Ham on Rye

In what is thought to be one of the best of his many prodigious novels, Charles Bukowski depicts the troubled, solitary years of his harrowing youth in a semi-autobiographical novel, through the voice of his literary alter ego Henry ‘Hank’ Chinaski. From his first memories of “two large people fighting, screaming”, to the violent, egotistical power struggle of high-school, to the alcohol-fuelled aggression of his gambling, chain-smoking adolescence, Ham on Rye details a bleak and fatalistic account of a perpetual outcast growing up during the impossibility that was the Great Depression.

Bukowski’s exploration of the permanent and irrevocable damage poverty and neglect can do to a person takes the form of a chronological account of his own troubled youth, and depicts the devastating effects of the Great Depression, particularly on working class American families. Through themes like pride, violence, status, and power, the novel offers the struggles of the working class in a new light: through the eyes of a child. From a marxist perspective especially, it can be said that Bukowski depicts the failures of capitalism in America through the young Henry Chinaski, who serves as a perfect reflection of the violence, desperation and cut-throat nature of low-life inhabitants of Los Angeles during the 1930s. By the end of the novel, the transition, from child to adult, is complete for Henry, yet it does not call for celebration; instead it leaves one in question of everything and displays the detriment caused by the importance society places upon values such as wealth, appearance, and one’s career, leaving the now self-entitled ‘Hank’, bitter, isolated, and drunk: a seemingly inescapable fate, foreshadowed from the very start of the novel in Bukowski’s address “To all the fathers”.

Through the comical, yet highly depressing thoughts of Henry, Bukowski presents the conflict surrounding him on all fronts, from his peers, his teachers, yet principally his own father, whose insanity, rage, and incessant denial is seemingly a product of his hatred of, and aversion to his own identity as a poor, unemployed immigrant whose own son has no more chance for success than he does, a fact that Henry faces and accepts: “They seemed to understand something that I didn’t understand. Maybe I was lacking. It was possible. I often felt inferior.” Bukowski’s conveyance of the bleak hopelessness that subtly underlines the entire narrative accurately characterises the period that was the Great Depression, and Henry’s own self-loathing, self-deprecation, and pessimism evidences the dystopian world he is merely a product of, successfully persuading even the most optimistic reader of the very same cynicism: “Suicide? Jesus Christ, just more work.” Historians, marxists, optimists, and pessimists alike will all enjoy this novel for its honest, crude, and often comical depiction of a childhood spent in poverty and isolation, perhaps even leaving you with a new sense of trivial gratitude for your own measly life.