The road to Los Angeles

It is the second book of the Bandini saga.
While the first book still revolves around the theme of the Italian family, rendered in a realistic style lacking in evocative resonance, this novel effectively abandons ethnic and folkloric references to chronicle the coming of age of an eighteen-year-old youth who reads voraciously and lives primarily through imagination and fantasy.
The Italian family context is indeed present (the deeply religious mother and sister, an uncle who expects his nephew to shoulder his responsibilities), yet Arturo’s experiences are fundamentally those of any young man his age, compelled to reconcile labor—often grueling and alienating—with his own aspirations and dreams.
The book’s first theme is rage, the urge to rebel against an unjust society, frequently expressed through acts of violence (superb is the scene where Arturo slaughters crabs, imagining himself an ancient knight), through diatribes against the Catholic religion, and in allusions to the great nineteenth-century philosophers.
The second theme is the erotic realm, the pursuit of a connection with women, which inevitably passes through pornographic magazines and the solitude of his room.
Truly extraordinary from a stylistic standpoint is the chapter in which the author recounts Arturo’s destruction of the photographs of the women he loves! The final theme, and perhaps the most important, is that of imagination—the dreams and fantasies bound up with Arturo’s ambitions, with his desire to feel like a great writer.
And it is precisely the disappointment resulting from the reading of his first story that drives Arturo to flee his family and journey toward Los Angeles, and thus toward his own independence and maturity.
Fante abandons the cold, realistic style that had characterized the first book, moving toward increasingly intense expressions and syntactic constructions, rich in evocative power.
To the meaning of the word are added increasingly rich and nuanced "signs," generated by rhythm, phonetics, and the deployment of adjectives, often heightened by neologisms.