Waiting Period (Hardcover)

~ Hubert Selby Jr. (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Selby's latest offers a chilling look into the mind of a killer, as the author of Last Exit to Brooklyn uses stream-of-consciousness first-person narration to slowly transform his anonymous male narrator from a paranoid, disaffected war veteran into a deranged murderer. The catalytic event that initiates the transformation is the narrator's attempt to purchase a gun to commit suicide, but when a brief waiting period ensues, he decides instead to get even with his various tormentors. The first target is the bureaucrat at the Veterans Administration who has been denying the narrator his benefits, an alleged injustice he remedies by slipping the man a lethal dose of E. coli bacteria. The narrator goes through a brief period of killer's remorse, during which he almost confesses to a newsstand operator, but once his jitters pass, he targets a local TV celebrity for another dose of lethal bacteria. From there he goes completely over the edge, building a homemade crossbow as he explores the feasibility of using explosives to facilitate similar attacks in various cities around the country. Selby's style is relentless, harrowing and frighteningly effective, albeit somewhat monotonous and tough to read; this might have been a better novel if Selby had introduced some secondary characters and broken up the first-person narrative into chapters built around each incident. Still, in a world in which the reach of terrorism seems to grow on a daily basis, this story is a disturbing reminder of how vulnerable we are to attacks from the discontented and deranged, regardless of their location or nationality.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Here, Selby (Last Exit to Brooklyn, Requiem for a Dream) again documents obsession, this time that of a disgruntled veteran who stops short of suicide after being faced with a five-day waiting period on his handgun order. In this time, he decides that rather than sacrificing himself he will validate his existence by killing those he deems despicable. Armed with Internet-given E. Coli recipes and pipe bomb instructions, he sets out to eliminate, among others, his boss at the Veterans Administration and Big Jim Kinsley, a Southern racist wrongfully acquitted in the murder of two black doctors. Like Requiem, Waiting Period shows Selby's deftness at employing innovative punctuation and creative spelling in service to his particular narrative voice. Except for random interjections from God, this novel is narrated entirely in stream-of-consciousness first person. Since the novel's voice belongs to a somewhat whiny and paranoid murderer, it does get exhausting after a while, and some lines seem too crafted to spout spontaneously from the brain of a homicidal maniac, albeit a sensitive one. In addition, as only one perspective is presented in this novel, it lacks the lively intermingling of different voices and the seamless transitions between them that Selby exhibits so well in his other work. However, the narrative can be appreciated for its schizophrenic word association games and the narrator's ideas on checking out of the status quo. Fans of vernacular wordsmiths like Irvine Welsh and of Selby's earlier work will want to take a look. Julia LoFaso, "Library Journal"
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 155 pages
• Publisher: Marion Boyars Publishers Ltd (July 1, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0714530719
• ISBN-13: 978-0714530710
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.6 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.1 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,653,227 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars This is the end., February 10, 2003

By	Angry Mofo "angrymofo" - See all my reviews

I was critical towards The Willow Tree, Selby's 1998 comeback, but compared to Waiting Period, it reads like Requiem For A Dream. After all, The Willow Tree still not only retained some of Selby's Naturalism, but also magnified the compassion that was always present in his work but was often somewhat difficult to see. And upon having read it, I thought that, its perceived weaknesses aside, perhaps Selby mark II, having spent twenty years in literary silence, would develop this kinder side further, that he hadn't lost the plot but merely changed it. Then I saw a blurb describing Waiting Period, learned that it tells the tale of a deranged veteran whose depression leads him to become a serial murderer, and became somewhat apprehensive, to say the least. Then I actually read the thing. Unfortunately, my fears were confirmed. Waiting Period is by far Selby's worst book. Crime And Punishment it definitely ain't.

Selby's style has not changed at all since Last Exit To Brooklyn came out in the sixties. That lack of quotation marks and that abundance of run-on sentences that made Requiem For A Dream seem so feverishly vital are now just motions to go through. Waiting Period's only accomplishment is to dilute it to a stream of broken thought fragments, depriving it of any power it still had. Selby even plagiarizes himself at times - that "cops and robbers" bit on page 185 is lifted straight from Selby's 1971 novel The Room, word for word, and those depressed rants at the beginning are mighty similar to some of the ones in the aforementioned novel. Except The Room, difficult and often vicious as it was, _never_, _ever_ demanded that the reader approve of its character - on the contrary, it was a portrait of self-abasement of the lowest kind, and made sure to underscore it.

Waiting Period, on the other hand, revels in it. Consider the fact that the main narrative - a stream-of-consciousness first-person monologue from the point of view of the main character - is occasionally interrupted with little paragraphs in italics that say things such as this: "Wonder upon wonder. The man is not only without fault, he is with virtue. His nobility brightens the night sky. Oh my son, my son, what joy you awaken in me and thus the world." (167) Then, a bit later, we get: "You are the aurora borealis of my life." (179) This delusional viciousness could have come from a Chuck Palahniuk novel; in fact, it's what fuels Palahniuk's entire career. It's bitterly ironic, since hacks like Palahniuk have made names for themselves aping, among other things, Selby's own The Room and The Demon. But you know how it goes - the student becomes the teacher, and they both ride home on the kindergarten bus. Or something. It occurred to me that these interludes were meant as some kind of Ironic Attack upon religion - the dedication ("To the Inquisition"! Oh, how _clever_!) seems to support this - but if so, it lacks any depth whatsoever. Much emphasis is placed on the fact that the murderer only murders those who "truly deserve" to die. Why - that's exactly like Raskolnikov, except without the whole point!

At its worst, the writing is not only derivative, but just plain bad. "Feel like any moment now I/ll be so focused on the process that I/ll become a part of it and just flow through the ether and become a part of every atom, every proton and quark and resonate through the Universe...all of it...all, all... ...Oh, what a sublime thought, to float free of the body and mind, just a pulse in space...but it would be _my_ pulse, _my_ awareness, awareness of freedom, free from the vice-like oppression that has crushed me all my life..." (36-7) Every quark, eh? Right. I never thought I'd live to see the day when Hubert Selby Jr. would start sounding like a chapter in a self-help booklet, but there it is, right before your eyes. Honestly, I found myself looking at the spine of the book to make sure that this was really written by Selby. I mean, for crying out loud, this is Hubert Selby! This man wrote not one, but two triumphs of Naturalism! This man was one of America's outlaw poets! What happened?

I don't recommend Waiting Period to anyone. Go read Selby's Requiem For A Dream. It's emotional, raging, dramatic and powerful, and it has much to say to you. All Waiting Period has to say is that it's over.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars a decent, entertaining book, April 3, 2005

By	Chris Wells - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Waiting Period (Paperback)

No, it's not Selby's best book--I doubt that he intended it as his masterpiece. It's also true that the style has changed little since *Last Exit to Brooklyn*, with its stylized paragraph indentations, idiosyncratic punctuation, and phonetic spellings, and I agree that such conventions seem to work best in the world of *Last Exit*.

Perhaps if it had been longer, it would have been a bit much, but I considered it a fun read. This short novel functions well as a portrait of an angry old man, crushed by bureaucracy, in a world whose very bureaucracy serves to impose the "waiting period" during which he "realizes" the "meaning" of his life--to kill the fat-cats whom he perceives are holding him down. I though it was, at the very least, Selby's funniest book (albeit in a twisted way) and definitely worth the time spent to read it.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Waiting For Justice, April 22, 2005

By	Leyman (London) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Waiting Period (Paperback)

I discovered this book after learning that Herbert Selby jnr. the author of this was the same mind behind the script for Requiem for a Dream, a recent film about drug addiction.

I hadn't seen Requiem at the time, but from what I had saw and heard of it I was quite intrigued to know more about the mind behind it. This was what brought me to The Waiting Period, probably Selby's latest.

The opening line reads from the mind of our main character Horatio saying; "but I suppose it could best be done with a pack of sleeping pills." Or something. And by "done" he meant death. To kill himself I gather. Other thoughts are like; "what if when I slash one wrist, and I am only half conscious enough not to be able to cut the other properly?" Or "what if the razor slips and I half to find it?" This kind of thing. I at first thought it easy to label this book a typical American expose on the nothingness of life, but I think this book asked me for more.
I don't believe that the author wanted the main character in this book; name, sex or job to be that important to us, but what he is looking for which we all do and that is a purpose to live. He is waiting so to speak on this purpose. This purpose to live. Which echoes what Sara G, a character in Requiem said when she told her son Harry that she needed "a reason to wash the dishes everyday." This is what he is waiting for "a reason," when he buys the gun and this is what he is against when he starts to question everything from why to get up in the morning to what should he do next. Maybe a shower? Fortunately or unfortunately depending on how you look at it he finally decides that there are people out there who deserve to die and not himself. Sparing whom he sees as innocents at the same time respecting equal rights of women to bear the same consequences that men do he sets on this mission to sting the targets he has made, people who live off others misery. This becomes more than a reason but a fixation.

And with this the book runs, and runs and runs. Spoken mainly from inside the mind of the main character this book reads with no chapters and barely any characters to explore.
Maybe there is something about the author's reputation which let his publishers give us this book with no chapter reference point or exact grammatical punctuation.

I found myself waiting for justice to be served that perhaps things will catch up with our main character but readers will find that they may have to wait... and wait and wait....