Full of Life: A Biography of John Fante

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Summary: Fante will find his way into the classroom
Review: Cooper is an elegant writer in his own right. He brings new light to Fante's life and work. After reading his stimulating biography, any readers unfamiliar with Fante will immediately be drawn to his novels and readers already familiar with Fante will get the urge to re-read and re-think an author who, with the help of Cooper, will eventually find his way into the classroom.

Rating:
Summary: Disappointing and Surprisingly Lifeless
Review: For a book called "Full of Life," this work is surprisingly flat and boring. Not much happens in the life of John Fante. He drinks a lot, writes a little, drinks some more, abuses his wife, drinks even more, and saves just enough time to drown a sack of kittens in the kitchen sink while his children cry horrified. That's it for the drama, though. There isn't much life here, just a sad example of a generation of gruff and abusive alcoholic men slowly fading into memory. "Life" in these terms seems defined by random violent outbursts, failure and the bottle. Even Cooper's prose, fashioned to echo his idol, falls flat on the page with sentences like, "He was full of piss and vinegar." This isn't a biography as much as a eulogy to a time and a man better left forgotten. Fante's literary achievements were limited in his lifetime at best, perhaps in no small part due to his heavy alcoholism. There is nothing new or interesting here, not even a great work of art to point to and wonder. Cooper looks behind the curtain of Fante's existence, finding that whatever wizard we had imagined there had long ago crumbled to dust. There is no life here, full or otherwise...

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Summary: Full Of Exhaustive Research
Review: Overall, a good first biography of John Fante. Fante's extensive screenwriting efforts are documented in detail here, and there are interesting insights into the writing of Ask the Dust. I found some portions a bit dry, like the delving at length into Fante's family tree at the beginning. Likewise, the fifty pages of scholarly Notes at the end are tedious reading and seem superfluous. Invaluable are facts surrounding incidents such as Fante's car accident later in life (Stephen Cooper hinting that perhaps it was an attempt at autocide), and Fante's purchase of a revolver (the biographer suggesting that Fante may have been planning to kill himself). Inexcusable, however, are omissions like the failure to note the recent writing achievements of Fante's son, Dan, whose books are big business in Europe. Dan may have his father's gift of braggadocio, and the curse of ten times the old man's bitterness, but the oversight (?) is bizarre in the context of such an obviously well-researched bio. The few glossed-over gaps in Full of Life are almost to be expected since John Fante's own letters and fictions were so frequently full of fabrication themselves.