[In the following review, Harper compares Bukowski to Ernest Hemingway and asserts that the stories in Hot Water Music “are imbued with the perverse romanticism of adolescent disillusionment.”]

Ernest Hemingway and Henry Miller are alive and ill and living in a rented room in East Hollywood—or so one might think after reading this collection of 36 short stories [Hot Water Music]. Sordid, obscene and violent, Bukowski's Los Angeles is more like Miller's Paris than Hemingway's, but our guide through this underworld responds to Hemingway's laconic stoicism, not Miller's apocalyptic rhapsodies.

Bukowski's narrators, who are sometimes “underground” writers like their creator, live in a world of cheap hotels “filled with prostitutes, winos, pickpockets, second-story men, dishwashers, muggers, stranglers and rapists.” The inhabitants of this world are all losers, because “life” is a game where the odds are stacked against you: “You might think for a while, especially when you were young, that luck was with you, and sometimes it was. But there were all manner of averages and laws working that you knew nothing about, even as you imagined things were going well.”

Lives of quiet desperation explode in apparently random and unmotivated acts of bizarre violence. A jealous wife shatters her husband's dreams with a revolver; a drunken woman takes a matchbook and tries to turn herself into Joan of Arc at the stake; a bank manager gets drunk and molests children; a man facing unemployment conquers his impotence by raping a neighbor in an apartment elevator; an ex-stripper sexually mutilates the man she is ostensibly seducing; a small-time gambler who reads Camus impulsively slits a stranger's throat and steals his matches. Most of the dialogue is unquotable in these pages, and story after story describes murderous impulses born of frustrations for which there is no cure.

“No cure”—that is the key to Bukowski's bleak vision, and it is in this fatalism that he most resembles Hemingway. In the final analysis, the horror of the lives Bukowski describes is not, in his view, the product of any particular social or political system, and hence it cannot be eradicated by social and political change. Human life is horrible, Bukowski implies, because of all the ills that flesh is heir to, and social decay is simply an extension of the biological order making men and women susceptible to hemorrhoids and halitosis, vulnerable to attacks by hot lead, cold steel and sharp teeth. In short, the ultimate realities in Bukowski's world, as in Hemingway's, are flesh and the death that will eventually overtake it: “Well, we all ended up dead, that was just mathematics. Nothing new. It was waiting around that was the problem.”

The Bukowski hero is the man or woman with the courage to face this fact squarely, to recognize that death makes nonsense of all pretensions to beauty, tenderness, love and delicacy, to accept that all humane ideals are sentimental lies which are dangerous because they offer only cruelly false hope.

All you can do is take whatever comfort you can find (booze, or another warm, decaying body) wherever you can find it (usually a dirty, ill-lighted place): “All you could do was light another cigarette, pour another drink, check the peeling walls for lips and eyes. What men and women did to each other was beyond comprehension.”

If all this strikes you as the ultimate wisdom, then Charles Bukowski will seem a very profound writer. There is certainly a raw power in these stories, but Bukowski's hard-boiled fatalism seems to me the flip side of the humanism he denies and therefore just as false as the sentimentality he ridicules. The things he writes of are undoubtedly “true,” in the sense that they have their counterparts in “real life,” and a virtue of his work is to give a voice to the kind of people usually excluded from “literature”; but in condemning as phony any idea or feeling that is alien to his chosen milieu, Bukowski mistakes a partial truth for the whole.

However “unromantic” they may seem, these stories are imbued with the perverse romanticism of adolescent disillusionment: Having discovered that the world is not heaven, he insists on seeing it as hell. Hemingway would be proud of his pupil.