Books: Borderline Psychotic

LAST EXIT TO BROOKLYN by Hubert Selby Jr. 304 pages. Grove Press. $5.

This is Grove Press’s extra special dirty book for fall. Apparently on the assumption that literary sex and violence, like heroin addiction, only gives kicks when the dosage is steadily increased, this new offering is even more extreme than Naked Lunch, City of Night, or any of Grove’s earlier peddlings in the same line.

Last Exit is a series of six stories, loosely linked by shared characters and unremitting violence, to make up a novel about the waterfront slums of Brooklyn. In this book all the ordinary four-letter words are for the little children, while grownups employ a more esoteric vocabulary where drag means transvestite clothing, silks are women’s underpants worn by men, a John is a male prostitute’s male customer, and rough-trade is that same prostitute’s brutal boy friend.

A fist in the face or a knee in the groin are routine asides. The climaxes occur when a gang of hoodlums beats a stray soldier nearly to death, with every kick, blow, chipped tooth, broken bone, and gout of blood and vomit described in detail; when a gang of transvestites and their boy friends get high on gin, Benzedrine and morphine, with every ensuing act of sodomy and fellatio described in detail; when a gang of dockworkers, derelicts and degenerates inflict multiple intercourse upon a prostitute in a parking lot so savagely that she is killed, with every drop of beer, blood, spittle and semen described in unrelenting detail.

There are critics (Grove is already assembling them) who will defend as art and high realism a book that describes such life and death with the primitive but undeniable power and anger that Author Selby demonstrates. But Last Exit to Brooklyn is not realism at all. Instead, it is a hypocrisy just as flagrant as the old-fashioned kind that wrote for dirty words and **** for scenes of sex. What Selby scrupulously elides are all the pleasant moments of life. What’s left, he tells in a style that will also inevitably be hailed as “tape-recorder realism”-because it mumbles like the nonstop mouthings of a drink-sodden bum or screams like a borderline psychotic.