Criticism > Short Story Criticism > Bukowski, Charles - David Montrose (review date 1984)

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David Montrose (review date 1984)

SOURCE: “A Bit on the Wild Side,” in Times Literary Supplement, May 4, 1984, p. 486.

[In the following negative assessment of Hot Water Music, Montrose contends that the “misfires occur far too often even by his erratic standards, the compensations too rarely and too meagrely.”]

Although not an exclusively autobiographical writer, the prolific Charles Bukowski has always drawn heavily on personal experience for his poems, stories, and novels; certainly, the presence of Bukowski himself, usually in the transparent disguise of “Henry Chinaski”, has normally been a feature of his better work. Fortunately, an eventfully misspent adulthood supplied a fund of experience rich in potential. Bukowski's uses of it were, admittedly, wildly uneven in quality, but, at his best, notably in various early stories, he reproduced the squalor and violence of low-life L.A. with the dirtiest of dirty...

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1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Criticism
   1. Thomas R. Edwards (review date 1972)
   2. David Evanier (review date 1973)
   3. William Feaver (review date 1974)
   4. Peter Ackroyd (review date 1974)
   5. Michael F. Harper (review date 1983)
   6. Carole Mansur (review date 1984)
   7. David Montrose (review date 1984)
   8. Julian Smith (essay date 1985)
   9. Norman Weinstein (essay date 1985)
   10. Russell Harrison (essay date 1994)
4. Further Reading
5. Copyright