Book Review – Charles Bukowski's Hot Water Music

A Short-Story Collection Full of Debauchery and Freedom

May 9, 2009

Three dozen tales of drinking and nihilistic tendencies show Bukowski at a literary high and the inhabitants of the world at a moralistic low.

German-born American author Charles Bukowski (1920-1994) had, at the time of 1983’s short story collection Hot Water Music (Ecco, ISBN:0876855966), made a career on taking his life-experiences and turning them into self-proclaimed “tales of ordinary madness.” With Hot Water Music, he uses breaks no new ground in his literary career, instead putting out another exceptionally-written anthology of bad people doing bad things. He occasionally lets his degenerate represent what the world can do to people, but more often than not his characters end up just showing people at their most indulgent stage of debauchery, representing what people can do to the world.

A Walk Through the Worst Parts of Town

The stories in Hot Water Music are the equivalent of walking through the worst parts of town at the best times, when both ends of the social spectrum clear out, when the gutters and nice houses both empty and the scumbags within start to move from bar to bar with a bad attitude, filling their guts with handout bar pretzels and stale popcorn. Bukowski follows these people around for awhile and ditches them before they become old news. These thirty-six stories rarely exceed six-pages, and they don’t need to. The reader is allowed to get a sense of the vulgarity that rubs its belly near the feet of everyone.

The Usual Suspects

The characters in these stories are the same drunks, rapists, sexual hounds with pathetic justifications for drinking whatever flows down the curb that anyone familiar with Bukowski’s work will recognize immediately. Bukowski’s literary alter-ego Hank Chinaski even makes several appearances, paralleling the arc of the author’s life in some of the more personal stories in this collection.

The subject matter is standard Bukowski fare, as well: women, booze, coming to grips with popularity after a life of being shunned and enjoying it. At their worst, these stories are uneventfully bleak (“Turkeyneck Morning”) or just sort of uneventful (“In And Out And Over”). At their best, these are stories of perverts and weirdos settling for less than what everyone else expects them to.

A Haul Towards the End, but More Than Worth It

Though this collection gets a bit tedious if read straight through (especially if a reader is also simultaneously taking in other works by Bukowski), the great writing that was cultivated with 1982’s Ham On Rye sees Bukowski taking his minimalistic approach to life and language and turning it into a series of blinks past the windows where the shady people dwell.

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