Here we have Charles Bukowski’s Women (1978). At nearly 300 pages chronicling Bukowski’s adventures and misadventures with the ladies, it turns into a self-indulgent experience which loses much of the dark humour of his other works.

It’s not without merit, of course, but it would have certainly been better suited to novella status.

We don’t know what Bukowski was thinking (well, we do as he was drunk when he wrote it—three bottles of wine a night, apparently). He got ahead of himself and this proved to be one of his few missteps across a career revelling in squalid madness.

Bukowski’s Women Was a Career Low-Point in Deadbeat Drunkenness

“Being alone never felt right. sometimes it felt good, but it never felt right.”

The plot of Women is set in Los Angeles and the reader gets an endless series of misadventures with women.

As you’ll know if you’ve read his other works, there’s a persistent theme of womanising sprinkled amongst the drunken antics and employment mishaps.

Think of 1975’s Factotum and his leering antics and, well, you’ve got the sole basis of Bukowski’s Women.

His alter-ego Chinaski remains a boisterous anti-hero.

A downtrodden low-life who has accepted his lot with drunken wit but certainly won’t pass through life making things easy for anyone.

The real Charles Bukowski was plagued with terrible acne in his youth along with average looks, so he was heartbroken to find himself alienated from society (his father also beat him).

He turned to alcohol for an escape and, boy, did he get it from it.

“That’s the problem with drinking, I thought, as I poured myself a drink. If something bad happens you drink in an attempt to forget; if something good happens you drink in order to celebrate; and if nothing happens you drink to make something happen.”

After his awful upbringing, it’s no surprise he rejected society and imposed himself in isolation (stating in Factotum he thrived on solitude). A shy man in adulthood, his drinking brought out his explosive nature, but also ensured he could never hold a steady job.

Women is the Drunkest Bukowski Ever Was in Literary Form

Crap bags, does Chinaski drink a lot in this book! It’s relentless. He’s so pissed out of his head all the time, the pages positively reek of alcohol.

You get to hear about an alcoholic’s drinking routine, too, which is more of a candid insight than the writer had revealed before.

“I like to change liquor stores frequently because the clerks got to know your habits if you went in night and day and bought huge quantities. I could feel them wondering why I wasn’t dead yet and it made me uncomfortable. They probably weren’t thinking any such thing, but then a man gets paranoid when he has 300 hangovers a year.”

Really, it’s quite astonishing just how often he references alcohol, drinking, getting drunk, and being hungover.

We suppose this is the big problem with Women. The self-indulgence.

The casual witticisms and fun of his previous works was gone, replaced by a continuous stream of:

• Chinaski gets pissed
• Chinaski sleeps with another woman (cue excessive details)

Despite it becoming dull and repetitive, there are those positive moments. In amongst the indulgence you’ve got some great one-liners and the like. The Bukowskisms.

“There’s no way I can stop writing, it’s a form of insanity.”

But the core problem of the work, we think, is down to a theory we have.

Replicating Post Office With Women

“And yet women-good women—frightened me because they eventually wanted your soul, and what was left of mine, I wanted to keep.”

Referring to his first book, we think what Bukowski was trying to do here was replicate the success of his first work (Post Office in 1971).

By transposing the postal service with his sexual adventures.

What’s important to stress is Bukowski in literary form was rock and roll. He drank way too much, had no respect for authority, little desire for self-preservation, and didn’t give a shit.

Upon finding success as a writer aged 50, he suddenly became a surprise sex symbol of sorts due to his rebellious attitude, which helped audiences familiar with Beat Generation writers such as Jack Kerouac to find him endearing.

This resulted in Bukowski turning his experiences with women into a lurid account of sleeping around, interspersed with thunderous bouts of alcoholism. How true Women is we can’t know for sure—it’s simply best to consider his work as semi-autobiographical.

However, this time around, whilst the mishaps and dark humour are there, by the time you reach the 100th page you’re going around in circles. The relaxed cool of previous works clears off and reading becomes a pornographic chore.

“Strangers when you meet, strangers when you part -a gymnasium of bodies namelessly masturbating each other. People with no morals often considered themselves more free, but mostly they lacked the ability to feel or to love. So they became swingers. The dead fucking the dead. There was no gamble or humor in their game -it was corpse fucking corpse. Morals were restrictive, but they were grounded on human experience down through the centuries. Some morals tended to keep people slaves in factories, in churches and true to the State. Other morals simply made good sense. It was like a garden filled with poisoned fruit and good fruit. You had to know which to pick and eat, which to leave alone.”

That’s a more printable bit. Elsewhere, he really lays on the sexual descriptions, so it’s not exactly a NSFW book. We remember reading it on public transport and hoping no one was checking it over our shoulder.

This is up to the point where Bukowski’s critics (and some notable feminists have an issue with his writing) have a strong point against him.

“Once a woman turns against you, forget it. They can love you, then something turns in them. They can watch you dying in a gutter, run over by a car, and they’ll spit on you.”

The gradual progression of the work does have an arc, as Chinaski comes to realise he isn’t beneficial for the women he’s with.

It’s a guilt complex that develops, one which he explains by the lack of love he received as a young child, teenager, and man. And he kind of has a point. It’s a bad personality failing, one he acknowledges, and one he addressed properly in arguably his greatest work.

Bukowski Got His Writing Game Back in Order For Ham on Rye

“And my own affairs were as bad, as dismal, as the day I had been born. The only difference was that now I could drink now and then, though never often enough. Drink was the only thing that kept a man from feeling forever stunned and useless.”

To Bukowski’s credit, he got his act back together with the excellent and rather poignant Ham on Rye (1982).

The work goes a long way to explaining how he came to be the way he was, with Women standing as a testament to his confusion with the opposite sex. Feeling rejected, there was a lot of resentment welling away there.

Despite his issues, the real theme Bukowski’s works should be remembered for (we think) is the sardonic, deadbeat humour.

Whilst big doses of poignancy are never far away, along with the absurdity of a working-class existence, he carried on through it all with a wry wit and a casual aloofness few writers have mastered since.