Post Office - A Review

“This is presented as a work of fiction and dedicated to nobody”

I can’t say whether it is for fear of appearing creatively barren, or if perhaps it is simply a case of sustaining an illusion, but it seems that more than a few authors are understandably reticent when it comes to admitting to having written autobiography. You have to admire then the fierce honesty in the above dedication, taken from Charles Bukowski’s first novel — Post Office.

Labelled as a misogynist by his detractors and a misanthrope by his proponents, Bukowski easily drew as much vitriol as admiration, in life and in writing. He similarly divided the critics, with some deploring his excessive reliance on self-caricature and others celebrating the naked simplicity of his prose. Critical reception aside though, Bukowski produced an expansive collection of work — some good, some less so — and if there is a consensus on Bukowski, then it is that he is an unpopular legend of American Literature.

Now, I have to admit to having been a little apprehensive about reviewing Bukowski, as legend is legend, and writing such a review for the turgid Internet backwaters is undoubtedly an exercise in futility. Evidently however, I’ve decided to do it anyway and my reasons are twofold: 1. Bukowski remains a controversial figure, and 2. Post Office is often overshadowed by his later work.

Post Office’s protagonist is Henry Chinaski, named quite obviously— think Samsa/ Kafka— after Bukowski, and the narrative centres, excepting a brief diversion, around life on the eponymous Post Office. Chinaski, later to reappear in Ham On Rye, is an anti-hero who stretches the ‘hero’ aspect past breaking, and it is not hard to see why Bukowski had a reputation for chauvinism. Chinaski’s language is crude and idiosyncratic, particularly when it comes to his indelicate descriptions of women and sex. Indeed, the coarseness of the text is so abrasive that you could be forgiven for putting the book down before the first chapter is out. To do so however, would be to miss a great deal of beauty, and a whole lot more ugliness.

Unsurprisingly, it is in the descriptions of the Post Office that the book is at its strongest; the dullness of the Post Office is rendered in negative against the colourful Chinaski, and it looms malignantly over every facet of life in the novel. The Post Office could easily make for an unreadable backdrop, but Bukowski’s dry humour and strong characters, deftly illustrated by terse, simple speech, make the novel vivid and appealing. The monolithic presence of the Post Office could potentially be read as being allegorical, representative of a world in which the working classes have little real freedom, but I think that to apply such a value-laden interpretation would be to misunderstand Bukowski, who was ever a cynic and a realist. I suspect that the Post Office is rather simply a fact of life, for Chinaski and Bukowski both.

Similarly, calling Bukowski ‘the voice of the working classes’ would also be wrong, and I suspect that most in the aforementioned group would resent being represented by such vulgarity. But I think that it is fair to say that his is a voice that is little heard in traditional Literature; it’s ugly and it’s depraved, but it is also very, very sad. Throughout Post Office, there is a duality in the way that Chinaski seeks both instant gratification and genuine warmth and affection — you have to wonder whether the predilection for the former might not just be an attempt at self-sabotage, masking a true desire for the latter. This is certainly an interpretation that would fit well with the Bukowski’s own self-representation, the brutality of which almost reads like self-harm.

Those that reflexively label Bukowski’s work as misanthropic or misogynistic misunderstand the man. It is an axiom that Bukowski only ever wrote through the prism of self-portrayal, so the misogyny, the misanthropy, the ugliness and the sadness can only be elements of a self-portrait, consciously applied. Charles Bukowski himself may well have been all of the above, but the only thing that we can be sure of on reading Post Office alone is that he thought himself ugly.

To sum it up then is very difficult — the adjectives that are typically used here just don’t work. Warm? No. Beautiful? Not Conventionally. Funny? Perhaps. Sad? Maybe too sad. All that I can really say then is that, provided you can stomach it, it’s very, very good.