As in much of his fiction, Charles Bukowski employs the narrator and antihero Henry Chinaski to channel his own personal experiences. These are in turn transformed into simple yet engrossing tales of the quintessentially down-and-out, rebellious loner — an archetypal image that Bukowski projected throughout all of his works.

Conceived as a response to (and titular pun on) The Catcher in the Rye, Ham on Rye conveys Bukowski's own coming of age, from his first sensations of isolation as a toddler underneath a kitchen table to his turbulent teenage years and the helplessness that grows as he continues to drown himself in drink.

Bukowski's deceptively sparse prose moves along at a rapid but never overwhelming pace. Henry seems destined to be the outsider from the beginning, born into poverty and attracting "the poor and the lost and the idiots" from the first day of school to the last, a condition that becomes physically marked by his development of severe acne vulgaris.

Through a catalog of brutally violent fisticuffs, unlikely sexual opportunities, and drunken rampages, our narrator remains indifferent yet conscious of the "phoniness" that surrounds him. However, Henry's alienation is even more disaffected than Holden Caulfield's. Chinaski's indifference to the material and psychological struggles of the Great Depression takes on an almost existential flair, and drinking becomes the only reliable source of joy in a life forever mired in a tangled, often darkly humorous morass of complications. Bukowski offers us an unobstructed view into the chaotic and unforgiving world which spawned him; it is a glimpse of the rocky bottom that no reader is likely to forget.

-Kai Hsing