Let’s face it: most people have never even heard of Charles Bukowski or his influential 1975 novel, Factotum.
Despite being somewhat of a celebrity in counterculture reading groups and having an impressive oeuvre of five novels, 43 books of poetry, ten short story collections, seven works of nonfiction, and one script, he seems to be one of those writers who never broke into household name status.
Regardless of his impact on the mainstream literary world, Bukowski is a master of the novel.
His mastery of craft is apparent within the pages of Factotum.
In the book, we are introduced to Henry Chinaski (an alter ego Bukowski took on when writing and often the protagonist of Bukowski’s fiction) who exhibits none of the qualities of the traditional protagonist.
He is a consistently unemployed alcoholic who spends the majority of his time drinking, slumming around at the horse races, living in fleabag motels, searching for jobs that he has no intention of keeping and writing.
This character brings the concept of the “factotum,” or domestic worker, full circle; as Bukowski brilliantly defines him, he’s “a man who never had a job he liked; and never kept a job he had.”
The plot itself is simple to the point that the reader may find him or herself wondering, “Why am I reading this again?”
The man gets rejected from draft service in World War II, moves around the country looking for work, slowly drinks himself to death, shacks up with various barflies and writes.
Like I said, pretty basic stuff.
However, this is Bukowski’s ploy to get the reader involved in the novel. Before long, you realize that Bukowski has more tricks than you guessed, particularly in the development of character and scene.
Like a filmmaker, Bukowski creates a tapestry of the lesser-known, depressed world of skid row — a world of dark, smoky bars, neon lights on the verge of burning out, nights that reek of whiskey and tobacco-stained fingers.
Within this world live pimps, drunks, prostitutes, bums, degenerate gamblers, the disenfranchised and the dispossessed.
Welcome to the world of “dirty realism.”
Bukowski is credited with inventing this literary genre consisting of a minimalist writing style, removal of adverbs and unexceptional characters.
While this world may seem like the world your parents warned you about, Bukowski acts almost as a guide throughout the entirety of the novel, as though he’s holding the reader’s hand and saying “It’s okay. I know these people. They’re my kind of people.”
Even though these people are unexceptional, each character sticks with you like a horrid hangover and there’s no way to shake them.
In addition to Henry, you’re introduced to Jan, a mother of two and problem drinker and Laura, a gold-digger.
All characters frequent the bars to drown themselves until they forget their shared psychic trauma.
Bukowski uses the bar as almost a religious symbol, a confessional of sorts, where sinners come to atone and get their slates wiped clean for another week of debauchery and depravity.
In keeping with the theme of alcoholic spirituality, alcohol acts as almost a sort of divine figure within the novel, keeping the action going and constantly propelling the plot forward — a true wet novel.
But it’s more than that.
While Factotum can be read as the ramblings of a drunkard, it takes on an almost mythic form, as though it were a modern retelling of the great epics.
Chinaski is a modern Beowulf or Ulysses, traveling the land in search for a job, taking on new monsters (these now in the forms of inflation, depression and substance abuse) but ultimately hoping for the same goal: to break from the sick world of overflowing ashtrays and empty bottles on the nightstands of vacant hotel rooms.
Factotum is truly Bukowski at his finest, taking out all the stops, developing his craft with the utmost precision of language, and delivering an extremely engrossing read.
Conner McDonough can be reached at cmcdonough@spartans.ut.edu.