Women

Charles Bukowski Women (1978)
I was told this one wasn't so great, but I can't remember the specific thrust of the objection. As with Factotum, Post Office and the rest, it's fictionalised autobiography with the author recast as Henry Chinaski presumably so as to allow for a little wiggle room where an artistic truth makes more sense than a literal one. Being rooted in autobiography, references to Bukowski's career as a writer - by this point fairly successful in so much as that strangers are now paying him to fly across the country to give readings - seemed initially awkward, at odds with the tone of the novel and its focus on smelly realism; but I stopped noticing once the narrative settled into a steady rhythm of arbitrary fornication. There might also, I suppose, be some objection on the grounds of it being difficult to mistake Charles Bukowski for Margaret Attwood, but I'm not convinced accusations of misogyny really hold, excepting readers who just really need to find something over which to get pissy.

If I had been born a woman I would certainly have been a prostitute. Since I had been born a man, I craved women constantly, the lower the better. And yet women—good women—frightened me because they eventually wanted your soul, and what was left of mine, I wanted to keep. Basically I craved prostitutes, base women, because they were deadly and hard and made no personal demands. Nothing was lost when they left. Yet at the same time I yearned for a gentle, good woman, despite the overwhelming price. Either way I was lost. A strong man would give up both. I wasn't strong. So I continued to struggle with women, the idea of women.

Women might therefore be regarded as Bukowski struggling with the idea of women but failing to achieve any solid or consistent understanding. He drinks, he writes, he visits the race track, and he falls slowly apart as a seemingly endless succession of women beat a path to his bedroom door, one after another, each grubby union doomed before his pants have even hit the floor. His success, if we're going to call it success for the sake of argument, is bewildering, but its occurrence is massively enlightening, not through explaining anything but because of the range of questions it raises; and through all of this, despite Chinaski's raging libido and one track mind, he never quite reduces any of his girlfriends to just another series of holes. He remains transparent and committed to the truth, not least to the truth of his own bullshit.

I poured another wine. I couldn't understand what had happened to my life. I had lost my sophistication. I had lost my worldliness. I had lost my hard protective shell. I had lost my sense of humour in the face of other people's problems. I wanted them all back. I wanted things to go easily for me. But somehow I knew they wouldn't come back, at least not right away. I was destined to continue feeling guilty and unprotected.

I tried telling myself that feeling guilty was just a sickness of some sort. That it was men without guilt who made progress in life. Men who were able to lie, to cheat, men who knew all the shortcuts.

Women as a feminist text is probably a bit of a stretch, but it scores higher than you might think, at least as an unflinching inspection of one dude's attitude to women; and of course, he writes like a dream so it doesn't really matter whether we approve of his serial knobbing. No-one but an absolute fucking twat is going be cheering him on, or reading Women as an instruction manual.