Last Exit to Brooklyn by Hubert Selby Jr. (1964)

Banned in Britain when first published, here are six tales of junkies, drag queens, prostitutes, and delinquents in WWII Brooklyn.

Book Review:  Last Exit to Brooklyn is a terrible book; terrible in the sense of causing terror in its vision of hell here on earth. Make no mistake, Last Exit is bleak, despairing, hopeless. Hubert Selby's central message seems to be that all is pointless at best, and brutal and cruel otherwise, at a whole new existential level. Violence, meaningless, random, extreme violence is the norm, and never far from the surface. Most troubling is the easy acceptance of violence as a natural part of life. In conjunction with the violence is anger, hatred born of anger and fear, and more anger. And if you've lasted this far, for all of that Last Exit to Brooklyn is a brilliant, painful, book. Brilliant in its evocation of this seedy, underworld, and goes deep within the characters, their moments and thoughts, observations and small broken dreams. The book consists of six stories, sometimes with shared characters weaving in and out of the stories. In one story a solider is brutally beaten. That's the story. In another, a gay transvestite is stabbed for no purpose, then goes to a party with drugs, sex, and jazz -- the party is brilliantly executed as it goes on for pages; the reader is drawn into it without the ability to resist. In perhaps the central story, a pretty girl who wants only money, and never seeks love, pursues her vision of life to an apocalyptic ending. The longest story (103 pp.), perhaps a novella, tells of a minor union official during a strike realizing that he's gay -- only it's so much more than that, as all the stories are so much more than their plots. The last story tells of the residents of a low income housing project. It is the only story with sympathetic characters, and if you have a heart, this story will break it. The stories are full of domestic abuse, neglected children, cruelty to those they should love. So much pain, emotional and physical. Last Exit to Brooklyn is a very different Brooklyn from today; the stories are generally written about the WWII years. The stories are written in a very visual stream of consciousness -- Virginia Woolf in a leather jacket hyped up on bennies and ready to break your nose. Hubert Selby is creative with his punctuation (no apostrophes or quotation marks) and invents words to approximate speech: "not ta botha witha" means "not to bother with her," (I think). Not to worry, Selby's style of writing is easy to absorb. An interesting thing I noticed was that the straight men in the book seem to have no inner life, unlike the women and gay men. One more thing: this is not a book for young people. There is graphic sex, lots of drug use, emotionally difficult passages. And it's likely to make you give up all hope for humanity. But if you can can get through all that to get a glimpse of the gritty lives of those who have no lives, an almost hyper-realism, it's an amazing book. (For those who care about such things, my used copy had a list price of $1.95 on the cover!) [5 Stars]