[Below, Byrne offers a positive assessment of Song of the Silent Snow.]

It should come as no surprise to his admirers that Hubert Selby, Jr., began his career as a short-story writer. Even his acknowledged masterpiece, Last Exit to Brooklyn, leaves its readers with strong impressions of unforgettable characters who stand alone and step outside, as it were, the five sections and Coda that make up that seminal work: Tralala, Georgette, Vinnie, Tommy, Tony, Harry Black and the others. For this reason, Last Exit to Brooklyn is a novel in the American tradition of Winesburg, Ohio. In each of its six sections there is a concentration on character and a selection of details usually identified with the short story (or novella) form, though the entire work concentrates on the microcosm of universal angst that is Selby's Brooklyn. The fifteen stories in Song of the Silent Snow are, on the other hand, the traditional efforts of the artist to write without an easily recognizable common theme, other than his own vision, experience, and craft. This, in the case of Selby, is saying quite a lot, given his now-famous weltschmerz/weltanschauung conclusions regarding life in America, especially that rotten section of the Big Apple we have come to know and love as Brooklyn's last exit. But the stories in Song of the Silent Snow, while being, in most cases, up to Selby's high level of characterization and authentic language, don't always engage the reader's sensibility so directly as to lock into his memory unforgettable pictures of tortured souls.

Notes for the Selby aficionado: Eight of the fifteen stories have a Harry as the protagonist, this in addition to Harry Black, Harry White, and Harry Goldfarb of the novels. The other seven stories take up the plight of Fat Phil, Roy in "The Sound," Harold in "I'm Being Good" and "The Musician," Morris in "A Little Respect," and, inevitably, two stories where the teller is anonymous. Perhaps this is the stuff that novels are made of. For just as that seminal/breakthrough novel Last Exit was not a typical novel, it is possible that Song of the Silent Snow, having in it the power "to stare the social and psychological realities of the second half of the twentieth century in the face," is not a typical collection of short stories. It just might be almost as good as Last Exit to Brooklyn.