"Bukowski's loser's string of anecdotes, convulsively funny and also sad, is unflagging entertainment but in the end doesn't add up to more than the sum of its parts, somehow missing the novelist's alchemy," asserts a Times Literary Supplement contributor. But Valentine Cunningham, also writing in the Times Literary Supplement, sees the novel as a success: "Pressed in by Post Office bureaucrats, their mean-minded regulations and their heaps of paperwork, the misfit [Chinaski] looks frequently like an angel of light. His refusal to play respectability ball with the cajoling, abusive, never-take-no-for-an- answer loops who own the mailboxes he attends ... can make even this ribald mess of a wretch seem a shining haven of sanity in the prevailing Los Angeles grimnesses."