Ham on Rye by Charles Bukowski: book review

Ham on Rye (1982, this edition 2000) is set in Los Angeles from 1922 to 1941. The narrator is Henry Chinaski – the fictional character in Bukowski’s novels Post Office (1971) and Factotum (1975). Although this is the third book about Chinaski, it starts at the beginning – in his youth, from the age of two to 21 years. It is also autobiographical, using an alter-ego to describe Bukowski’s rather unpleasant childhood.

Henry Chinaski Junior writes of his parents, Henry and Katherine, his grandmother Emily and his ostracised grandfather Leonard. Born in Germany, Henry Jr, moved to America when he was two years old.

Henry began to dislike his father at an early age: ‘he was always angry about something.’ Henry was not allowed to play with other children and did not make friends easily. Henry’s childhood and schooling were a series of fights and beatings, but mostly of loneliness and a horrific bout of boils and acne.

After school his first job at the Mears-Starbuck department store did not last long. He decided to enroll at the Los Angeles City College in ‘the easiest thing to take’ – journalism. He wrote about 10-12 short stories and hid them in a drawer in his bedroom. His father found them and was outraged, saying that no son of his could write stories like that and live under the same roof as him. Consequently Henry left home.

He turns to writing and reading, especially the books of DH Lawrence, Dos Passos, and Ernest Hemingway: ‘these men who had come into my life from nowhere were my only chance. They were the only voice that spoke to me.’

Bukowski finishes the novel in December 1941 with the attack on Pearl Harbour, bringing America into World War II. The life of Henry continues in the novels Post Office and Factotum.

Bukowski writes in the child-like way of Henry, but Henry is an angry insolent, crude, rude, brash, and vulgar child and teenager. The style is easy to read with short punchy sentences, sometimes revealing a cocky unlikeable boy, but sometimes showing his vulnerabilities as a awkward lonely child.

MARTINA NICOLLS is an international aid and development consultant, and the author of:- The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).

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