Charles Bukowski’s “Ham on Rye” is the grossest coming of age novel I have ever read in my entire life. Yes, I know that Charles Bukowski is great and I did appreciate the originality and no, I am not complaining. I just want to warn you that if you are squeamish about little things, you might not like the book.

If you are skeptical about how gross this book actually is, I will give you three of my favorite gross scenes from “Ham on Rye”.

• A high school student lets himself into his girlfriend’s parents house when nobody is home and pees in their milk bottle while complimenting his girlfriend on being the best girl he knows to his rather clueless friends.
• Two adolescent boys have a weird encounter with a strange, semi-perverted fat woman in a swimming pool.
• The main character almost gets seduced by  a drunk cougar when he is in high school.

These may sound like scenes from “American Pie” but remember that the book was first published in the early 80‘s and might have actually been read by some other writers.  

Charles Bukowski’s originality shines through in “Ham on Rye” with specific and interesting scenes.  This book probably inspired many works of autobiographical fiction, and may  in fact have been some of CD Paine’s inspiration for the Nick Twisp stories, which are being made into a movie.

In “Ham on Rye”, Henry Chinanski, who is supposedly a stand-in for the real Charles Bukowski, grows from uncool to cool to less cool due to circumstances beyond his control, like “bad boils”. He has a bad situation at home and sometimes an even worse situation at school. Throughout the novel, he becomes more and more interested in sex, but isn’t as lucky with the ladies as some of his friends.

Bukowski’s writing style is simple and he uses direct language and brief sentences. Due to the brevity of his sentences and the fact that book is easy to read, you might get the idea that you, too, could write an auto-biographical novel as good as this.

Don’t be fooled, though.  His first sentence is, “The first thing I remember is being under something”, which is more original than it sounds and is something that not everybody could write.

Let’s face it- not everybody is cut out to be the next Charles Bukowski.