Read: Post Office, by Charles Bukowski
Reading this novel forced me to take a critical stance, and I finally found one that I felt comfortable with; this is an excellently-written novel, with an utterly vile if sometimes compelling protagonist, and an authorial voice that is sometimes profound and at other times profoundly misogynistic.
The narrator (presumably a cipher for Bukowski himself, though I won’t presume) has the sort of job that I was doing over Christmas - the kind of braindead but brutal easy money that starts to rot the soul after a few weeks. I couldn’t help but laugh at the steady increase in his absences from work, as it reflected my own commitment to the job; by the end, I became downright scornful of an organization that sees people as machines, and even more so of the supervisors driving that machine into total submission. Working in a data entry center is mentally numbing, physically torturous, and aggressively antisocial. It will hopefully be the worst job I’ll ever have.
For Bukowski’s protagonist, the long-term nature of his awful job feeds into a wild sense of nihilism that infects his life - he fucks his way through several women, seemingly without care for their own thoughts and feelings, and there’s one occasion in particular early on that irreparably tainted my perception of the rest of the book. (This book comes with a pretty heavy trigger warning is all that I’ll say, as I see no need to upset people by describing events in detail). Sometimes, all of this is viewed dispassionately, and it’s here where it thrives - the detached first person perspective allows you to fill in the gaps and imagine an entire depraved life for this man.
But. Then, there are moments where the voice of the novel attempts to guide you into sympathizing with the protagonist, and while he has a shitty job, the trail of human suffering and general unpleasantness he leaves in his wake means that when you’re forced to have feelings about him then you end up resenting any attempts to bring you onto his side. It’s a little as if Patrick Bateman suddenly started making an impassioned defense to the reader in favor of his way of life.
So it’s a mixed bag. A product of its time, in that it puts the quality of the writing first, and absolutely doesn’t suffer in that regard, but it’s also a novel that sees women as little more than objects you can put your penis into. And, honestly, I’m a little bored of that attitude.