Adam Floridia's Reviews > Pulp

"'This whole thing is a bad senseless dream,' I said" (200).

That about sums it up; except it isn't bad. It's not good either. I felt like Bukowski was just playing a joke on his readers the whole time, like "hey, let me just write some outlandish fiction with an absurd, nonsensical plot and someone will publish it and lots of people will read it. And I'm going to do that because I can." And he did. And he makes writing seem so easy. And this makes me think that I could write a book like this: simple sentences, cliched dialogue, random plot, poorly developed characters. And I know I can't (yet, he tells himself optimistically), which is one of the reasons I liked this book--he makes it seem easy. I could read this cover to cover without getting bored by the prosaic writing or the trite characters (Death, aliens, Louis Ferdinand-Celine, a more than a few cartoon thugs). And it's because Bukowski somehow makes all that crap palatable.