Ham on Rye by Charles Bukowski: he brought everyone down to earth, even the angels.

In what is widely hailed as the best of his many novels, Charles Bukowski details the long, lonely years of his own youth in the raw voice of alter ego Henry Chinaski. From a harrowingly cheerless childhood in Germany through acne-riddled high school years and his adolescent discoveries of alcohol. Ham on Rye offers a crude, brutal, and savagely funny portrait of an outcast’s coming-of-age during the desperate days of the Great Depression.

First published in 1982, Ham on Rye is Bukowski’s fourth novel. It traces the youth and adolescence of Bukowski’s autobiographical anti-hero, Henry Chinaski. It acts as a sort of reverse-bildungsroman. Depicting one boy’s realisation that he doesn’t want to know the world, and that the world doesn’t want to know him.

So instead of growing up, Chinaski takes off, fleeing down the first open manhole cover he finds into a subterranean existence of skid-row dives, football fantasies, library books and bleeding ulcers. The good boys of his generation are marching off to fight Hitler. Chinaski stays home and fights a daily battle with America.

First, of course, there is Henry’s primary oppressor, Dad. A man whose limitless rage drives him into his car every morning to commute to a job that doesn’t exist. Just so the neighbourhood’s other deadbeats don’t think he’s one of them. Then there are all the pretty girls who don’t want to date (or even look at) Henry. And the deadening world of work where, it turns out, management isn’t looking for bright young things with new ideas. Rather, they want to hire more broken-down losers like themselves.

Ham on Rye is, like most of Bukowski’s books, very funny, very sad, and honest in most of the right places. In many ways, Bukowski may have been the perfect writer to describe post-war southern California. In an age of conformity, Bukowski wrote about the people nobody wanted to be. The ugly, the selfish, the lonely, the mad.

As Chinaski describes in a characteristically dirty epiphany. «The problem was you had to keep choosing between one evil or another. And no matter what you chose, they sliced a little bit more off you, until there was nothing left. At the age of 25 most people were finished.»

For Bukowski, the self is a hole you dig in order to rage against the darkness. Ham on Rye (Bukowski’s most painful book) is about digging such a hole.