1933 Was a Bad Year

1933 was a Bad Year is one of a number of short, powerful novels that John Fante wrote in the 1930s and 1940s, chronicling young, aspiring men trapped in dire economic circumstances. Dominic Molise, a 17-year-old from a poverty-stricken Italian-American family residing in the shadows of the Rocky Mountains, dreams of becoming a major-league baseball player and, in the process, escaping his philandering father's attempts to lure him into the family bricklaying business. His problems are exacerbated when he becomes hopelessly infatuated with his best friend's icily beautiful elder sister.Using tough, unsentimental, yet always lyrical, prose Fante beautifully evokes the internal emotional world of an adolescent--the wild fantasising, the nascent sexual feelings and the struggle between the urge to do what is desired and the duty to do what is morally right. But this is more than another coming-of-age tale. There is real spit and fire in Fante's finely judged sentences and a genuine anger at the crippling poverty that flattened so many lives and destroyed so many hopes during the Depression.Like the novels of Charles Bukowski, who idolised Fante and whose praise helped to bring Fante's work to a wider audience, the writing here is so unerringly honest and the griminess of quotidian life so sharply conveyed that it is impossible not to empathise with these beleaguered characters. This is a short novel, but it displays more truths than most novels several times its length. --Jane Morris