“Frozen Stillness”: The American Sublime and the Meteorological Element of Snow in John Fante’s “Books of Youth”

This paper addresses the representation of snow in John Fante’s novels Wait Until Spring, Bandini (1938) and 1933 Was a Bad Year (1985). While acknowledging its symbolic meanings, I contend that in Fante’s “books of youth”, the meteorological element primarily emerges as a sublime manifestation of nature that, by impeding human activity, resists conquest and mastery. Moving from a complex and gendered understanding of the American sublime, the analysis focuses on the characters’ conflicted relationship with the snowy mountainous landscape of Colorado and their imaginative retreat into an idealized, springlike California. Interpreting snow as a narrative catalyst for brutality and death, this paper examines the familial animosities represented in the novels through the lens of the passive immobility fostered by the meteorological element. By situating Fante’s novels within an American literary tradition that inscribes a twofold meaning in the nation’s natural landscape, this interpretation also seeks to move beyond their traditional categorization as ethnic literature.