Ham On Rye - Charles Bukowski (1982)

Ham On Rye is an almost-autobiography - both a loose memoir of his Charles Bukowski’s life up until the end of his teens as well as the story of a young man growing up and finding himself completely lost in an unforgiving society.

The novel is a first person account of the youth of Henry Chinaski – an alter-ego Bukowski often used in his other works - growing up in depression era America as the son of an abusive, regularly unemployed father and helpless mother. Over the course of the book, Chinaski moves from one disheartening failure to the next as he tries to navigate his way through life as a strange kid, ill at ease with his surroundings and on the wrong side of the tracks of American society. Through his encounters with the street, school, violence, sex, alcohol and an extreme and debilitating case of acne Chinaski lurches from one misadventure to the next, leaving him lost and bewildered by a pitiless world. 

The genius of Ham And Rye is that Chinaski’s redemption does not arrive on its pages. Even though the future of the author is well known - Bukowski went on to become one of the most celebrated poets of the 20^th century - his writing and his discovery of and love for literature are mentioned but barely explored. Rather the story is of a life that both starts off as difficult and that then provides very little chance of salvation. It is in giving the reader no more than a hint of his own future that Bukowski presents not only a memoir but also the devastating story of an everyday, nameless, down-and-out American youth on a road that can only lead to nowhere. Ham On Rye is as much the story of Charles Bukowski, the one that made it, as it is the story of all of those that didn’t. It leaves you startled, in a sort of shocked awe, at how many others must have been, and surely still are, left out there.

From the point of view that is actually Bukowski’s story, it is an amazing insight into his early life. The fact that someone can be born so out of place in this world - and continue from that starting point to move even further down the wrong path - yet still somehow manage to find his place is remarkable. For those who have read his poetry (I can recommend Pleasures Of The Damned, essentially  a Best Of collection) the realness, dark dark humour and desperation of his work is only reinforced by a reading of Ham On Rye and the realization that this is actually how he lived.