Last Exit To Brooklyn

In my last post, I wrote briefly about a recent trip to Portland, Oregon, where I attended the Pacific Division Meeting of the American Philosophical Association. Among the places I visited was Powell’s City of Books, which advertises itself as the world’s largest bookstore. I don’t know if that’s really true, but it certainly is the largest bookstore that I have ever been in. The first time that I went there in 2005, I was so overwhelmed by the size and expanse of the place that I wandered through the whole store, never stopping to browse, exiting the three-story building empty-handed with a feeling of deep anxiety. This time around I was calmer, taking multiple trips to visit multiple sections of the store on multiple days. Breaking up my book browsing in this bite-sized manner helped to make the experience less overwhelming and more relaxing. And this time I did not leave empty handed.

I found many interesting books that I would have liked to buy, but then I would have had to haul them back home on the plane, which seemed like more inconvenience than it was worth. In the end, I decided to purchase just one used pocket book that could easily be carried in my backpack. It was a 1973 paperback edition of Hubert Selby’s 1964 novel Last Exit To Brooklyn. This would be my first introduction to Selby’s writing, which I was interested in primarily because I am a fan of Darren Aronofsky’s film Requiem For a Dream, based on another one of Selby’s novels. If Powell’s had a copy of that book, I would probably have started with it. Instead, I paid $4.95 and walked off with the book that a reviewer for the San Francisco Chronicle called, “A profound vision of Hell.” When my wife saw my purchase, she said that she was familiar with Selby’s reputation but had no interest in reading his work. I was excited to discover what I had got myself into.

Last Exit To Brooklyn reminds me of other novels, like Trainspotting, that are assembled from short stories that could be read in isolation from one another, but which are held together because they constellate around a common location. In this book, that location is an all-night diner called The Greeks, in Brooklyn, New York. The characters in the various stories pass in and out of the diner, and some of their paths cross during the course of the book, but their narratives pursue differing trajectories, mostly ending in tragedy and abjection. There is a group of hoodlums who beat up and almost kill a serviceman; a trans woman who falls in love with one of the hoods from the diner, but ends up being degraded and abused by him; a guy who really wants a motorcycle; a woman who begins life as a predator, but ends up becoming a victim of gang rape; a union shop-steward who, while awakening to his own homosexual desires, ends up badly beaten by the hoods from The Greeks; and finally an imagistic snapshot of the meaningless and dismal lives of the residents of a government housing project.

In the course of reading one story after the other, I experienced a feeling like I was zooming in and out of various atrocious dramas transpiring in a neighborhood populated by residents with no real sense of community or compassion for one another. Their desperation, despair, and self-loathing are exhibited through alcohol and drug abuse, violence toward family and strangers, and the willingness to debase themselves and others sexually. No one is sympathetic in this novel, and I can see why some people really detest it. Published in 1964, it was praised by critics for its boldness and originality but in 1966 it was the subject of an obscenity trial in Britain, where it was, for a time, banned. Today, an uninitiated reader like myself will probably be confounded upon first starting to read the work, but as I stuck with it, the intensity and strength of Selby’s writing engulfed me, and I was drawn into a world that I would never care to experience in real-life.

One of the things that makes the book so challenging is the author’s unconventional style of writing. One sentence runs into another, mimicking the way that the characters speak in rambling, manic, alcohol and drug-induced streams. Interior monologues overlap with exterior conversations, and there are no quotation marks to indicate where one begins and the other ends. This stream of thought stretches on into paragraphs that run for pages, before an indentation or a text-break jolts the reader out of the flow. At times it is difficult to understand precisely what is going on in terms of the action (which may be a blessing in chapters like “The Queen is Dead,” and “Tralala”), but the manner of writing is always successful in arousing a frenzied mood of dread, disgust, and often horror. In “Landsend,” which appears as the last chapter – and is identified as a “Coda” – the agitation of a married couple who communicate solely by yelling at one another is evoked by the use of ALL CAPITAL LETTERS EVERY TIME THAT THEY OPEN THEIR MOUTHS. Once I stopped trying to think about who was who and who was saying what, I found myself slipping into the rhythm of Selby’s writing, which in turn placed me directly into the awful world of the characters. Throughout the book, I felt as if I was listening to the outbursts of particularly loathsome neighbors who might drive me to violence myself.

The chapter that I found most engrossing is titled “Strike.” More like a novella than a short story, it is longer than the other chapters and written in a more-or-less conventional style. Because of its length, the main character is more completely developed than those appearing as mere sketches in the other chapters; and because of its style, the narrative is easier to follow.

The central character in “Strike” is Harry, the steward for a union shop that manufactures machine parts. His resentment against management, and his devotion to the Union, is a mask for his own underlying lack of self-esteem and unhappiness in life. He is married and has a child, but his mind is filled with obscene fantasies about tearing his wife apart during sex and abandoning his family, who are just scapegoats for his discontent. He seems to be angry at everyone, and no one really likes him.

When his shop goes on strike, Harry feels and acts like a big-shot, running the strike office and telling everyone who will listen that he is the one in charge of the collective action. No one listens too closely to Harry, and no one really believes anything that he says, as it is clear that he is desperate for attention and using his position to boost his low self-esteem. After a violent confrontation between the striking workers, police, and strike-breaking truck-drivers (during which Harry is cowardly and indecisive), he starts to stock the office with kegs of beer, which he charges to the Union account. Each night he stays late, getting drunk and hosting late-night parties for some of the denizens of The Greeks, which sits just across the street from the office.

It is during one of these impromptu parties that Harry is introduced to a predatory transsexual who frequents the diner. Finding himself unexpectedly aroused, Harry starts to regularly visit a gay bar downtown, ultimately forming a relationship with one of the transwomen, who he wines and dines with money from the Union account. It seems as if Harry is finally happy, with friends and a lover who really enjoys spending time with him. However, when the Union strike eventually ends, so does the money, and Harry is dumped by his girlfriend, ostracized by the rest of the people at the gay bar, and left humiliated. In despair, he tries to seduce a young boy on the street and is beaten and battered nearly to death by some of the same hoods who he partied with at the Union office.

The other stories in Last Exit To Brooklyn are similarly bleak (except for “And Baby Makes Three,” which is a very short sketch of a guy who fantasizes about, and eventually gets, an old, junky motorcycle). The world that Selby conjures is populated by desperate people who share intimacy with other desperate people that can’t be trusted. I consistently felt dread as a seemingly minor event (such as Harry ordering a keg of beer) foreshadowed other events that I knew were bound to lead to no good at all. As I hoped for some sort of kindness, tenderness, or compassion on the part of the characters, I also shuddered at the more likely probability that any apparent benevolence was actually a precursor to continued victimization and cruelty.

But I guess that’s the genius of the author. Out of this series of stories, he successfully opens up an abyss of abjection that the reader falls into, partly willingly, and partly with reluctance. Selby repeatedly assaults us with such hyperbolic horror that we become conditioned to expect the worst while vainly hoping for some sort of upturn. The closest that the novel comes to any sort of redemption is in the final chapter, where one of the residents of an urban housing project, while cheating on his wife, ends up getting more sex from his one-night-stand than he anticipated.

That, and an old beaten up motorcycle, are apparently the best things that the characters in Last Exit to Brooklyn can hope for.