Post Office

It was a bit of rough going during the early passages of Charles Bukowski's 1971 novel Post Office.  Vulgar, but not really a problem.  Repetitive, more of a problem.  Was I in for nearly two hundred pages of some lech getting drunk and laid? Now, I knew a bit about the author, mainly from the film BARFLY, which starred Mickey Rourke and Faye Dunaway.  His considerable output of poetry and short stories.  Writings about the downtrodden, the poor slobs who may drink away their paychecks. Or just try to survive.  A subversive point of view that earned him surveillance from the FBI.

Post Office, based on the author's experiences in the 1950s and '60s, follows a guy named Henry Chinaski and his years on and off with the U.S. Postal Service.  The long shifts, the tedium, the inclement weather.  The heavy loads of junk mail.  Ungrateful addressees and sometimes disagreeable supervisors and co-workers.  And Chinaski's women.  Some he shacks up with for awhile, others are one-night stands.  A few to whom he delivers those parcels.  One he meets at the track (Henry supports himself with long runs of good luck/skill betting on horses) and then faces her old man the next day.  Violently.

It's kinda like a diary.  Eventually, I became intrigued.  Sure Henry is bitter, even a sometime rapist.  But his humanity does emerge now and again.  When his common-law wife Betty passes during chapters nine and ten, Bukowski gives his alter ego some heart, some compassion.  No sentiment.  Still some wry observations.  A tonic amidst the comic misadventures (some laugh out loud) that preceded.  They kept me reading.  

I don't know if Post Office is the best place to start for those new to Bukowski's gin soaked underworld. It was mine, and compelled me enough to seek out more.