"Particularly striking is Bukowski's uncharacteristic restraint: the prose is hard and exact, the writer's impulse towards egocentricity repressed," comments David Montrose in the Times Literary Supplement. Ben Reuven, writing in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, describes the "first-person reminiscences" in Ham on Rye as being "taut, vivid, intense, sometimes poignant, [and] often hilarious," concluding that Bukowski's "prose has never been more vigorous or more powerful."