Written in the first person, the novel follows Henry Chinaski, Bukowski's thinly veiled alter ego, during his early years.

Written in Bukowski's characteristically straightforward prose, the novel tells of his coming-of-age in Los Angeles during the Great Depression.

Bukowski keeps his descriptions of his hometown grounded in reality, paying more attention to the people that make up Los Angeles than to the city itself.

This type of description does not venerate or idealize the city, a contrast to other so-called "Los Angeles Novels".

[2] The story takes place at home, at his different schools, at the doctor's office (for his never-ending acne treatments) and at various other locales around town.

As Henry begins High School, his father, who is experiencing downward inter-generational socioeconomic mobility, makes him go to a private school where he fits in even less amongst all the well-heeled, spoiled rich kids with their flashy, colorful, convertible sports cars and beautiful girlfriends.

To make matters worse, Chinaski develops horrible acne so severe that he has to undergo painful, and mostly ineffective, treatments, essentially becoming a human guinea pig for various experiments thought up by his uninterested doctors.

The reader eventually follows Chinaski to college and reads of Henry's attempt to find a worthwhile occupation.

Like his previous autobiographical novels, Ham on Rye centers on the life of Henry Chinaski, this time during his childhood and teenage years.

Chinaski, growing up poor in Los Angeles during the Great Depression, is shown developing into a sarcastic loner.

The post-facto rationalizations they concoct for their hostility, however, involve his inability to play sports and his being viscerally revolted by cruelty to animals, the latter being one of the favorite past-times of neighborhood men and boys alike.

Chinaski has been compared to both Frankenstein's monster and Kafka's Gregor Samsa, because of his alienation and outcast resulting from his "monstrous" appearance.

As a prequel to Bukowski's previous novels, Ham on Rye depicts the origin and development of many of the reoccurring themes of his work as well as the persona of Henry Chinaski.

Some of the major themes: This is encapsulated particularly in the opening to Chapter 44, in which Henry ruminates on the American Dream as a sham reality which his father believed in, but which he cannot.

The Chinaski bloodline had been thinned by a series of peasant-servants who had surrendered their real lives for fractional and illusionary gains.

What woman chooses to live with a dishwasher?Like Henry, the rest of the Chinaskis are modeled after Bukowski's own family.