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It has been said of John Fante that he is one of America’s “criminally neglected authors.��

I would add that this is not a misdemeanor but a felony. I only discovered his work when I read Darrell Kastin’s wonderfully entertaining Shadowboxing With Bukowski and learned that Fante had been an influence on the Barfly.

Wait Until Spring, Bandini is Fante’s introduction to the world of Svevo Bandini, one of the criminally neglected characters in literature. First published in 1938, between the Great Depression and the Second World War, Fante describes the lives and misadventures of the Bandini clan in Colorado.

No doubt drawing on his own Italian-American experience, Fante reveals how the fiercely American, yet never abandoned Italian descent of Svevo shapes his world and his family’s. The reader meets a plethora of wonderful characters: Svevo’s wife Maria and their sons Arturo, Federico and August (and I could not help wondering if they had any influence at all on Mario Puzo’s Corleone boys �� Santino, Fredo and Michael) as well as Svevo himself, his friend Rocco, and his hated mother in law Donna Toscana. (Donna damn near steals the show).

Like Cher’s Moonstruck, Lawrence Kasdan’s 1990 I Love You to Death, and any number of lesser Italian American tragi-comedies, the lyrical quality of the dialogue and the fine lines between misery, joy and reverence must be experienced to be understood, but it was entertaining and many times uproariously funny. The more sober parts introspective, culturally and timely observant, were like a snapshot of a time and place. His vivid description of a time before radio and TV, when a dime would get you into a theater, when families savored the experience of a fresh roasted chicken like a feast was mesmerizing and the pages turned and turned.

Fante’s writing is inspired and well crafted and this was a joy to read. I’ll revisit Fante for the rest of the Bandini books (four in all) and anything else by him I can find.