This novel was like a car packed with high explosives and driven into the middle of American literature and left there to explode in a fireball of nitroglycerine sentences containing jagged ugly words which could shear your mind in two. I can't believe how powerful it still is, I read it years ago and it seared my thoughts and turned me inside out, and it practically did the same again even though a lot of cruelty and evil violence and scenes of underclass horror have flowed from other writers of other fictions since 19641964, year of the cheeky moptops singing I want to hold your hand and the year of Last Exit to Brooklyn in which we meet teenage hooker Tralala. Two years later it was published in Britain and immediately prosecuted for obscenity and found guilty and withdrawn. Then it was cleared on appeal. When I look at the title page of my hardback copy I find it's the first 1966 British edition, the one that was busted. (Hey – I'm rich! No, it hasn't got a dust jacket, so it's probably still worth the two quid I paid for it instead of the £100 I'd get with the dust jacket. What a crazy world. But I'm not selling anyway.)This is a great novel but its greatness is difficult. The difficulty does not lie in its famous non-punctuation (I nearly went into shock when I spotted an apostrophe in the word "we're" on page 57 – it was such an obvious misprint) and busted up Brooklynese syntax:Goldie lit a few candles and told her Sheila was turning a trick so they had come down here and Im sure you don’t mind honey, handing her some bennie, and told Rosie to make coffee. Rosie lit the small kerosene stove in the kitchen and put on a pot of coffee. . When it was ready she passed out paper cups of coffee then went back to the kitchen and made another pot, continuing to make pot after pot of coffee, coming in inbetween to sit at goldies feet. The guys slowly snapped out of their tea goof and soon the bennie got to their tongues too and everybody yakked.This is not difficult. The prose flows hypnotically from almost boring and then and then and then narrative to dialogue to interior monologue and back again without any breaks. The minutely described incidents trundle along and without warning violence erupts and the violence is then described in the same slightly stoned unemotional way. Selby makes no judgements, he's just on a mission to tell you about this stuff he knows and he knows you don't know. So this book's difficulty comes from the constant depiction of degeneration, the unredeemed bleakness and horribleness of Selby's truthtelling, that all the characters are relentlessly graceless, nasty, violent, or nervewrackingly stupid, and that their lives both internal and external are revealed pitilessly to our flinching ears, that the men appear to hate the women, that the couples all have babies and children who they find unbearable, that there's never any money which causes most of the bitterness, that there's never any love. And here's the other difficulty. The two longest and greatest of the intertwined stories are the Queen is Dead and Strike. Both depict gay men and both I think enshrine the worst possible images of gay men. That night Harry went to the dragball. Hundreds of fairies were there dressed as women, some having rented expensive gowns, jewelry and fur wraps. They pranced about the huge ballroom calling to each other, hugging each other, admiring each other, sneering disdainfully as a hated queen passed. O just look at the rags she's wearing. She looks like a bowery whore. Well, lets face it, its not the clothes. She would look simply ugly in a Dior original, and they would stare contemptuously and continue prancing.In Strike Selby gives us a guy who finds out he's gay and goes through a horrible personal meltdown during which he performs a sex attack on a ten year old boy.So Selby has prancing fairies in drag and he has a gay man attacking a child. Underneath its avant style, Last Exit is about as politically incorrect as its possible to be. You really can't say that, Hubert.Of course there was a tradition in literature of dragging the people of the abyss into the light of day - Zola and Dostoyevsky in Europe, Jack London and Sinclair Lewis in the USA. But Selby makes those guys look like mealymouthed tergiversators, which they really weren't. Selby's amplifier goes to 11, not ten like everyone else's. His book is a white hot shriek of pain. It's awful.Last Exit's influence has been massive. Andy Warhol's early films and Lou Reed's Velvet Underground songs start here (Sister Ray is like a scene from Strike), likewise his "New York" album. Madame George by Van Morrison likewise. Last Exit also bequeathed Trainspotting to us (and fortunately Irvine Welsh was able to suffuse great humour and pity into his tales of junkie scumbags.)It's five stars from me, but I don't know if I'd honestly recommend it to anyone.
HIGHEST RECOMMENDATION!Grabbed this from my stash Saturday evening and started blazing through it, rapt! Could not put it down. Finished Sunday...Uncompromising portrait of petty slothfulness and violence in grim Brooklyn in the 1950s. The 1989 Jennifer Jason Leigh film was fine and disturbing, but it can't capture the earnest immediacy of this book and the machine-gun style of expression of the colloquialisms and the stream of consciousness. This is masterly, it seems to have flowed off Selby's fingers the way Kerouac's "On the Road" did. No quote marks or identification of speakers, but they're not needed because it makes sense without all that. (Books this good sometimes make me question the need for punctuation, actually...)I actually had difficulty trying to start this book in the past, but reading Joyce's "Ulysses" has raised my reading comprehension level greatly, so this thing flows like buttah.The terms "gay" and "Miss Thing" were already in use in 1957. Who knew?This is raw and frank and vivid and emotionally harrowing. The cold amorality of the city. Selby's expression is refreshingly free; he's a genius at depicting squalor...It's a world of coffee in styrofoam cups and queens who suck cum out of used condoms found in the park...This could end up being a favorite. Let's see.UPDATE:More than halfway through now. "Strike," which takes up the entire middle third of the book, is the kind of proletarian literature one rarely encounters. A real, on-the-ground look at a brutish, closeted gay married shop steward, swaggering like a little Caesar, trying to draw attention to his pathetic self...It's rare to see labor and unions depicted so unflatteringly in American literature. It's nice for a change to see actual WORK LIFE depicted in a book. Too often we get the after-hours doings of characters and nothing more in novels, always the sex bits and never the workaday stuff that takes up most of our daily lives. Gotta respect this. Great historical value in this book as well. I'd add this along with "The Jungle" and "Christ in Concrete" to the list of best prole lit.This part of the story starts with a hint of gay pedophilia and ends with an overt act of same. Not much that Selby shies from...Also must note, "Strike" is written in somewhat more a conventional style by comparison to the preceding chapters. Omniscent narrator and punctuation, though a lot of ellipses... (like that)Also, a must in the realm of gay/queer lit in its evocation of gay bars, drag balls, rough trade, and repressed sexuality taking the form of violence and compensatory extreme male hetero behavior.The heroes of the book, if there can be said to be any, are the stoic, browbeaten women. Selby's portraits of women are by and large sympathetic, even in the face of the menfolk's rampant misogyny. Women also are seen as sexual beings who want orgasms as much as men. I doubt this was commonly admitted in much other lit. in 1957.The last section of the book, "Landsend" is a concentrated portrait of a half dozen family tenants in the tenement block, alternating stories of the same characters. Heartbreaking vignettes. The old woman, Ada, probably the only truly sympathetic character in the novel. Selby's depiction of her reality is lyrical, perhaps the only real lyricism in the book. It gave me chills.This is a classic. Definitely a new favorite.
What do You think about Last Exit To Brooklyn (2015)?
An absolute masterpiece. It's in a league of it's own in terms of style, and every time I read it I still shake my head, finding it hard to believe that it was written in the 1950s. The language is extremely raw, coarse and literally screams up off the page. The final segment, the Coda, set over the course of 24 hours in a housing project in Brooklyn, leaves me shell-shocked every time. It's relentless and utterly devastating. Selby's writing is fantastic; he somehow managed to get away with not using coherent punctuation and conventional formats. Not only did he rebel from this format, but he managed to create his own effective form of literature. You can hear the voices; you can hear the urgency, the anger and the hatred, and at times, the very subtle, self-conscious and desperate plea for love and understanding. Harry, Tralala, Ada and Abe... You'll never forget these characters. To create such abusive and selfish characters and make the reader empathise with them is truly remarkable. Last Exit to Brooklyn is simply one of the finest pieces of literature ever written.
—J.A. Callan
The high ratings and high praise for this book put me in mind of the following scenario: a group of people stand around a display at a gallery - simply, a pile of shit upon a table. The idiots surrounding the table do not dare to let the others know their hidden truth: they don't (don/t) get it, it looks like shit to them! No one wants to be the first and possibly look the fool, so they begin to ascribe to it those catch-phrase buzzwords they've heard others use in similar situations. Brutal! Truth! Avant! Garde! and they all turn and nod and pat each other on the back for being so very smart and hip.Folks, it ain't art, IT'S SHIT.The dialogue is such a headache-inducing mess that if I ever came across people that actually spoke in such wretched patter I'd cut their damn tongues out. This pales in comparison to the grammatical butchery that makes my own run-on sentences look like unfinished thoughts. The author mistakes his aversion to periods and paragraph breaks for the real flow of conversation. SHIT! Replacing apostrophes with /'s? Is this how cool you are Mr. Selby? SHIT. Like the drag queens who treat us to an unrealistic evening (speed consricts blood vessels, erections need blood, just sayin') this piece looks like a book from the outside, but inside?SHIT!
—Jason
Good God, this is a brutal book. The writing style's brilliant, but the stories are so vivid that the pain of the characters is visceral. It's not a novel so much as it's a series of short stories that tie together to portray the hell-hole that was 1950's Brooklyn. There was a whole obscenity case about this book when it was published in the early 1960's: the story that received the most attention for being obscene, however, was not the one I found most painful. The most infamous story was "Tralala", which is about a teenage girl who slowly destroys herself (and is destroyed by others) as she uses her body for male attention and for money. However, her character was not as sympathetic as that of Georgette in "The Queen is Dead". This is one of a few stories written in a hybrid first/third person stream of consciousness style, which makes you feel for Georgette, a young gay man and sort of transsexual. Overall, it's amazing how words on a page can break your heart, but Last Exit to Brooklyn definitely does.
—Megan
