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Delinquent Dogs and the Molise Malaise: Negotiating Suburbia in John Fante's “My Dog Stupid”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 May 2017

RUTH HAWTHORN
RUTH HAWTHORN*
Affiliation:
School of English and Journalism, University of Lincoln. Email: [email protected].
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Abstract

This article explores ideas of suburban masculinity in “My Dog Stupid” (1986), a comic novella by the critically neglected novelist and screenwriter John Fante. Placing the text within the context of the twentieth-century suburban “canon,” I argue that Fante complicates and critiques the dystopian image of American suburbia that has dominated both fictional and sociological representations of this environment over the past seventy years.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 52 , Issue 3 , August 2018 , pp. 766 - 786
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press and British Association for American Studies 2017 

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References

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51 Ibid.

52 In “My Dog Stupid,” Henry shares the same impoverished Mid-western background as his creator. He reminisces about “when [he] was a boy in Colorado” and refers to “the poverty of [his] childhood, the desperation of [his] youth.” Fante, “My Dog Stupid,” 54, 43.

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60 Ibid., 70.

61 Ibid., 125.

62 Ibid., 133.

63 Ibid., 15, 23, 22–23.

64 Ibid., 17.

65 Ibid., 121.

66 See respectively Simon and Garfunkel, The Graduate: Original Soundtrack (Sony), released: 31 Jan. 1994; the Monkees, Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn and Jones Ltd. (Rhino/Wea), released 10 July 2007; the Mothers of Invention, Freak Out (Rykodisc), released 1 April 2002; the Mothers of Invention, Absolutely Free (Rykodisc), released 1 April 2002; The Mothers of Invention, We're Only in It for the Money (Rykodisk), released 23 April 2002.

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77 Ibid., 52.

78 Ibid., 37.

79 Ibid., 52, 43.

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85 Ibid., 129.

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91 Racism is a prominent theme in Fante's work, where “Americanness” is portrayed as an exclusionary identity, asserted through the denigration of “other” ethnicities. This is particularly prominent in Ask the Dust (1939), which offers a vivid portrayal of the racism which is deeply entrenched within a vibrantly multicultural Depression-era Los Angeles.

92 Fante, “My Dog Stupid,” 17.

93 Ibid., 85, 88, 89.

94 Ibid., 86.

95 Ibid., 100.

96 Ibid., 115.

97 Ibid., 77.

98 Jurca, White Diaspora, 167.

99 Fante, “My Dog Stupid,” 34, 58.

100 Ibid., 109.

101 Collins, John Fante: A Literary Portrait, 252.

102 Fante, “My Dog Stupid,” 134.

103 Ibid., 143.

104 Beuka, SuburbiaNation, 235.

105 Fante, “My Dog Stupid,” 142.