Novel: Post Office

Overview
Charles Bukowski’s 1971 debut novel follows his alter ego, Henry Chinaski, through years of low-wage grind at the United States Postal Service in Los Angeles. Semi-autobiographical and told in a blunt, deadpan voice, the book charts a cycle of drudgery, booze, sex, gambling, and small acts of defiance as Chinaski drifts between the streets, the racetrack, cheap rooms, and the sorting cases and routes that come to dominate his days and nights. The portrait is unsentimental and often darkly funny, turning monotonous labor and petty office cruelty into episodes of raw, episodic storytelling.

Plot
Chinaski starts as a substitute mail carrier, a temporary worker who is summoned unpredictably and sent to unfamiliar routes. He staggers through dawn call times and brutal shifts, wrestling with bulging mail sacks, hostile dogs, extreme weather, and the maze of addresses that blur together when he is hungover or short on sleep. Supervisors enforce rules with robotic zeal, timing his every step, while coworkers share tips, resentments, and quick swigs from bottles tucked away. Away from the job, he drinks, bets at the track, and falls into bed with women who briefly soften the edges of the days.

After a stretch of grinding routes, Chinaski quits, buoyed by the fleeting illusion that escape is possible. He drifts, the money thins, and he returns to the post office as a clerk, trading the sidewalks for a fluorescent hell of sorting schemes and window duty. The holidays bring a tidal wave of packages and overtime; nights bleed into mornings, and he learns the numbing rituals of case sorting by rote. The same bureaucratic sadism follows him: write-ups for trivialities, surveillance, and supervisors who wield power like a hobby. He flirts, fights, gambles, takes sick days he can’t afford, and keeps stumbling back to the time clock.

Relationships flare and collapse around the job. An older partner offers stability and a roof, another younger lover brings chaos and desire; both are swallowed by the same undertow of drink, money trouble, and Chinaski’s refusal to play the part expected of him. A few minor illnesses and injuries mark the years, but the larger wound is spiritual: a slow, abrasion-by-abrasion erosion of dignity. After cycles of warnings and punishments, he finally walks, choosing uncertainty over the suffocating predictability of the case and the route.

Characters and setting
Chinaski is stubborn, funny in a scorched way, and allergic to authority. His supervisors are interchangeable avatars of the system: fussy, vindictive, and invested in procedure for its own sake. Coworkers are a chorus of survivors, cynics, schemers, and a handful of quiet professionals, whose jokes and whispered solidarity provide tiny shelters. Los Angeles sprawls in the background as sunburnt neighborhoods, alleyways, tracks, and dingy apartments, a city mapped in footsteps and sorting codes.

Themes and tone
The novel is a sustained look at dehumanizing labor and the small revolts that keep a person intact. Bureaucracy appears as an absurd machine that reduces people to routes, schemes, and punch-cards, and yet the book keeps finding mordant humor in the grind. Work is portrayed not as moral uplift but as a bargain struck against one’s body and time; pleasure, drink, sex, gambling, functions as both escape and trap. Bukowski’s style is spare, episodic, and unsentimental, building rhythm from repetition and blunt detail until the tedium becomes strangely vivid.

Significance
Post Office set the template for the Chinaski novels that followed, capturing a blue-collar Los Angeles with an immediacy that made Bukowski’s reputation. It reads as a worker’s chronicle stripped of uplift, a comedy of endurance where survival is the only victory and quitting, when it finally comes, feels like the most practical form of hope.