Factotum by Charles Bukowski

"So now you're a little crazy. No love. Everybody needs needs love. It's warped you"

"People don't need love. What they need is success in one form or another. It can be love but it needn't be."

"The Bible says, 'Love thy neighbor.'"

"That could mean to leave him alone. I'm going out to get a paper."

Factotum means something like jack of all trades, one who does all things.  

I liked this book better than Post Office, the first Bukowski novel I read. This work gives a wider, all around study into Bukowski's world through his subject Henry Chinaski who here goes through various vocations rather than one drudging.

Chinaski drifts through World War II America, coming back and forth from his home Los Angeles, working a series of blue collar jobs to support his writing, most of which is rejected. Chinaski isn't drafted and does not volunteer to serve in the war. He is only willing to work enough to finance drinking and sexual trysts. His parents, particularly his father, resent him for this disinterest and make him go out and find work to continue living at home. After leaving home, Chinaski goes through job after job and leaves Los Angeles and California several times but returns. Towards the end he is about to go to Bakersfield, where I'm from, to pick tomatoes, but there isn't room on the truck after he helps others on. At the end he goes to a strip club, where he can't get it up.

The central theme is work itself. Chinaski has little to offer others except his labor during the hours of the day. Chinaski finds no purpose except in working for others because he is a profoundly lonely man. His parents want nothing to do with him, he has no family of his own to support, doesn't belong or participate in any social organizations, and lives a purely material existence. The only pleasures in life are venal: sex and booze. There's nothing spiritual about it. Subjectivity in a world where interest in somebody else is the only way it all works. Work as a means to self satisfaction which doesn't last, and so work itself for him the only value. 

But there are worse things than being alone, the title of a Bukowski poem. And so Chinaski goes on, which is why we love him.