That's a Novel?

I know a guy who saw Clerks and said, “that’s a movie? I could make a movie!” and promptly did. That’s how I felt after reading Post Office, Bukowski’s first novel. It’s good. He wrote it in three weeks.

Here’s the concept: forget three-act structure or any of that. Forget suspense. Forget beginning, middle, and end. Take a character, which is you, who is deeply flawed and totally unapologetic about it. He proceeds to describe how the whole world screws him over because people are such outright douchebags. He himself is a total tool, but mostly a pathetic one, as opposed to a mean one. Sounds annoying, right? But somehow it isn’t. It is the battle of mean people against pathetic people. Basically, the struggle of the working stiff against The Man. Stay away from expression of feelings about it all, just say what the Man did, then what you did. Then what the other stupid fool did, then what you did. Go on like that.

Usually, what you did is not very clever, but occasionally you manage to pull off a zinger. This makes you kind of an anti-hero that’s actually very sympathetic. Also, you don’t have to exaggerate the stupid things people do, it’s not hard to find assholes in the world that do stupid things, so here is automatic humor material. But you can use a little hyperbole here and there to create a Kafka-esque visual image around the stupid fools and their stupid worlds as well as your own stupid, pathetic world. For instance, here is Bukowski on delivering mail in the hot sun with a severe hangover:

The whiskey and beer ran out of me, fountained from the armpits, and I drove along with this load on my back like a cross, pulling out magazines, delivering thousands of letters, staggering, welded to the side of the sun.

Go on like that for a couple hundred pages, then find some tiny victory on which to hang the ending. Here is the ending: (Don’t worry, it’s not a spoiler)

I got into the door, said goodbye, turned on the radio, found  half-p9ind of scotch, drank that, laughing, feeling good, finally relaxed, free, burning my fingers with short cigar butts, then made it to the bed, made it to the edge, tripped, fell down, fell down across the mattress, slept, slept, slept . . .

That’s a novel? I could write a novel!