Factotum by Charles Bukowski

3 out of 5 Stars

Not quite as enjoyable as some other things I've read from Bukowski, but this was also my first full-length novel of his. Certainly there were those moments of squeamish delight, like Henry's failure to properly wipe after a particularly messy episode in the restroom, which he nonetheless returns straight to bed with Jan. But it's hard to keep the reader enthralled without a central plot or an overwhelmingly interesting narrator, or protagonist. There's little, if any, plot to speak of and Henry just isn't engaging enough. What I found most interesting was Bukowski's treatment of Henry's various bosses, and their seeming opposition to Henry when really they were in fact similar in many important regards. Henry's father berates him when he returns from a drunken escapade that lastest, I think, about a month. The father belittles his son with no ambition, disparages his drinking, and his aloofness. But Bukowski offers us another side to this story. Whereas Henry is definitely without ambition and is surrounded by seemingly ambitious men who own their own business and are the source of Henry's many, many flirts with a career, we constantly see these "ambitious" men cutting-corners at work, or cheating the system (the guy who sells three "types" of brake pads, which all come from one large pile of identical brake pads heaped onto a table). Where Henry is honest in his laziness, and is actually quite happy with being poor, others are not, and in fact their dishonesty is a product of their own laziness, their own insouciance, to the point where it may cause harm to innocent people. So I guess we're left to wonder who is worse in the whole scheme of things.