Customer Reviews

Last Exit to Brooklyn (An Evergreen book)

5 star:		(46)
4 star:		(12)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

I first read LAST EXIT when I was in junior high school, having discovered it mixed in with a cache of other books in my mother's library. I read it twice in a week, then a few more times, more slowly, over the following months. Selby crashed into my life like a meteor smacking into the earth -- literally, like someone from another world, which was what he was reporting to me. He wrote about the life in the city around him, which ruined many and forced some to ruin others, and starved people for love and made them turn to hateful substitutes. He also wrote unflinchingly about sexual agony, something I hadn't seen addressed honestly in any fiction at all until I'd read him. He also wrote with great empathy; he didn't hate any of his characters, even the vilest ones, but wanted to give them all a clear moment in the sun for us to see. I've gone on to recommend this book to others that I know will be moved and stunned by it, and they've in turn done the same to others they know. A lot of people will reflexively dismiss the book as disgusting or depressing, but I'll say this: what's more depressing? Reading an honest depiction of the worst and the best in us, or reading something that chooses to ignore the whole question in the first place? Selby will be remembered and loved for a long time after the louder, shallower, more immediate authors of our age are left to rot.

Selby's first book was published in the late 1950s. It was subject to an obscenity trial in England although it escaped U.S. censors unscathed. The book was reissued in 1988, coinciding with the release of a movie loosely based upon it. The book's dark vision remains with the passage of time. Not a book for the squeamish, faint-hearted, or for the conventional.

The book is a series of loosely related stories of varying length taking place in the tenements of Brooklyn. Many of the incidents center around an odius local bar known as "the Greeks" and its patrons. The longest story, "Strike" is about a long and ugly labor dispute and its effect on Harry, a worker and the strike organizer, on his marriage and on his sense of sexual identity. The story is detailed, sordid, violent, and fascinating. Other stories explore the world of cheap hookers, transvestites, drug users, petty crooks and drunks. The stories are raw told in a crude language of the streets appropriate to their subject matter.

The book reminded me of the early work of probably my favorite novelist, the Victorian writer George Gissing, in its concentration of the underlife in our cities. There is little of the express vulgarity and sexual crudity in the Victorian writer, but I think Gissing and Selby would have understood each other nonetheless.

This book is a disturbing picture of low life, partly written in the language and mores of its times but transcending that. There is little in the way of hope or love in the book and I think that the author wants to show us the consequences of a lack or hope and love. It is a book that in a materialist age can teach compassion in a language and style that pulls for attention. It is very sad, but the book invites and demands reflection. It shows us what is missing. This is probably a book that will be remembered in the literary history of America.

This is a work of sheer genius by anyone's standards. Yes, it's raw, it's shocking even to those of us who thought nothing in modern fiction could shock us but it's one brilliantly sustained song of the brutal, the outcast, the desperate, and at times the cruel who exist inside all of us. I read it over and over again hearing it in my head aloud. I lose it for a few years, then grab it up again. The rhythm of the sentences is perfection. It's for all the time, and the movie -- though a different entity altogether -- was pretty damned fine too. Of course it couldn't be the book. No. It couldn't be quite that dark. Yet it had its own magnificently wrought violence. Selby sings! Here's to him from another writer!

The mind simply boggles at the thought that "Last Exit To Brooklyn" should have been published in the 50s. It isn't hard to imagine the storm of controversy it created by its flagrant use of overtly sexual and lewd language. Its undeniable shock value notwithstanding, the novel is still regarded today as a classic for its blistering account of life on the other side of the tracks. The novel is full of unsavoury characters consisting of brutes, louts, pimps and whores. They inhabit a world where the sun never shines. They are all doomed. Georgette, the transvetite, Tralala, the town whore and most fascinatingly Harry, the union leader with a terrible secret even he doesn't know and pays for it when he does. Told through a series of loosely connected vignettes, Hubert Selby Junior's pitiless account of these wretched lives is so brutally honest it hurts to read. His prose is unconventional, utilising a combination of vernacular and "speak write" that has the dizzy immediacy of a screenplay. He switches between the first and third person with hardly the skip of a beat. As a novel, it's a mesmerising and compelling read. I couldn't put it down. Its cinematic possibilities have also been exploited and mined to the fullest some years back in a film version that is remarkably faithful to and captures brilliantly the essence of Selby's novel. The film has deservedly become a cult classic. I am only amazed the director didn't take advantage of the cinematic potential of Selby's last chapter, in which he indulges his voyeuristic licence to its fullest. Robert Altman would have had his camera cutting across the skyline and zooming in turns on the developing chaos within each household in the Brooklyn neighbourhood. "Last Exit To Brooklyn" may still be an uncomfortable read for some today. It's strong stuff, but those with the stomach for it will find it a wonderful read. A true modern classic.

I don't know whether it was deliberate or not, but Hubert Selby, Jr.'s LAST EXIT TO BROOKLYN is a window into the hidden side of America's supposed banner years during the Eisenhower administration. Movies and television of this period depicted squeaky clean families in their squeaky clean houses (with the notable exception of I Love Lucy and The Honeymooners whose families lived in apartments). In this Father Knows Best world, no one worried about poverty, minorities, or women's rights, and the only evil was on the other side of the hemisphere in the USSR.

And then there's the world of LAST EXIT TO BROOKLYN. This is the underclass of citizens that the nation preferred to ignore: pimps, hookers, thieves, junkies, drag queens, wife-beaters, and the thousands upon thousands of working class stiffs at the mercy of their union officials or their bosses, neither of which seem to have their best interests in mind. But this is no 'pity the poor' sort of the book, no HOW THE OTHER HALF LIVES (although I do wonder what kind of effect this book had upon its release). These characters, and they are fascinating, are not sentimentalized. Selby portrays most of them as brutal, unsympathetic, and as cruel to their own kind as anyone else. Even the drag queens, whom you would think would be a little understanding of each other, turn vicious at their best friends over the slightest insult. While very uneven in terms of pacing and tone, this is still a ferocious book which deserves reading.

Rocco Dormarunno, author of The Five Points.

I read this book about 9 years ago, and I can stiil remember the raw power of this novel. It is a brutal account of an assorted cast of characters who are basically human garbage. If they are not misanthropic or misogynistic, then they are poorly guided souls looking for love or meaning in a vile enviorment. This novel reminds me of my old neighborhhood in South Philadelphia, where the only true emotions shown are ones of angry, lust and gluttony. Reading this book should show the reader the evil of men, and what not to do in this world. The language is powerful, the atomosphere is heavy, and the vision is dismal. No other book, with the exception of "Naked Lunch" or "City of Night", shows the strength of great writing style and content. A must read!!!!!

Fifteen years ago I was busted out, suicidal, and 60 days off the juice. I hated all living things. Especially myself. One day I stumbled on to Last Exit To Brooklyn at a used book store in Venice.

I believe it was Kafka who said that a good novel should have the same effect as a blow to the head. Last Exit To Brooklyn had that impact on me. I was never the same after the first page.

Said plainly, Selby is a master at exposing his guts. His truth and the truth of the human condition screams and bleeds from every page. Every endless sentence.

Last Exit is the finest thing of its kind I have ever read. Maybe the best novel in the last 50 years. It tore my heart out and made me beg God to be a writer.

Today, when I look in the mirror, I still see the same two heads looking back but I know for certain that there's at least one other whackjob like me witnessing a similar event. I owe the end of my isolation from the human race and my birth as a writer and my love of books to Hubert Selby Jr.

Great stuff. Thanks Cubby.

Last Exit to Brooklyn, Selby's full-length literary debut, is structured more like a collection of stories than a novel. It consists of several episodes that involve completely different characters, have nothing to do with each other, and are structured pretty much the same way - a brief one-page exposition, followed by a buildup of violence all the way to some kind of unspeakably terrifying crescendo whose onset and cessation resolves absolutely no conflict but merely serves to mercilessly cut off the narrative. The last chapter is a series of short, disconnected vignettes that take place in one apartment complex; though they aren't as frightening, the events depicted in them are so uniformly grotesque as to be even more hopeless, even if they're completely banal. For instance, Selby's Naturalistic depiction of the time-honoured pastime of picking one's nose while gossiping is liable to turn one's stomach inside out. You can imagine, based on this example, that Last Exit to Brooklyn is not the most accessible (or even readable) book ever written.

Selby's own voice is not present in the writing; for the most part, the author functions only as a dispassionate chronicler of events that, for the most part, are all completely believable. There are no asides, no motivations, no interpretations - what one sees is very much what one gets, and so one is forced to confront what one sees. It isn't very pretty. However relentless his 1979 masterpiece Requiem for a Dream is, it's much more readable than Last Exit to Brooklyn, mainly because it at least features a "Dream" of some kind. The hapless characters of Last Exit to Brooklyn, however, have no dreams (unless, like Harry Black's, they're about evisceration). Selby himself once characterized this book as an attempt to describe "a world without love," and I think that this appraisal is absolutely accurate. Even the "love" felt by "Georgette" in the first big episode of the book (following a brief introduction that serves to establish what kind of world this is) is a grotesque parody of same. There is no human interaction in this book that does not feature some sort of casual brutality - even the striking workers, who are supposed to stand together in solidarity, in fact have no solidarity or togetherness whatsoever. This lack of love extends to every single member of society - the union leaders and the corporate officials are equally corrupt, the homosexual men and heterosexual women equally selfish, the police and the thugs equally violent, the black people and the white people equally isolated, and no one seems to ever sleep well. Sex is not only just another instrument of violence, it's almost always the instrument of choice. And while people who do bad things very often do get their comeuppance (in truly horrible ways - the robber/prostitute is raped to death, the closet homosexual beaten beyond recognition, et cetera), there is no sense of justice served since everyone is guilty.

Why read it, then? Well, Selby does harbour compassion towards these so-called human beings, but that's more visible in his later books; here, his own choice to recede into the shadows doesn't really show it. Only in the last chapter is it somewhat visible, when he describes a doddering old widow who wonders why no one seems to smile and who is probably a precursor to Sara Goldfarb in Requiem for a Dream. Still, his silence must not be confused with approval, since not only does he not sneer in the book, but his silence seems due to his being overwhelmed by grief. Another reason is that it, assuming the mantle of Naturalism, claims to depict a kind of truth - people can argue about how true it is, but they owe it to themselves to learn it first. But then again, one might quite legitimately ask if there is any value to a truth that is so grimly non-human. Third, one might want to appreciate this book simply based on the writing, and the writing is powerful indeed, but hardly refined enough to place Selby among the stylistic masters. In the end, what it comes down is this: if outright war between reader and writer is what you like, you'll never find a better book; otherwise, you'll have a hard time getting through it once. Also, in either case I would advise you not to eat before reading it.

With a journalistic clarity which has not been seen in the last 50 years or perhaps ever, Selby fictionally documents the lives and life of various natives in post-war Brooklyn. Like Burgess ("A Clockwork Orange") Selby is one of only a few authors who can use the rhythm and energy of pure language, either imagined or otherwise, to ignite the senses and open the mind.

Staggering across a desolate landscape, the denizens of each short story are gripped in depravity, violence and any variety of desire/panic that is described in all its painful detail. The impact of which can scarcely be conceived within English words.

These gruesome urban yarns are not presented as shock for the sake of itself. At the beginning of each vignette is a quote from the Bible (King James). Perhaps, at the time and within the context of something undeniably pertinent, Selby was re-telling some older stories. To be human in an inhumane world. Behind our excesses, no matter how grotesque or extreme, there is a frailty and tenderness that borderlines the spiritual. These tales caution that the death of spirituality and of dreams in general is a slow and painful one. Never in a flash of self-sacrificial glory but a long and agonizing descent. The personal loss of everything, starting with human dignity. The one hope is that life, in all its imperfect forms and circumstances, crawls, copes, pleads and hangs on through its course. Cold comfort, but a constant throughout.

These stories were recommended to me and as I pass on its recommendation to others, its odd that I see the same impact repeated time and again.

If you're looking for a novel that adheres to the book club check list that so many people rely on these days to gauge the value of a novel--"does it have likeable sympathetic characters that I can care about?" "is there a well constructed plot line?" "is there strong, plausible character development?" etc, --this is probably not the book for you. In Last Exit to Brooklyn Selby purposefully transgressed mainstream writing conventions to create one of the most unique and powerful visions of American life in the history of American literature.
Selby comes out of the tradition of the American Naturalist/Realist school of writers like Upton Sinclair and Stephen Crane who wrote about the marginalized and disenfranchised and depicted their world not as it should have been but as it was. The characters here are not pretty nor is the world in which they live, which is marked by mechanical sex, violence, pervasive ignorance, callousness, complete lack of spirituality and a survival of the fittest mentality. This is the ugly flip side of the American Dream and only those who don't read the newspaper could say that this book is outdated and irrelevant.

Yes, the narrative is episodic and there is no overarching plot line that ties it all together. A lot like real life, no? There is a sense of chaos, randomness and unpredictability although all the characters are limited by their own narrow consciousness and circumstances as well as the stultifying environment in which they live. Most are emotional cripples who express any sort of tender impulse in the only way they know how-- through crude sex or violence or anger. Accordingly, there is little sentimentality here and the little there is usually marks the character in its grip as doomed.

Selby didn't write this book to measure up to conventional standards of what a novel should be in terms of form. In much great art, form follows function and that's the case here. The fact that he doesn't develop an engaging, easy to read plotline or punctuate his sentences is about as meaningful a criticism as saying that the cover of the book isn't a nice colour. Great artists always break rules in their attempts to find the best way to narrate their vision and Selby is a great artist. Read this book on its own terms because it's one of those rare books that created its own standards. Having said that, this book does what great writing always does: shows us some aspect of the human condition in a light that is as harsh and difficult to face as it is illuminating and truthful.