2010/35

Hubert Selby Jr.: Last Exit to Brooklyn (304p. in the first American edition, fifth print) 

The Smiths (the best band of the 80s?) named their classic 1986 album The Queen is Dead after a short story by Hubert Selby Jr., which first appeared in a few literary magazines, and then became the second chapter in Selby Jr.’s debut novel Last Exit to Brooklyn (1964). Last Exit to Brooklyn is Lou Reed’s favorite book and that’s how I found out about it, in a rockumentary on the making of Transformer. Another champion (and musician) of Selby Jr.’s craft has been Henry Rollins (Black Flag).

Hubert Selby Jr. wrote in a language of the street, forsaking all convention (for instance using slashes instead of apostrophes because it allowed him to type faster), and in Last Exit to Brooklyn offers an uncompromising glimpse into Brooklyn’s lower class in the 50s, brusquely painting scenes of domestic violence, drug use, and transvestitism, the most notorious scene being the gang rape (after a night of heavy drinking) of the young prostitute Tralala.

An American cult classic.

…they continued to fuck her as she lay unconscious on the seat in the lot and soon they tired of the dead piece and the daisychain brokeup and they went back to Willies the Greeks and the base and the kids who were watching and waiting to take turn took out their disappointment on Tralala and tore her clothes to small scraps put out a few cigarettes on her nipples pissed on her jerkedoff on her jammed a broomstick up her snatch then bored they left her lying amongst the broken bottles rusty cans and rubble of the lot and Jack and Fred and Ruthy and Annie stumbled into a cab still laughing and they leaned toward the window as they passed the lot and got a good look at Tralala lying naked covered with blood urine and semen and a small blot forming on the seat between her legs as blood seeped from her crotch and…