Dan Kaufman's book blog

One-sentence review: A caustic tale of modern life, with its alienation, bad friends and dreams of self improvement.

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As children, we often think books ought to be about larger than life characters: adventurers, royalty, vampires and magicians. 

Yet when we’re older and our dreams of becoming rock stars, professional athletes or Hollywood actors have dissolved, it’s the life-size characters that often resonate: the office worker, the lonely, the depressed and – in the case of The New Me, it’s all three.

Far before J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye and John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces, there was an author writing about young misfits with flair and passion: John Fante.

In the 1930s Fante began a series of novels starring Arturo Bandini, a delusional, obnoxious, socially incompetent and penniless wannabe writer who is, I am afraid to say, someone I relate far too closely to. Fante’s first novel, The Road to Los Angeles, was rejected and unpublished until after his death in 1985. The second, Wait Until Spring, Bandini (1938), gained critical praise but it was his third – Ask the Dust (1939) – that was a work of genius.

One sentence review: the most beautifully written, moving and yet sweetly humorous collection of short stories I can remember reading.

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I’ve recently read two collections of short stories by authors championed by Black Sparrow Press: A Manual for Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin and The Bell Tolls for No One by Charles Bukowski.

On a superficial level there ought to be similarities: both authors were alcoholic underground writers who wrote about the low life with thinly-veiled versions of themselves as narrators. And yet in terms of style, heart, intelligence and maturity there is a world of difference between them.

One sentence review: Witty. Moving. Enveloped me whole. I adored this novel.

Slightly longer review:

I didn’t expect to like this.

The plot seemed cliched: a celebrity who falls for a norm. As with most celeb meets norm stories (think Notting Hill), the celeb walks into the norm’s workplace (in this case a New York bodega), the norm doesn’t recognise the celebrity, likes them anyway and sparks fly.

And then I read the first few sentences – and they were so well written that I bought the book on the off-chance I was wrong about the plot. I was, and I fell in love.