A Bit on the Wild Side
[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 realism. In 1970, aged fifty and with an emerging reputation, Bukowski became a full-time writer. Significantly, though, his most impressive work still derived from the preceding period of his life. But, by the mid-1970s, this source had worn thin. That the new material available—Bukowski's career as a minor literary celebrity—carried much less substance was strikingly illustrated by his third novel, Women, a fragmentary account of his life since 1970 that was little more than a self-aggrandizing catalogue of interchangeable sexual encounters. Small wonder that Bukowski's last novel, Ham on Rye, cast back to a largely unutilized source: his childhood and youth.
Hot Water Music, Bukowski's first collection of stories for over ten years, evinces a similar circumspection only in “Some Mother”, an uninspired tale of adolescent curiosity concerning the mysteries of the female body. Bukowski/Chinaski appears in less than half of these thirty-six stories. A number of others, though, are Chinaski vehicles in all but the protagonists' names. The collection mainly comprises further reworkings of Bukowski's older material and further reminders that the newer is, by comparison, infertile stuff. Even allowing for a sense of déjà lu, what is immediately apparent about the former is their tiredness. Two stories, for instance, deal with incidents following the funeral of Bukowski's father: events which, in several poems, he has used to good effect. Here, though, they receive perfunctory treatment. Similarly ill-handled are “It's a Dirty World”, “Beer at the Corner Bar”, and “Home Run”, where familiar scenes on the wild side are depicted with little of Bukowski's once-customary verve. “Fooling Marie” shows something like his old spirit, but its content—a gambler is robbed in a motel room by a woman who has picked him up at the racetrack—comes right from the bottom of the barrel. The stories based on Bukowski's more recent experiences frequently resemble postscripts to Women. “Not Quite Bernadette”, though, is an entertaining shaggy dog story, while “Scum Grief” also amuses: Chinaski, accompanied by his girlfriend, attends a poetry reading; while the poet declaims—“Choke, Columbia, and the dead horses of / my soul, / greet me at the gates / greet me sleeping, Historians / see this tenderest Past / leapt over with / geisha dreams, drilled dead with / importunity!”—Chinaski provides a whispered translation (“… Basically what he's saying is that he can't sleep nights …”).
The non-autobiographical stories—or, at least, those not obviously autobiographical—tend towards fatal inconsequentiality. In “Less Delicate than the Locust”, for example, two painters and their girlfriends visit an expensive restaurant; they get drunk, create a disturbance, and leave without paying the bill. The End. The principal exceptions are “Turkeyneck Morning”, a brief episode from a lousy marriage, and, in particular, “Broken Merchandise”, which concerns a middle aged nobody with a nagging boss at work and a nagging wife at home, who vents his frustrations on two young troublemakers who cut him up on the freeway. Though by no means one of Bukowski's very best, it is the kind of story with which he has always compensated for his regular misfires. In Hot Water Music, though, the misfires occur far too often even by his erratic standards, the compensations too rarely and too meagrely.
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