In her essay “Work,” Maria Laurino writes that “the educated Italian-American workforce prides itself on its success in escaping the earlier fate of a lifetime in construction, and many have transcended their working-class roots by entering law and business [ . . . ]. But at what cost have we forsaken the pleasure, intimacy, and skill of using hands and heart, or expressing a part of the self in one's work” (2000, 184–85). What if one's work were building with words rather than with stone; what if one constructed books instead of bridges? Near the Great Depression's end, four “classic” American novels arrived almost simultaneously: The Grapes of Wrath, Christ in Concrete, The Day of the Locust, and Ask the Dust. Teresa Fiore has noted that “Fante's books, whose distinctive feature is that of showcasing the struggles experienced by the writer in the writing process, [are] reminiscent of the struggles of the laborer on the construction site” (116), and this “overlap of activities” (119), this metafictional aspect of Fante's work, I believe, elevates Ask the Dust above the other three famous novels of 1939.My thesis is a personal not an academic one. As a fiction writer, I react to these four novels in this moment in time. They are books that have meant a lot to me for a lot of years. One was a favorite in high school; another was a beloved novel during my undergraduate years and a book that influenced the end of my novella Temple of the Rat (Left Hand Books, 2000). For many years, I taught a course called “Hollywood: An American Community” and, though not part of the syllabus, would always say that Ask the Dust is the best Los Angeles novel ever written (and The Day of the Locust appeared on the syllabus in every iterance of the class). Christ in Concrete, as I wrote about in Italian Americana many years ago, had a more direct connection for me. Louis Ducoff was a mentor for my wife and myself as we began our professional lives—and Pietro di Donato modeled his character Louis Molov on him. The real Louis and the novelist remained life-long friends.I have considered writing an essay about these four books for 20 years. What finally pushed me to do so is the fact that the otherwise excellent book recently edited by Stephen Cooper and Clorinda Donato, John Fante's Ask the Dust: A Joining of Voices and Views, includes very little about other works by Fante (one could read this volume and think Ask the Dust was the only book the author ever wrote) and virtually nothing on other works from the late 1930s. Everyone knows the story of how a lawsuit may have curtailed sales of Fante's novel. There is, for one example of the good work here, an excellent contribution by Ryan Holiday entitled “How Hitler Nearly Destroyed the Great American Novel.” If Ask the Dust is the great (I say) Los Angeles novel, then some might call The Day of the Locust the great Hollywood fiction and The Grapes of Wrath the best California story. How about Christ in Concrete? Surely, any reader of this essay already knows that the Book of the Month Club chose di Donato's book as a first choice and John Steinbeck's epic as an alternate. Fante admired Steinbeck (at least, he envied Steinbeck's success). If the minor shortcoming in the Cooper and Donato collection has pushed me to finally say something about these books together (and what I say may be evaluative, a sort of literary journalism and not “rigorous” scholarship), what I say today differs from what I would have said two decades ago. History in general is a web lacking a center. These four novels form a spider's web of 1939. Once, perhaps in 1989, I had a dinner with members of the Board of Trustees of the University of Saint Joseph. One board member turned to my colleague, our Shakespearean, and said, “You have a cushy job. Shakespeare never changes.”A brief echo from the past: “(At this point you will say I go all around the subject, and I, as Olson, will respond, ‘I didn't know it was a subject.’ Rather, a movement from under the unfinished work toward a finished work. A movement that defines its space by its act. A movement that examines as it listens. A movement that moves on . . . )” (Barone 1982, 125).In a letter dated August 7, 1932, the young John Fante (1909–83) offered his new-found mentor H. L. Mencken (1880–1956) a short synopsis of his life. He begins with a lie, noting his birth-year as 1911, but it is a funny lie for he claims to have been born “in a macaroni factory, which is the right place for a man of my genealogy [ . . . ]” (Fante and Mencken 1989, 29). It may be obvious but in addition to mixing fact and fantasy, Fante self-consciously claims his Italian American ethnicity. He does so, however, without xenophobic pride. Fante notes that his father “was so happy” at his birth “that he got drunk and stayed that way for a week” (Fante and Mencken 1989, 29).Whether or not he had to prove his worthiness to either his real or his figurative father, the young Fante certainly had ambition. He wrote his cousin Jo Campiglia in a letter dated November 23, 1939: “My next book should be the money-maker, which is not important, but critically a big, full book from me that succeeds will put me smacko among writers like Faulkner, Sinclair Lewis, Tom Wolfe” (Selected Letters, 158). Fante believed his next book would attain mainstream acceptance and allow him full membership in the club of the literati. Just like so many other writers, Fante reveals here his ambivalence or confusion regarding money versus art. In his time, these feelings would be most manifest in an oft-repeated opposition between film and novel writing.But Fante had a more personal conflict. Although his ethnic background provided rich material for his art, he worried that his ethnicity would negate the possibility of mainstream acceptance and praise such as that received by Faulkner, Lewis, and Wolfe. And so in perhaps his most famous short story, “The Odyssey of a Wop,” his alter-ego first-person narrator reveals that “From the beginning, I hear my mother use the words Wop and Dago with such vigor as to denote violent distaste. She spits them out” (135). No wonder that at school he considers, “Doesn't my name sound French? Sure! So thereafter, when people ask me my nationality I tell them I am French. A few boys begin calling me Frenchy. I like that. It feels fine” (136).Today, we might admire Fante for this complex examination of identity in America. And yet, at the same time as he created an enlightening, moving story such as “Odyssey,” he contributed film scripts such as “Dago Mike Cantello,” “Stiletto,” and “Mama Ravioli” that seemed to perpetuate rather than question stereotypes. (“Mama Ravioli” became the completed and released 1940 film East of the River.) Of course, he did not consider film writing to be a very serious endeavor but rather something he had to do for the sake of financial stability.He sold a lot of short stories to well-paying magazines; but even in the mid-twentieth century, it was near to impossible to make a living from such publication. Stephen Cooper, the Fante expert, gathered many of Fante's uncollected stories in a volume called The Big Hunger. One of these stories, “The Sins of the Mother,” originally appeared in the Woman's Home Companion in December 1948 as “The Wine of Youth.” Because Cooper had called an earlier volume of Fante stories The Wine of Youth (including the 1940 collection Dago Red, plus a few additional stories), a different title for that story seemed necessary. As either “The Wine of Youth” or “The Sins of the Mother,” it is a good story of family, parents and children, that old American Dream theme, and what it means to be a “good” man.Another story in this selection arranged by Cooper and originally published by Black Sparrow Press in 2000, begins with these three words: “The grocery bill [ . . . ]” (“Charge It,” 41). In his ambition, which he did not always meet and which became derailed at times by worries and debts and habits, he sometimes expressed envy for the success of Steinbeck, but his early work The Road to Los Angeles might be called an anti Grapes of Wrath. Completed in 1936, but not published until 1985, this brief work explores identity and narration in a manner that today feels more contemporary than Steinbeck's Grapes. In Steinbeck's story, some hungry migrants stop at a diner, and Mae, the wise-cracking waitress, begrudgingly sells the dad some bread and then lets him have two candy sticks for the kids at the price of one penny. After the migrant family leaves, another customer says, “’Them wasn't two-for-a-cent candy [ . . . ] Them was nickel apiece candy’” (161), hence proving that Mae isn't so hard-boiled and that folks sure can be nice to one another when they want to be. On the other hand, the first-person narrator in The Road to Los Angeles, Arturo Bandini, says the following about a Filipino coworker: When I saw how dark he was I suddenly knew what to say to him. I could say it to all of them. It would hurt them every time. I knew because a thing like that had hurt me. In grade school the kids used to hurt me by calling me Wop and Dago. It had hurt every time. It was a miserable feeling. It used to make me feel so pitiful, so unworthy. And I knew it would hurt the Filipino too. (64–65)Another Los Angeles book, another first-person narration Arturo Bandini book, and the work considered the author's finest, Ask the Dust, echoes young Arturo's racism and self-knowledge quoted previously but transfers such antagonism to his Mexican American love interest Camilla Lopez. He calls her “a filthy little Greaser” (44) and yet he realizes, “Ah, Camilla! When I was a kid back home in Colorado it was Smith and Parker and Jones who hurt me with hideous names, called me Wop and Dago [ . . . ] and when I say Greaser to you it is not my heart that speaks, but the quivering of an old wound, and I am ashamed of the terrible thing I have done” (46–47).Although there are many fine essays in the recent collection John Fante's Ask the Dust: A Joining of Voices and Views, none of the contributions consider this Fante novel in relation to his other work or in the context of other novels from that time. In addition to Ask the Dust and Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, 1939 also brought forth Nathanael West's The Day of the Locust and Pietro di Donato's Christ in Concrete. Contemporary novelist B. G. Firmani has called Christ in Concrete “a young man's novel, madly uneven,” she continues, “spilling over with pain and a prose made hyper-precious by its burning need to testify” (“The Wound”). To Firmani, “the style of the prose [in Christ in Concrete], rather than drawing the reader in, is like a stiff arm keeping the reader away” (“The Wound”). Fante's style in Ask the Dust, on the other hand, has its poetry, a consistent poetry in prose. It is lyrical—Whitmanesque—rather than “weighted with its own portentousness,” as Firmani says about di Donato (“The Wound”). Listen to this, for example, from Fante: Los Angeles, give me some of you! Los Angeles come to me the way I come to you, my feet over your streets, you pretty town I loved you so much, you sad flower in the sand, you pretty town. (13)These four fictions from 1939—their style and aspects of their content—are the subject of this essay.If di Donato composed sentences of Baroque and ever-shifting consistency and Steinbeck strains readers with sentimentality interspersed with didacticism, Fante and West are great stylists. Chapter 6 of Ask the Dust is an extraordinary passage of poetic prose that exceeds in intensity a similar one in West's novel. Fante's chapter is a mere six paragraphs long. The first paragraph shares most with West's passage from near his novel's end (229–30). “The old folk from Indiana and Iowa and Illinois, from Boston and Kansas City and Des Moines, they sold their homes and their stores, and they came here [Southern California] by train and by automobile to the land of sunshine, to die in the sun [ . . . ]” (45), as Fante writes. Where West stops, Fante keeps going, getting more and more critical and bitter, with each word-marked step. As Charles Bukowski put it in his Preface to the novel's re-issue: “The lines rolled easily across the page, there was a flow. Each line had its own energy and was followed by another like it” (6). Why John Fante? That's why. Style, not sociology.Today, indisputably, readers consider Ask the Dust to be Fante's best book. In his lifetime, his 1952 novel Full of Life made the most money, but Fante did not like it. There again is that old ambivalence between art and commerce, but there is much humor in the book and a rich examination of spirituality and Catholicism.Full of Life became an entertaining and successful film. Fante's second most repeated alter-ego bore the name Henry Molise, a mediocre screenwriter and the protagonist narrator of late Fante writing such as “My Dog Stupid” and The Brotherhood of the Grape, though in the final posthumous story, Dreams from Bunker Hill, the author returns to Arturo Bandini.One-third of the way into his Dreams, Bandini/Fante recalls a trip to the library. “I went to the bookshelves, and pulled out a book. It was Winesburg, Ohio” (57). Sherwood Anderson makes Bandini/Fante cry. Overwhelmed, he tries to write something, anything but “the words would not come as they did in Anderson, they only came like drops of blood from my heart” (57). Bandini/Fante sets a high bar for himself; but in Los Angeles, can an Italian American “succeed”—whatever that may mean? Near the end, he opines about LA: “Had I not paid my dues? Had I not worked hard, tried hard? What did it have against me? Was it the incessant sense of my peasantry, the old conviction that somehow I did not belong?” (132).The Grapes of Wrath remains the most well-known and best-selling of these four 1939 novels. It probably sells more each year than the other three combined, and for decades it has been read by millions of American high school students. I know I first read it at that age. I'd mow a neighbor's lawn and complain that there “be nothing but jimson weed” even if in fact the lawn resembled a golf course green. I'd finish cross-country practice, look down at my feet, and tell my friends “these dogs sure are tired.” I'd go home and ask what we had for “side-meat” that evening.For a fairly long book about out-of-work people looking for employment, there are few passages in it about the activity of labor. When they do occur, they are most often about preparing food or fixing cars. Sometimes they appear in repetitive parallel structure of noun, verb, object/noun, verb, object that reminds me of Jacques Prevert's poem “Dejeuner du matin,” but his short work evokes ennui whereas Steinbeck's intended to engender community through story. “He fitted the wrench again [ . . . ] He loosened the bearing bolts in the pan [ . . . ]” and so on (172). The phrasing seems mechanical and hence dehumanizing precisely where the author's intention must have been the opposite. Or consider this example of preparing a hamburger: “[ . . . ] he scrapes the griddle with a spatula [ . . . ] He presses down a hissing hamburger [ . . . ] He lays the split buns [ . . . ] He gathers up stray onions [ . . . ],” etc. (154).The community fostered by the novel has strict limits: the family and “folks we know” (205). There are only two mentions of African Americans in the entire book, and both use derogatory language: one is a curse (236) and one is a racist sexual comment (407). If Jim Casey and Tom Joad discover that we are all part of one over-soul, that “we” seems to have strict limits: “we” Whites, in other words.Who gets to work—to hold a job or write a book? In Christ in Concrete, a much shorter book than The Grapes of Wrath, there are four mentions of African Americans. They become more collegial and compassionate with each instance. Paul, the protagonist, ages from 12 to young manhood, and he matures as he does so. First, something seems slightly pejorative in the mention. Paul and his mother Annunziata go to see a fortune-teller, the Cripple, to contact their recently deceased father/husband Geremio. In the waiting room with Paul and Annunziata are “a nervous dignified middle-aged man, a Negress, and a woman dressed in furs and silks” (109). The man and the rich woman are described in a few words while the “other” person has a single word to identify her as if that says it all and no more need be added. A neutral reference to working groups states simply, “Irish, Italian, and Negro laborers swiftly loaded the scaffolds” (177) without any implied ranking or racism. Next, near the end of the drunken reception for Luigi and Cola's wedding, a brief conversation regarding Italy's military forays into North Africa concludes that whether Italian, English, German, or “Africano” makes less difference than economic status (204). Class supersedes race or nation. As di Donato put it later in the book, “The scaffolds are not safe, for the rich must ever profit more” (228). When Paul nearly falls to his death from one such scaffold, “Reuben, a colored hodcarrier, put his arm about Paul's waist and helped him up [ . . . ]” (217). Reuben tells Paul not to cry and offers to carry him home. A Black man has become the comforter for a suffering soul in this Pietà.A strange, bewildering scene that satirizes America's ethnic and racial divisions occurs near the start of West's novel. Tod, the protagonist of this fiction, attends a Hollywood soiree at screenwriter Claude Estee's house, “an exact reproduction of the old Dupuy mansion near Biloxi, Mississippi” (21). As Tod greets Claude, the latter calls to a butler, “’Here, you black rascal! A mint julep’” (21). Just as the house has no authenticity, the “black rascal” turns out to be “a Chinese servant,” and he brings not a julep but a Scotch and soda (22). Such porous borders fit with the book's depiction of artificiality, its theme of confusion between on-screen and off-screen. Hence, in Los Angeles, “A great many of the people wore sports clothes which were not really sport clothes [ . . . ] The fat lady in the yachting cap was going shopping, not boating; the man in the Norfolk jacket and Tyrolean hat was returning, not from a mountain, but an insurance office [ . . . ]” (5).A few of Fante writings address fraught relations between ethnicities, as in Ask the Dust (Arturo, Italian American; Camilla, Mexican American; and Vera, Jewish American), and those between Italian Americans and African Americans. Immediately the two short works that comprise West of Rome come to mind. In the novella “My Dog Stupid,” Henry Molise's oldest son dates and marries an African American woman. Early in the novella Henry asks his son, “ ‘Don't you have any race pride?’” (17). At this point, Dominic has a poster of a nude Black woman hanging in his room. A few pages later, Henry wonders if Dominic has “‘got some kind of racial sickness’” (21) because he dates a Black woman. Henry states that he wouldn't care if Dominic married a Black woman because of his Neapolitan heritage, but his Anglo wife, Harriet, he assumes, would be upset. Harriet, indeed, becomes unnerved when Dominic brings home Katy Dann. Henry, however, admires Katy's “high spectacular ass and the breasts under her green sweater” (63). Fante makes Henry appear humorous (or humorous and sexist) and Harriet appear racist. Later, Harriet thinks Black Panthers have beaten Dominic for dating “‘one of their women’” (88). Actually, Katy beat Dominic during an argument. Yet, they marry, and Katy is pregnant. Henry thinks, “I felt his pain, not that he married a black girl, but the pain to come [ . . . ]” (93), and he concludes his thoughts: “Black or White, it was bad enough to be born at all, but black and white?” (94).In the short story “The Orgy,” an African American coworker in the building trades offers a worthless deed to Vico “Nick” Steffanini in thanks for fair treatment over the years of their association. Speed Blivins buys mining penny-stocks. Vico's best friend, Frank Gagliano, believes these purchases “nothing more than a gambling addiction common to all Negroes” (150). Vico defends Speed. When Speed does make a substantial sum in these stock trades, he leaves the deed to a failed gold mine to his friend Vico. Speed then disappears from the narrative; like so many of Fante's narratives whether in fiction or film script, the story turns to a recounting of sin and penance.Vico's son tells this story, and he's an eloquent kid at that. Consider these four sentences: Spellbound, I hurried away, hawk wings lifting my heels as I dashed downstairs and around the church to the front door. In one of the rear pews I knelt and began to pray.I prayed like a flame, a torch. I crackled. (171)Fante follows a sentence that contains image, alliteration, and assonance with three sentences that decrease in length. This prose rhythm of repetition and list sings a patterned poetic sound.Di Donato's poetic prose has a different meter and rhythm than Fante's. The former tried to capture communal idioms, and the latter captured an individual idiolect. The former may be said to be predominately outside and the latter, inside. Hence, di Donato's story of the New York construction trades during the 1920s (written from the vantage point of one decade later) has rich, dense depictions of work, of toil. All of Chapter 9 of the book's third section, “Fiesta,” reads like a Lewis Hine photo put in motion. For example, one sentence from these four pages reads: “From the very peak [of the fifty-floor building site] the hundred-foot derrick swung its steel latticed arm out beyond the building and from it descended a cable with an ironworker clinging to it” (176).When Paul goes to work as a bricklayer at the age of 12 to help his large family survive after their breadwinner Geremio's death, he despairs that he makes so little after working so hard. The Joad family experiences a 50 percent wage cut after the conclusion of a strike, but Paul and his family get struck by one calamity after another—much harsher calamities than the Joad family confront—and yet, as Ma Joad might put it, they go on. Geremio and other workers die due to corrupt worksite management, Paul's Uncle Luigi has a leg crushed at work, Paul's godfather Nazone falls to his death, and so on. As one of the workers, known as The Lucy, puts it: “‘My blessed spirit father's hands should have rotted off the day he first gave to me his trowel!’” (74). Yet it is not so simple: the workmen express determination, pride, and satisfaction, too. Paul feels “thrilled” to work on the 50-story building (179). And after three years at work, at age 15, Paul “was proud that God had given him hand, back, and eye to bring home food, proud that he earned [ . . . ]” (163). As the Depression begins, Paul finds he must kick-back “ten dollars a week” (212) to keep his job and his work “pressed upon him and choked him” (219).Twice near the end, the word “cheated” has importance. In Paul's dream, his father says, “I was cheated, my children also will be crushed, cheated” (226). (At the book's beginning, Geremio boasts of the success his children will achieve.) Paul argues with his mother. He rejects Christ. And he says, “‘I only know that I am cheated’” (230).West's working title for his 1939 novel was “The Cheated.” If di Donato wrote of the realities of the national scam, West wrote of its many mirrors and illusions and how they created in Los Angeles not a dream factory but a “dream dump” (143). West's novel concerns people who come to California not to find employment but “to die” (5). Indeed, these migrants do anything they can not to work—except for Tod, but his work becomes a Bosch-like mirror of depravity. At the book's end, on canvas and off canvas meld into a single nightmare, as Tod calls it: The Burning of Los Angeles.West calls Homer Simpson, a retired hotel bookkeeper from Wayneville, Iowa, “an exact model for the kind of person who comes to California to die [ . . . ]” (41). Homer does not represent Steinbeck's rural poor or di Donato's urban working class. He resembles what Fante calls “the booboisie” (Ask the Dust, 22). Homer need not work because he came to California with his savings, plus a small inheritance. But without work, he doesn't know what to do with his time. He sits on a broken patio chair and gazes at a lizard. He is alienated not just from his environment but from himself; hence, when he washes his hands “like a poorly made automaton,” “they lay quietly on the bottom [of the sink] like a pair of strange aquatic animals” (48).Homer becomes infatuated with the would-be starlet Faye Greener. Faye, too, does not work regularly. She worked once in a “two-reel farce” (18) in which “she had only one line to speak, ‘Oh, Mr. Smith!’ and spoke it badly” (19), and yet she believed that one day she would be a star. She did not know how, but she maintained a fierce certainty that it would be so.Her dreams knew only imagined results, not the means to their actual attainment.There to observe these people who “have been cheated and betrayed” (230) is Tod Hackett, a recent graduate from the Yale School of Fine Arts who has been hired as a set and costume designer but who also works on a large canvas called The Burning of Los Angeles. At the novel's end, West describes this painting as Tod becomes engulfed in the mayhem of a riot spontaneously taking place during a picture premiere at Kahn's Persian Palace. “Across the top” of Tod's work, West writes, Parallel with the frame, he had drawn the burning city, a great bonfire of architectural styles, ranging from Egyptian to Cape Cod colonial. Through the center, winding from left to right, was a long hill street and down it, spilling into the middle foreground, came the mob carrying baseball bats and torches. For the faces of its members, he was using the innumerable sketches he had made of the people who come to California to die; the cultists of all sorts, economic as well as religious, the wave, airplane, funeral and preview watchers—all those poor devils who can only be stirred by the promise of miracles and then only to violence. (241–42)West's novel does not end as The Grapes of Wrath with a still-hungry Joad family in near Biblical scene nor as Christ in Concrete with an individual's rejection of Christ and the community of Christians, but instead in a total apocalypse. Tod's painting of the crowd's “awful, anarchic power,” powerful enough “to destroy civilization” (161), has leapt from the limits of his frame to the streets of Los Angeles.Fante wrote to his publisher telling him about his proposed novel Ask the Dust. He asked rhetorically, “Do I speak of Hollywood with its tinsel blah? Of the movies?” (“Prologue,” 147). No, he said and offered instead to write about “the real Los Angeles [ . . . ]” (“Prologue,” 150). Fante's novel concerns the life of a young writer in Los Angeles, Arturo Bandini, instead of a young painter, Tod Hackett, as in The Day of the Locust; so instead of external image, Fante offers internal thought. Instead of a third-person view, Fante provides an almost obsessive first-person telling; in fact, the word “I” appears 20 times on the book's first page.Arturo as narrator must be described as solipsistic, immature, untrustworthy and yet, at the same time, revelatory. And Fante, racist, sexist, violent, and brilliant, but at the same time an artist of arrangement, balance, symmetry, and song. Near the start of Ask the Dust, the 20-year old boy-man stalks a prostitute. This is a story of an unsteady identity, off-balance, not a postmodern fluid identity avant la lettre. Arturo spies the woman “talking to a Mexican” (23); as he follows them, he rages internally: “My God, a Mexican! Women like that should draw the color line. I hated him, the Spick [ . . . ]” (23). Here he identifies as White; a few pages back, he recalls how back home in Colorado others hated him for his poverty and ethnic difference (20). He will write a book (20) and by that means exact his revenge and get the girl (any girl or every girl). His notions of manhood, art, and sexuality are bound together in an amoral childishness, which by the novel's end he does put aside.Ask the Dust may be seen as a coming-of-age fiction. Arturo learns not just about adolescence versus adulthood but also about life versus art. The more mature Arturo late in the novel and at the novel's close realizes his motives for creation have not been elevated ones, and it just might be that a life has more value than a book.He tries to establish a moral sense early on, but repeatedly fails. For example, when his neighbor Hellfrick offers a scheme to steal milk, Arturo asserts, “‘No thanks, Hellfrick. I like to consider myself an honest man’” (29). But then in his mind, he begins to taste and see the milk and slides into temptation. He always either repents his sin or gets his comeuppance. In this instance, it is the latter: the milk he takes is buttermilk, and Arturo hates buttermilk.Much of the work concerns Arturo's sexual insecurities and failures with women. He has a childish notion that directly relates to his work as a writer; he can't be a writer without a book, and he can't be a man without a woman—so he reasons. These equations, he believes, are codependent. Untamed, unruly ego dominates Arturo so much that when he finally has sex with a woman—Vera Rifkin—and the Long Beach earthquake occurs almost simultaneously, he believes his sinful act of adultery (Vera has a husband back in Pennsylvania) has caused it: “You did it, Arturo. This is the wrath of God. You did it” (98).Just as he behaves immaturely in relationships with women, so he acts in relation to his work. He would write a story, sell a story, get a check, spend every cent, become broke again, and start the cycle over again.Th