Product Description

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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #383287 in Books
• Published on: 2000-08-04
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

Amazon.co.uk 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

About the Author
Dan Fante was born and raised in Los Angeles. He is the son of writer John Fante. Dan Fante has worked dozens of crummy jobs. He hopes eventually to meet a fat waitress and learn to play the harmonica. Spitting Off Tall Buildings is the brilliant final chapter in the Bruno Dante trilogy, which is opened by Chump Change and also includes Mooch.

Customer Reviews

A Classic.
I've only had this book for a couple of months, but I must have read it at least 5 or 6 times. I thought that this style of writing had been exhausted by Bukowski and numerous others - and done very badly by a lot of them.

But Dan Fante writes brillianty. As you follow Bruno Dante's alcohol & despair fuelled decline and eventual 'redemption', sentences and phrases will stay in your memory long after you put this book away.

I have read a lot of fiction, but I'd have to say that this book is one that'll I'll always come back to again & again.

Ask the Sons

"Chump Change" is Bruno Dante's memoir of his life after being released from a "nut house" in the Bronx and his journey, both psychic and literal, home to Malibu to see his dying father, Jonathan Dante ("Ask the Dust"). "In this house, I was to experience what happens when a passionate artist gives up what he does and comes to detest himself."
Bruno is wounded. His soul and his heart ache for his father's love and acceptance but like Bruno Jonathan was also, for most of his life addicted to alcohol. Jonathan was either lost in a fog of alcohol, in a frenzy of writing...or both. Jonathan was unavailable to Bruno both physically and emotionally and Bruno becoming a writer only made this distance between the two more pronounced not less so. "Loving Jonathan Dante had not been an easy thing for anyone to do...I heard myself say, I Love You (to my father, Jonathan). Saying the words, what I felt was something like sorrow, but it was not sorrow, it was far deeper. It was the emptiness of a hole that would never be filled."
Fante has an uncanny ability to reduce a situation to its well-observed basics: "Seeing L.A. from the Air was more frightening than memory permitted. Real, vivid science fiction. It was just after sundown when we began to land. The natural light of day was gone replaced by billions of smog particles that gave the coming darkness the hue of blood in a draining sink. This enormous, overfed, infected pig of a city rolled across the landscape as far as the eye could see, coughing, snorting and sucking up whatever was once natural and undisturbed."
Many passages in "Chump Change" are laugh out loud funny though most are tragic for what we witness is Bruno's talent being smothered by layers of alcohol, drugs and fear: "I might have written books. He (Jonathan) had done it. Why hadn't I? It was because I had given up, had never had the courage to let myself fail. My father was dead and so was I. That was the sadness and the truth that was in my soul."
"Chump Change" proves Bruno wrong: though sad and often depressing it stands as a testament to Bruno's remarkable and incontestable talent.

A breath of fresh air
This is the kind of fresh, clear, honest writing that I adore. This guy writes with a brutal honesty and an economic style. This is the best contemporary read I've had in ages. None of his peers come close. Of all the three Bruno Dante books, this is definitely the best. I highly recommend this book to any fan of straight talking and straight writing.