How is Hubert Selby Jr. perceived today?

POSSIBLE SPOILERS for Last Exit to Brooklyn

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My familiarity with his work is limited to reading Last Exit to Brooklyn and seeing the movie, and seeing the movie version of Requiem for a Dream.

Is Selby seen as a “sensitive chronicler of the underclasses and fringe-dwellers” or something different?

Personally, I think he held most of the sort of people he wrote about in abject contempt and enjoyed putting them in hopeless, hideous situations. Yes, he was a junkie himself, but I guess that involved a certain degree of self-loathing.

Except for the family having the wedding and the baby, who are attempting to live a mainstream, if poor, life, everyone in Last Exit is utterly disgusting. It’s impossible to care one bit for them as they are presented. Georgette and the other Queens are shallow, manipulative, self-obsessed, egotistical and obviously self-hating. Vinnie and his gang are violent, amoral thugs. Tralala is a horrible consienceless woman who brings about her own brutally grotesque downfall. Harry Black is also a very small, wretched and self-serving man.

These are not stories about finding nobility in poverty and suffering. These are stories of petty villains getting their well-tailored comeuppance; figurative tales of living by the sword and dying by the sword. There’s no redemption or sense of loss when they meet their ends.

Selby was a very intelligent man who through circumstance of birth grew up among these sorts of people, likely observing their self-destructiveness on a daily basis, and likely being victimized by some of them as well. I think this experience led him to utterly *despise* the underclasses and fringe-dwellers, and his books, at least Last Exit to Brooklyn, were written as a form of vicarious revenge against them.

by LibrarianBarbarian1