Charles Bukowski- Hollywood

Hollywood

Cannongate

Charles Bukowski
1989

Other Bukowski Reviews; Post Office - South of No North - Factotum - Women - Ham on Rye - Tales of Ordinary Madness - Notes of a Dirty Old Man

“People just weren't interesting. Maybe they weren't supposed to be. But animals, birds, even insects were. I couldn't understand it.”

Back in 1971, the debut novel by one Charles Bukowski (who, by the way, was fifty-years-old at the time, giving me some semblance of hope I'll achieve something myself by then), Post Office, introduced the world to Henry Chinaski. Bukowski's barely disguised but definitely exaggerated alter-ego; a poverty-stricken, loveless poet wasting his life away working for the US postal system. Part of the appeal, alongside Bukowski's masterful writing talent, was the sheer power of the anger portrayed by the character based around his inability to fit in with or even tolerate contemporary society. Bukowski's second book (actually a prequel) Factotum continued along those lines to more critical success. Women, his third, offered a slightly mellower version of Chinaski who had earned some success as a poet, but whose rampaging affairs through girls and alcohol portrayed more sadness and inner torment. Ham on Rye took readers back to the childhood and adolescent origins of Chinaski/Bukowski, and was the angriest book of them all by some distance.

Chinaski's fifth and final printed adventure is a marked departure in tone and setting from his previous exploits, for reasons easily explained by the title alone; but does Bukowski's indomitable and unmistakable spirit suffer as a result? Or, as the man himself puts it, is he becoming something that he hates? I think it's up in the air. The plot of Hollywood appears (to me, anyway) to be probably the most thinly-disguised of all of Bukowski's roman à clefs, rewriting his experiences in the entertainment capital of the world during the production of his one and only movie screenplay, for the film Barfly. The actors and production staff behind the movie are given fake names (Micky Rourke becomes Jack Bledsoe, for example), as Chinaski witnesses the madness and inconsistencies of Hollywood and irs people first hand. Despite being cancelled about five times, Barfly (or The Dance of Jim Bean as this novel calls it) is finally made and released to moderate success, and Bukowski retires from screenplay writing for good. It's not an expansive, turn-based plot, but an aghast character study of an industry as seen by an outsider.

Smoking is cool.

The crucial difference between Hollywood and Bukowski's prior novels, every one of them to varying but notable extents, is that this Henry Chinaski is ridiculously mellow-tempered in comparison. He still drinks, but in moderation. He sticks to one, sensible girlfriend. His friends and Hollywood associates are crazy, but he simply watches in bemusement. It took this reader a good few pages to really start enjoying the book, so markedly different was the style. Ultimately I did enjoy it, since Bukowski's dry wit and memorable characterizations of his contemporaries are a lot of fun, but there was a notable edge missing. Because of this I can't help but categorize Hollywood as the 'worst' of the Henry Chinaski series in terms of how powerful I found it. This is probably due entirely to the short time-span between the real life events and the publication of the book (the author himself admits, maybe facetiously, towards the end of Hollywood that its creation was basically just something for him to do), where the line between Bukowski and Chinaski is so blurred as to become almost non-existent.

In a sense I really don't like to criticise this book much since it's a fairly organic and honest development of a character that never really had his own identity in the first place, but I can't help but admit it was an underwhelming way to see Chinaski go out, so to speak. Out of his element as a real barfly and too old and successful to stay truly angry, Chinaski witnesses this exorbitant facsimile of his past performed by people just crazy enough to give it some realism and doesn't seem to have enough of an impact on that world for me to fully care. In an ideal world the fictional Henry Chinaski would've died younger and angrier, with a burst of self-righteousness, and Bukowski would've written Hollywood as a non-fiction memoir, but there are just enough crazy people and anecdotes to make the book a good read.