Ham on Rye: A Novel

Charles Bukowski's fourth novel, Ham on Rye, is the semi-autobiographical story of the early years of his alter ego Henry Chinaski. It is a finely written and honest account of the painful childhood of a boy marked out from his peers. Regularly beaten by his father, Chinaski is shown growing through his difficult and violent adolescence (struck with the worst case of acne his doctors have ever seen) through to the first jobs he can't and won't hold down. In this moving story of growing up Bukowski disciplines his muscular, concentrated writing and creates a novel that distils his poetry into the finest full-length piece of prose that he ever wrote. Bukowski is often good but in Ham on Rye he's great.Sadly, best known as the alcoholic inspiration for the film Barfly (an experience he reflected on in his book Hollywood), it is as a poet, rather than a drunk, that Bukowski should be best remembered. His bitter, caustic, direct, humane, damaged poetry reflects a life dominated by poverty and booze. His poetry stretches over many, many volumes but Bukowski also wrote great novels: all of them have many faults but the first four books he wrote shine for similar reasons. Post Office and Factotum both dissect, quite brilliantly, the life of an angry, poor man forced to do mindless jobs, pushed around and considered mindless by the fools who force him to do them. Women, as Roddy Doyle points out in his short introduction, continues the themes but focuses on the numerous women who share his hero's bed and bottle.I would call Chinaski a misanthrope, were it not for his abiding love – nay, obsession- with the female form. (let’s just say l had no idea how gross teenage males could be). Oh, and of course, alcohol. He notably remarks, after experiencing intoxication for the first time: “this is going to help me for a long, long time”.Unfortunately, the honeymoon is short-lived, and his relationship with alcohol leads to progressively seedier and more violent behavior.There’s not really much of a “plot” in Ham on Rye: it tells the story of the first 20 years of Chinaski’s life; and then it ends. And that was OK with me.

The earlier parts of the book are good: the young Chinaski's misfit friends and the abuse he suffers from his family, his classmates, and society at large. At times it's pointlessly crass but then, I suppose, it wasn't too far from how my classmates and I spoke and thought. The latter parts are bad. Nothing but drinking, meanness, and fighting with no sense of direction or purpose in the plot. The fistfights are tiresome and unbelievable. We get it, Chinaski is a mean drunk with no desire to be anything -- the simplicity of this personality cannot be an excuse for boring writing. Overall a 2/5 rating. If the latter portions of the book were removed, re-worked, or simply ignored, it could be a sold 3.5/5.

Ham on Rye is a brilliant little novel about adolescence. While this story has been told a thousand times before, the narrative voice of our acne'd outsider protagonist is incredibly refreshing. When one considers that many of the other narratives of the era tend to be self-affirming urban adventure stories that take themselves too seriously, Bukowski's narrative shows us a semi-autobiographical, self-deprecating, cynical life that’s rife with alcohol, disappointment, and fistfights.Bukowski's boozy world is one where the outsider is the king protagonist of his own destiny, and it is one that is probably shared with a great deal of young men in their American upbringing. His dysfunctional family echoed my own experiences (even though I didn't necessarily have physical punishment, the emotional aspect was spot on). His feelings on his own existence as an animal (and of course, I didn't have the acne problems, but I have myriad others that gave me outsider social status) were real. His experiences with young women, school, and trying to make it against all odds professionally and educationally were very familiar to me.While Bukowski may be offensive to most readers, the plain fact of the matter is that his views on life and adolescent sexuality are the exact same ones I had in my youth. What is the most memorable is the manner in which he tells the story. He doesn't self-edit. He doesn't leave anything out. He tells us everything about his experiences as they happen. This isn't entirely something that should be described as offensive, but real. A real experience. What it is really like. And while many of us want to find some parochial editorializing when we read, the best part about Bukowski is that that is simply not in his novels.I first read his work when I was eighteen or nineteen years old. Now that I am thirty-five, picking up HOR again has left me with a reading experience that was much different since I have had a great deal more life experience and perspective. Looking at this book today, I have found a hilarious, beautiful, tragic, and exciting narrative about living as an outsider in America. I absolutely loved it – more than I did the first time – and look forward to revisiting a couple more (Post Office and Women) in the coming year.

The events of this book precede Post Office and detail Bukowski's childhood. This is raw and emotional, bleak and hard to take at times but Bukowski is so open and honest you can't tear your eyes off of him. This was reality fiction before reality TV. An ugly teenager without social skills, a father who seems to despise him and a mother almost as pitiful as the author. Bukowski still manages to evoke the human experience I think most of us can find some parallels with or own experiences of teenage angst and self loathing his experiences with sex and alcohol, though Bukowski takes this to nihilistic and levels of disgust that would make most of us blanch. This is funny and raucous and well worth a read.

Ham on Rye has been one of my two favourite novels for almost thirty years. The other has varied over time – first Jeanette Winterson’s The Passion, then Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, then Philip Roth’s The Human Stain, alternating between them, back and forth – but always side by side with Ham on Rye. When I ran away to the big city in 1991, not quite a proper reader or anywhere near a writer yet, one of my co-op housemates, a student at the Polytechnic of East London (as it was then), had in his room a copy of Bukowski’s Women. Something about the name Bukowski suggested to me American and academic, and I thought it the sort of thing I ought to be reading. But no, he told me, Women was the opposite of all that, it was the one thing that brought him relief after long hours spent in the college library, swotting away alongside those feminist bitches. Intrigued, I borrowed it from him immediately he’d finished it, and my eyes were opened. I had no idea you were allowed to write about the things described within its pages: drinking for days on end, wanking, avoiding work wherever possible. One of my other housemates had a copy of his short story collection, The Most Beautiful Woman in Town, a gift from someone known to us as Junkie Bob, and the things my eyes had been opened to came into sharper focus. And then I was away, I was a writer too. As the man himself might have said, it was like magic. Now Women seems to me a little repulsive, a bit boring; it’s essentially the weakest of his first three novels, following on from Post Office and Factotum : essentially self-indulgent, misogynist, its subliminal message seeming to be, I’m a poet now and all the women love me, but secretly I hate them, hee hee. But Ham on Rye stands alone.Before I came across it, I was given a collection of Bukowski’s poems and short stories, Septuagenarian Stew. Many of the poems are set in the desperate world of Ham on Rye, Bukowski’s depression-era childhood, and the clarity and the innocence that goes into his descriptions of universal boyhood activities, repugnant and artless but always unpretentious, are what stick with you. It’s worth stating here that, although he wrote a series of novels, the last couple of them of even more middling quality than Women, Bukowski was first and foremost a poet, and this is evident in the short paragraphs and chapters here, the one-off killer lines and the not-quite-inane profundities. Like a really good poem, it all comes at you in a rush, and there’s no filter: indeed, the story goes that when Bukowski’s original publisher, John Martin of Black Sparrow Press (which he started by selling his collection of rare first editions in order to publish Bukowski and other underground writers), asked if he’d ever considered writing a novel, Bukowski had said I’ll knock one out for you, and a month later he had Post Office.Ham on Rye begins with the toddler Henry Chinaski (Bukowski’s exaggerated alter-ego throughout his work) lying under a dining table and commenting on the legs of the people and the furniture – he prefers the legs of the tables and chairs to those of the people, projecting backward the world-weary cynicism of his youth and adulthood, from an anal-retentive stage in grade school to his macho posturing in high school, through the brutal beatings administered by his father for the slightest infraction, real or imagined, to his mother’s abject failure to come to his aid, to his final escape from the house of his parents as the novel draws to a close : I could see the road ahead of me. I was poor and I was going to stay poor… I wanted someplace to hide out, someplace where one didn't have to do anything. Was a man born just to endure [these] things and then die? Although I didn’t suffer anything like the level of routine physical violence Chinaski did, I do identify strongly with this childhood, the poverty and the casual verbal deprecation: look at him, he’s bloody useless, what an idiot; so perhaps Ham on Rye isn’t for everybody; and yet, it is, it really is. Because this is the human condition, as they say.This is my fourth or fifth reading of Ham on Rye, and it really hasn’t lost any of its power over the years, despite its occasional lapses into an almost infantile arrogance and naiveté. I remember from my last reading of Ham on Rye thinking that it was about thirty pages too long, that the section after Chinaski leaves home to go live alone and drink himself to death was unnecessarily unpleasant and really ought to have been cut. Curiously, it doesn’t seem so bad now, although the way he tries to beat up anyone who visits him does get a little boring. But more than anything else, it’s Chinaski’s identification of literature as a redemptive force, a saving grace when all else seems so hopeless that does it for me. As he says in The Burning of the Dream in Septuagenarian Stew, this library was there when I was young and looking to hold onto something when there seemed very little about. Still a favourite, Five stars.

This is the latest Charles Bukowski piece I've read and again it gets full marks from me. I am running out of ways, however, to say just how much I like his work. Just so open and direct. Another masterpiece.

Growing up in a tough, rough family in Depression-ridden America. Acne, fights, sexuality, drunkenness and desperation are all there. This book is for those who’d like to know what those circumstances actually felt like to a kid who felt an outsider and had to struggle to find an identity that matched his soul. By the end of the book he hasn’t quite succeeded. But you think he might.

`Ham on Rye' - the ham is America, in practice LA, and the rye(bread) is Germany, his country of origin - is generally considered Bukowski's finest novel. It is an account of the childhood and early manhood of one Hank Chinaski, Bukowski's alter ego. Hank is raised in a small town in the depth of the 1930's depression. His father is out of work for most of the time, but desperate to keep up appearances, and his mother is a characterless soul who just supports her husband. The latter is also a sadist, who regularly viciously beats Hank for trivial `errors'. But the novel is only semi-autobiographical, because in fact Bukowski's parents had a normal marriage and his father was not the monster portrayed in the book. What is factual is the serious disfiguring skin condition that Bukowski suffered and is mirrored in the acne suffered by Hank Chinaski. This isolates Chinaski from his classmates, and he is also bullied because of his Germanic origins. He takes refuge in reading in the local library and dreaming of becoming a writer, but he realizes that his alienation is deeper, not just with his family and school, but with America in general and its values. He has no desire to have a steady job, marry and have children, or any of the other things that most American's hold dear. He even flirts in a minor way with fascism and shows no inclination to enlist even when, at the end of the book, Pearl Harbour is bombed and one of his few school friends, now a marine, rushes back to his base. Eventually he pays the price, seemingly willingly, and descends to drink, and frequent personal violence.The story overall is sad and depressing, but there are many small pen sketches of people and incidents, often humorous, sometimes moving, that makes one see that Chinaski is a complex character and not simply a nihilist. The writing is direct, sometimes raw, and often coarse, but is just right for the situations described. In his late 50s, after some years `in the wilderness', Bukowski became famous and rich from his writings, and although still consuming copious amounts of alcohol and changing partners regularly, achieved a more settled life, always believing that he had not `sold out'. One would like to think that Hank Chinaski eventually also found a haven via his chosen route, and similarly not `selling out'.

What I like about it, is it just processes thoughts that i know i had as a youth. And if i had read this sooner, it would have helped my outlook and growth in the world at an earlier stage.Definitely handing down to a sibling or future child to explain things they would ordinarily find difficult to talk about.