swung wildly between thinking that she wasn’t good enough for me and being disgusted with myself for leading someone on because I was so lonely. Shortly after that relationship, I would come to terms with the fact that I didn’t like who I was becoming and I would return back to America.
That was ten years ago, and I’ve learned and grown so much. I don’t really think about that time very much anymore. But one of the biggest things I’ve learned is that other people are not just supporting roles in my life, but full-fledged main characters in their own right, complete with a past, dreams, values, and goals. But that was such a formative time in my life. I had such strong ideas about who I should be, and I was constantly hitting brick walls of a world that wanted me to be someone else. And in my quest to be the right person, I made the wrong decision pretty often.
And I don’t think that I’m unique in this way. There is a particularly early to mid-twenties mixture of ambition, grandiosity, cynicism, self-denial, self-criticism, self-aggrandizement, and insecurity that is specific to young people–men especially–who want to be recognized as special, singled out, and appreciated by the world for their talents and hard work. We are told our whole lives we are what we contribute, and that it is good to be decisive, strong, and determined. So we set our mind to being these things but wires get crossed, priorities get jumbled, and we don’t always read the room well.
I’ve seen books and watched movies that captured elements of this, but the reason I share all this is that–if you relate at all, or if it makes you curious, you should read Ask the Dust by John Fante.
The main idea is that Arturo Bandini is an aspiring writer living in Los Angeles in the 1940’s trying to sell short stories and a novel. He is complex: talented but delusional, completely in love with someone completely in love with someone else, a big romantic and a little misogynist (and kind of racist). He doesn’t know what he wants, he doesn’t have a good idea of who he is, and he usually thinks of himself as the good guy but is often not. He is, in short, a man whose waking life is preoccupied by “should’s” and daydreams, and as a result he is strict and punishing when dealing with himself and self-involved when dealing with others.
It is a short read and a gripping novel, and there are parts of it that are breathtakingly beautiful. Like this passage that comes from a little over halfway through the book.
Camila, the woman Bandini is in love with, asks him to read a manuscript written by Sammy, the man she’s in love with. Sammy is sick and dying of some unknown illness in a hut in the desert an hour away from Los Angeles. Bandini agrees to read Sammy’s work and concludes that Sammy is a hack. Bandini at first wants to encourage Sammy but his resentment at Camila gets the best of him. So he sits down to pen a scathing letter telling Sammy he is a hack and should never write again in order to spite Camila and cause calamity in their relationship. The following excerpt comes immediately after Bandini writes the letter, and is reflecting on what to do about it.
There it was, finished, devastating. I folded the manuscripts, placed the note with them inside a big envelope, sealed it, addressed it to Samuel Wiggins, General Delivery, San Juan, California, stamped it, and shoved it into my back pocket. Then I went upstairs and out of the lobby of the mailbox on the corner. It was a little after three o’clock of an incomparable morning. The blue and white of stars and sky were like desert colors, a gentleness so stirring I had to pause and wonder that it could be so lovely. Not a blade of the dirty palms stirred. Not a sound was to be heard.
All that was good in me thrilled in my heart at that moment, all that I hoped for in the profound, obscure meaning of my existence. Here was the endlessly mute placidity of nature, indifferent to the great city; here was the desert beneath these streets, around these streets, waiting for the city to die, to cover it with timeless sand once more. There came over me a terrifying sense of understanding about the meaning and the pathetic destiny of men. The desert was always there, a patient white animal, waiting for men to die, for civilizations to flicker and pass into the darkness. Then men seemed brave to me, and I was proud to be numbered among them. All the evil of the world seemed not evil at all, but inevitable and good and part of that endless struggle to keep the desert down.
I looked southward in the direction of the big stars and I knew that in that direction lay the Santa Ana desert, that under the big stars in a shack lay a man like myself, who would probably be swallowed by the desert sooner than I, and in my hand I held an effort of his, an expression of his struggle against the implacable silence toward which he was being hurled. Murderer or bartender or writer, it didn’t matter: his fate was the common fate of all, his finish my finish; and here tonight in this city of darkened windows were other millions like him and like me: as indistinguishable as dying blades of grass. Living was hard enough. Dying was a supreme task. And Sammy was soon to die.
I stood at the mailbox, my head against it, and grieved for Sammy, and for myself, and for all the living and the dead. Forgive me, Sammy! Forgive a fool! I walked back to my room and spent three hours writing the best criticism of his work I could possibly write. I didn’t say this was wrong or that was wrong. I kept saying, in my opinion this would be better if, and so forth, and so forth. I got to sleep about six o’clock, but it was a grateful, happy sleep. How wonderful I really was! A great, soft-spoken, gentle man, a lover of all things, men and beast a like.
Bandini flips from self-confidence to self-doubt, from trying to be a good guy to being a clearly bad guy. The book is full of beautiful passages like this. And the ending is perfect: tonally consistent, lyrically beautiful, narratively jarring. I don’t think everyone will see themselves in Arturo Bandini, but I strongly recommend the book if the story of a hopeful, cynical, insecure, confused, wildly ambitious young creative with a muddled sense of self resonates with you at all.
Postscript: This has only been up for a couple hours and I’ve already received more emails than usual asking for a follow-up on this cast of characters. My friend is doing well now. We are cordial and like each other’s stuff on social media but never really got back to talking as much. She got married to a guy who seems great. My ex and I were not great for each other but both grew a lot after we separated. We do not talk at all but she is also happily married with some kids. And I met someone great who I married and we have a house, two dogs, a daughter, and a great life. It was a tumultuous time but everyone turned out OK.
Thank you for sharing this. It sounds right up my alley, and very similar to my own 20s experiences. I am probably in the female minority on this one, which of course adds a different twist to things, a different flavor of "what is my role in life?" Though, the struggles that come with it, the loss of friends, the loneliness, are universal. I often search for male coming-of-age type stories as I find them more relatable, so thanks again. Added to my tbr!
"To a Mayan Princess, from a worthless Gringo."