Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Stephen Donadío

Critical Essay by Stephen Donadío

SOURCE: "The In Way Out," in Partisan Review, Vol. XXXII, No. 2, Spring, 1965, pp. 299-303.

In the following review, Donadío faults Last Exit to Brooklyn as unrealistic, uninteresting, and unartistic.

The locale of Hubert Selby, Jr.'s Last Exit to Brooklyn is Red Hook, the dock and factory district lying roughly south and west of the Gowanus Expressway approach to the Battery Tunnel; its inhabitants range from the murderous and monstrous to the beaten-down and vague. In their collapsing lives, the author finds what appear to be subjects; but while Mr. Selby may be good at capturing the eccentricities of Brooklyn speech, which he reproduces as monotonously as an uncut tape recording, this book is no more about life in Brooklyn than Naked Lunch is about anything. The writing, furthermore, is of no interest at all; the page is hardly graced by punctuation, except for a slash now and then...
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