[Schott is an American editor and critic. In the following review, he suggests that Last Exit to Brooklyn is a relevant and shocking vision of urban life that nonetheless would have benefited from an exploration of love's presence in the world, not just its absence.]

Last Exit to Brooklyn drops like a sledge hammer. Emotionally beaten, one leaves it a different person—slightly changed, educated by pain, as Goethe said. The transfer of suffering has been made. One has gone to bed regretting life, wishing Hubert Selby's stories were not truth, and aware that they cannot be the whole of truth. They both confirm experience—and are caught by limitations imposed by experience.

Selby's world is as hard as a brickbat: greasy all-night diners, darkened bars, garbage-strewn apartments, grinding factories, sinister streets, throbbing motorcycles, and automobiles with radios screaming to calm their occupants.

Through this jungle run the urban predators of the twentieth century: young toughs growing up absurd, girls who hope to make it big as whores, hip queers dressed in silk panties and high on benzedrine, smoldering husbands and swollen-eyed wives; and the kids with their four-letter vocabularies, homemade weapons and taste for marijuana.

Selby lays open the social corpse of Brooklyn, not by telling us its heart is black but by showing us, event after event, the poison draining out of its veins.

The gang hanging around the Greek's in "Another Day Another Dollar" mutilates a soldier purely for the hell of it. Nothing else to do. The "doggies" happened to encounter Freddie, one of the gang, routinely working over his girl:

Rosie walked 6 inches to his right and 6 inches to his rear. He leaned against the lampost and spit past her face. Youre worse than a leech. A leech yacan get ride of. You dont go for nothing. Dont bullshit me ya bastard. I know yascored for a few bucks last night. Whats that to you? and anyway its gone. I aint even got a pack of cigarettes. Dont tell me. I aint ya father. Ya cheap motherfucka! Go tell ya troubles to jesus and stop breaking my balls. I'll break ya balls ya rotten bastard, trying to kick him in the groin, but Freddy turned and lifted his leg then slapped her across the face.

But it's more fun to club soldiers. They're part of authority. They wear uniforms.

With conversation shot from machine guns and obscenities as common as prepositions, these stories move on the surface power of happenings and with the speed of speech. The shock comes as much from Selby's refusal to moralize on these events as from his skill in carving them on the conscience with language like a switch blade. However, a large theme obviously runs through Selby's fiction.

Harry Black, machinist and shop steward turned homosexual, hangs crucified on a jungle gym in "Strike," not only because he tried fellatio on one of the neighborhood kids but because counterfeit love destroyed him. ("Strike," the fullest realization of Selby's powers, is also his most recent and longest story, and it suggests he can go the distance in the novel he is writing on crime and punishment.) The mass rape of the whore Tralala—semen, urine, beer spewed over her mess of flesh—climaxes her professional failure to roll an army officer, but her failure is really a lust for power and things so rapacious it replaces every other feeling. "Coda"—a prose movie reel of a publicly owned apartment complex modeled on the Red Hook project—assaults the spirit because all its human action denies everything we mean by love: infants burn in incinerators, eroticism dies in bedrooms, and to touch is to strike. The typical wedding in Selby's Brooklyn—four hours after the baby's christening—takes us to black humor by way of animal passion and mechanical thrust. While Selby's stones move horizontally from events ricocheting off events, they penetrate vertically with ideas. His dehumanized human beings dramatize a grand mal in the society of the streets and, by Selby's reckoning, everywhere.

Above all, Selby is writing about the distortion of love, the rottenness of its substitutes, and the horror and pathos of its perversion. The shock produces total recoil.

"What I'm attempting to portray," Selby said in a letter to me a few days ago, "are the horrors of a loveless world. What love there is in the book is twisted, turned and directed into something inhuman."

Something, everything, has gone wrong, horribly wrong, in the lives of Selby's characters. Vinnie and the gang can maim and kill, not only without conscience but with joy and exhilaration. Lucy, the puritan Negro in "Coda" responds with a grunt to her husband's proposals, "thinking .. . it would start like every weekend (and many nights too) and just the thought made her muscles tighten and her flesh get clammy." The Greek chorus of "Coda," idle wives waiting on park benches to cash their relief checks at the liquor store, curse the police for rescuing a baby about to fall several stories from an apartment window, and spoiling the day's entertainment. Violence brings Harry Black therapeutic release. He luxuriates in it:

. . . Felt real great when the trucks got blown up, yeah . . . yeah, he felt real good that night and the next day with the picture in the paper . . . yea, that's when they started to know who he really was. . . . Fuck them, the ball-breakers. They couldn't shove him around anymore. . . . Aint breakin my balls anymore . . . thats right, aint had that dream since the strike started. Blow a couple more trucks up and I'll never have it.

Tralala, who dies with cigarette butts crushed out on her breasts and a broomstick jammed into her body, "was 15 the first time she was laid. There was no real passion. Just diversion." The men who ravage her quit because they can't think of anything else to do to her. Seeing her from a cab sprawled in the vacant lot, Jack pounds his leg and roars with laughter. Rape is funny. When Harry Black's strike catches fire "the police, who had been standing, bored, for months . . . finally found what they too had been waiting for. . . . " Brutality relieves monotony.

It's almost as if Selby, who has never read Paul Goodman's Utopian proposals, had set out to write a fictional demonstration of their urgency. The products of work are meaningless to Selby's characters. Social and economic imbalances have shoved youth into total disaffiliation. Out of boredom his part-time thugs drift into full-time violence. Acquaintance with a professional criminal is as good for one's status as owning a motorcycle. Offered no goals, Selby's humans devise gorrilla entertainments. The fraternity of distorted sex, drugs, alcohol and mayhem becomes their community because society provides no alternatives except a faceless housing authority that threatens eviction from a concrete cliff. Natural contempt: human feces on the elevator floor. Affection, emotional union, empathy in Last Exit to Brooklyn exist in a limbo beyond love. The nearest thing to man-woman eroticism in the book takes place between homosexuals or men and machines. Abraham, the longshoreman, caresses, fondles, sings to his love object—"his bigass Cadillac."

The only conventional love and constructive association in the book is a reminiscence: an old woman's recollection of oneness with her dead husband. As if to compensate for the absence of love in Selby's other stories, she lays out his pajamas each night in hope that Hymie will return from the dead.

Like steel, the form of Selby's fiction becomes its subject. Language imitates action. Selby's two-page sentence describing the collision of police, strikers and firemen begins quietly, with clipped participles and slow verbs. It accelerates by repeating key words and gathers more speed with verbs and conjunctions as the fire hoses tear at the men and the strikers chew at authority. Then, as human rubble fills the streets, Selby decelerates with long, open vowels and a retarded iambic foot:". . . soon it was quiet enough to hear the ambulance sirens and the louder moans that spewed from the mass and soon too the street was clear of the smaller debris and even the blood had washed away."

"Tralala" starts with a tight, short line—tough, hard and aggressive like a girl on the make. As lust for power through sex degenerates into physical collapse, the line becomes longer. As in prose poetry, the line is the measure of form in Selby's fiction. And his style is speech. "I hear these things first," he says, "Eventually I'll have a style. But as for deliberately and consciously attempting to create a style, it has no place in art. All I've tried to do is incorporate a rhythm that will reveal the psychodynamics of person and place."

Reading Selby's book I kept worrying in the margins whether we have a critical vocabulary to describe it. I think not. As many threads lead to the naturalism of Dreiser and Farrell as to the expressionism of Gottfried Benn, and the cruel romanticism of Faulkner. The stabbing conversation may come from Hemingway, but it is overlaid with the existential desperation of William Burroughs. Last Exit to Brooklyn cannot be shaken as fiction. It's as real as a loaded pistol.

"I'm trying," Selby says, "to overwhelm the reader with truth, like Beethoven, so that weeks, months, or any damn time after he has finished the book and whether he liked it or it disgusted him, he will be forced to think." Only Beethoven and Isaac Babel, he says, have had an effect on his work—"Beethoven's ability to repeat and stop at precisely the right time." Babel he admires for the "extreme surface power of his stories that forces you to go to total emotional depth." I'm inclined to think that neither Selby nor anyone else can trace his sources. They come from within—an agonizing social conscience and a total lack of literary sophistication. Uneducated (a year and a half of high school), a jack-of-all-trades with Babel's picture in his billfold, Selby is a genuine sport—a modern American primitive who has seen in a new way and discovered a new (and ancient) eyewitness means of recording his vision. The dirty words are dirty because our speech is dirty. The horrors aren't hallucinated; they're real. Love hasn't flown the coop; it hatched as hatred. While the palefaces have gone off to Stanford or the Iowa Writers Workshop to fashion sestinas to their psyches or compete for a place in Esquire's Hot Center, Selby has written from his gut with the compassion that Dostoevski called the chief law of human existence. An articulate literary renegade, Selby has created more than he has seen, exploding remembered violence and depravity in a Rorschach of living savagery.

And we have been wholly unprepared for him. Critical response to his book confirms my suspicion that despite the legacies of Edmund Wilson and Alfred Kinsey the American literary establishment is run by the intellectual heirs of Mary Poppins. Granville Hicks defends Selby's "dirty" words in the Saturday Review with the gratuitousness of necessity. Eliot Fremont-Smith in The New York Times honors Selby and finally takes everything back with "not a book one 'recommends'—except to writers." And Time pronounces Last Exit to Brooklyn "Grove Press's extra special dirty book for fall."

Why not send these folks a copy of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs? They're ready for it. Or to really play it safe, send them around the world on Rockefeller grant.

The only criticism of Last Exit to Brooklyn one can allow would have to be applied to most of Selby's serious contemporaries, and perhaps I'm asking that red turn green before our very eyes instead of providing the after-image. Selby obviously considers his Brooklyn to be the world in microcosm. His epigraphs from scripture imply a universality for Last Exit to Brooklyn. The collage of "Coda" suggests a world. "I would like to believe they (the lack of empathy and the other qualities of love) don't exist or are absent in other elements of our society," he says, "but, of course, they do. I do think the downfall of these people can be found in the faults of other people. Acquiring money, neglecting the home, abandoning children—the results will be the same, emotional strangulation. The symptoms will be manifested differently."

So far so good. The nice guys in the surburbs who wave at cops instead of giving them the finger, and the upper-middle-class ladies who attend extension courses instead of scouting the bars, work out their hostilities with therapists or take it out on one another late at night after a couple of Scotches. With imagination one can move out of the Brooklyn wasteland to a larger and somewhat genteel grave yard of love.

But it's a narrow purity Selby practices. He cannot show us what love is—or chooses not to. This inability or refusal prevents most of contemporary literature from achieving complete relevancy. The question is posed in the negative in our new literature—what isn't love? We must infer what love is through experience beyond Last Exit to Brooklyn, or through Selby's compassionate act of having written the book. This would have been richer and perhaps even more terrifying fiction if it had explored love as well as its denial. A restricted view obstructs whole areas of human feeling. We are thrown back to Last Exit to Brooklyn as reparation for stillborn love in Brooklyn and its equivalents in the urban garbage cans.

Selby's people do not know what love is and cannot express it, as Goodman has said, because their society has given them no opportunity to find out. "They wouldn't have known love if they had seen it," Selby says. "It would have been mistaken for something else—weakness or fear." We believe Selby's characters and will never be able to forget them. But they are not Everyman. In praising Selby's astonishing power to tear our sensibilities, one must remember that this is part, not all, of the world we would weep for. And that part, as Auden suggests in Casino, never had a chance. That is the new American tragedy:

. . . Deeper in these hands is
grooved their fortune: "Lucky
Were few, and it is possible
that none was loved;
And what was godlike in this generation
Was never to be born."