Last Exit to Brooklyn
by Hubert Selby Jr.
Summary
Last Exit to Brooklyn is built from six interconnected stories set among the bars, factories and housing projects of 1950s Brooklyn rather than one continuous plot. In Another Day, Another Dollar, a group of local hoodlums brutally beat a group of soldiers outside an all night diner for no real reason beyond boredom. The Queen Is Dead follows Georgette, a transgender woman rejected by her own family, whose infatuation with a violent hoodlum named Vinnie ends in humiliation. And Baby Makes Three follows a couple, Tommy and Suzy, through an unplanned pregnancy and the chaotic party thrown for their child's christening. Tralala, the collection's most brutal chapter, follows a prostitute who preys on drunken sailors until a night of escalating violence ends in a gang rape from which she is simply left, abandoned in the street. Strike follows Harry, a closeted factory union official whose self loathing curdles into violence against his own wife as he tries to buy status among men who despise him. The book closes with Landsend, a coda that widens out to show how the same housing project cycles the same desperation through different lives without any of its earlier characters finding an exit at all.
Selby writes in a stripped down, phonetic style that drops standard punctuation, quotation marks and apostrophes entirely, forcing dialogue and narration to blur together on the page. It reads as relentless and genuinely upsetting rather than as shock for its own sake, unflinching about violence, homophobia and sexual assault in a way that gives the book real force but also makes it one of the hardest books on this list to recommend without a clear warning about what it contains.
Grove Press published Last Exit to Brooklyn in 1964, Selby's first book, drawing on his own working class Brooklyn upbringing for its setting and its unsparing detail.
Historical Context & Significance
No literary prize considered Last Exit to Brooklyn; its documented 1960s history is a courtroom fight rather than an award. British publisher John Calder released the novel in 1966, and a private prosecution under the Obscene Publications Act followed; a jury at the Old Bailey convicted the publisher in November 1967, one of the most prominent literary obscenity verdicts of the decade. The barrister John Mortimer, later famous as the creator of Rumpole of the Bailey, argued the appeal, and in July 1968 the Court of Appeal overturned the conviction, a reversal now considered a landmark in the loosening of British literary censorship.
Reception split accordingly. Allen Ginsberg predicted the book would explode like a rusty hellish bombshell over America, while other critics recoiled from its violence entirely. Uli Edel's 1989 film adaptation brought the book's Brooklyn to a wider audience decades after the trial. Its influence has run mostly through other artists rather than institutions, the Velvet Underground's Sister Ray drew its lyrics from a scene in the book, one of many musicians who found in Selby's Brooklyn something closer to their own subject matter than anything a prize committee had rewarded.