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Ron Peters's Reviews > Last Exit to Brooklyn
Last Exit to Brooklyn
by
by
I read this because it’s on a list of David Bowie’s favorite books and I thought, “Well, this just has to be weird, then,” and it is. It’s West Side Story in the seventh circle of hell on Benzedrine and gin. The novel consists of six stories with loosely interlinked characters and settings. I hadn’t realized that Selby also wrote Requiem for a Dream.
For me, this book was at times an artistic success but, overall, a total entertainment failure. The characters live bummed out and weirded out lives, and Selby gives the reader a disconcertingly accurate portrayal of their existence. It’s like watching a series of horrible car wrecks in slow motion, filmed by Sam Peckinpah. While reading it, you mainly feel awful and tight inside. I don’t need to be amused by everything I read, but I also have no need to be merely made to feel accurately miserable.
There’s some continuity between modernist fiction (à la Joyce and Woolf) and Beat or Countercultural fiction (à la Kerouac and Selby) – just add drugs and stir. This has modernist elements such as stream of consciousness, no quote marks setting dialogue apart from the narrative, and heavy use of dialect and slang-based neologisms. This is blended with many (too self-consciously cute?) touches of Selby’s own, e.g., the use of a slash instead of an apostrophe for contractions, no apostrophe at all for possessives, paragraphs that start directly below wherever the previous paragraph ends, sentence fragments set against mile-long sentences with multiple layers of parentheses, and multiple pages set totally in caps.
To read this you must be willing to unblinkingly watch a constant stream of awful people afflicting other awful people, including urban crime, drug use, street violence, domestic violence, gang rape, prostitution, and violent attitudes toward the “sexually different” in the 1950s. In the bits of the book that possess a kind of dark and ragged street poetry, I think you may be seeing one of the influences from which hip-hop lyrics arose.
For me, this book was at times an artistic success but, overall, a total entertainment failure. The characters live bummed out and weirded out lives, and Selby gives the reader a disconcertingly accurate portrayal of their existence. It’s like watching a series of horrible car wrecks in slow motion, filmed by Sam Peckinpah. While reading it, you mainly feel awful and tight inside. I don’t need to be amused by everything I read, but I also have no need to be merely made to feel accurately miserable.
There’s some continuity between modernist fiction (à la Joyce and Woolf) and Beat or Countercultural fiction (à la Kerouac and Selby) – just add drugs and stir. This has modernist elements such as stream of consciousness, no quote marks setting dialogue apart from the narrative, and heavy use of dialect and slang-based neologisms. This is blended with many (too self-consciously cute?) touches of Selby’s own, e.g., the use of a slash instead of an apostrophe for contractions, no apostrophe at all for possessives, paragraphs that start directly below wherever the previous paragraph ends, sentence fragments set against mile-long sentences with multiple layers of parentheses, and multiple pages set totally in caps.
To read this you must be willing to unblinkingly watch a constant stream of awful people afflicting other awful people, including urban crime, drug use, street violence, domestic violence, gang rape, prostitution, and violent attitudes toward the “sexually different” in the 1950s. In the bits of the book that possess a kind of dark and ragged street poetry, I think you may be seeing one of the influences from which hip-hop lyrics arose.
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