cess is to make it as a whore; for Harry Black, union shop steward, happiness is to succeed as a bully and to make it as a queer; for Abraham, a flashy colored man who drives a Cadillac and has his nails manicured while his children are suffering from malnutrition, prestige is to make it as a cocksman; for Lucy, life is just to keep clean and to try to live decently. For all of them, their seeking leads only to nothingness, despair, or senseless violence, and all of them live in a world of excess where every pleasure becomes a vice and every human feeling becomes either weakness or ugly passion; ambition becomes lust, and courage becomes brutality.

Each of these stories is, in itself, well planned, and Selby displays considerable artistry both in his construction and in the selection of the details he relates with relentless precision. It is hard to know where reality leaves off and fiction begins. In fact, we may hope desperately that Selby is writing pure fiction, but we are plagued by the nagging fear that what he writes is not fiction at all.

Two of the six stories in this volume are concerned primarily with homosexuals and homosexuality, but just as all of this world which Selby describes is a world apart, so his homosexuals too are a world apart, but still we clearly recognize them as being fellow creatures. For those who think that the gay party as it has been heretofore depicted in literature depicted in literature is a stereotype, I suggest that "The Queen is Dead" will provide both shock and a real surprise. The longest story in the book, "Strike," is really two stories in one. One of these stories, fascinating for its revelations of machinations of a powerful union, concerns a strike against a large manufacturing company; the other story is of the awakening of a latent homosexual. Either story might have been told by itself and have been com-

plete, but as they are related here, the second grows out of the first, and so the two are artistically blended. The second story, that of Harry Black's metamorphosis, begins with his physical rape of his wife-an act which he commits regularly in revenge for her rape of his psyche-and in every detail leading to his final emergence as a cocksucker is a powerful tale which reveals an insight into man's sexuality which psychiatrists might and moralists should envy.

It is a basic rule in logic, as well as in grammar, that comparisons can be made only between comparable things. I hesitate, therefore, even to suggest a comparison between Last Exit to Brooklyn and John Rechy's City of Night. On one level, however, comparison is inevitable. Last Exit to Brooklyn's homosexual characters, like Rechy's, are faggots and queens, hustlers and johns, and both books deal with homosexuality as it exists on a certain level of society. There are basic differences between the two books, however, and the differences are far more important than their similarities. City of Night, though realistic in detail and in the impression it creates, is basically a story of romantic pathos and sentimentality. Last Exit to Brooklyn, though not without pathos, is pure naturalism. Even more important is the fact that whereas this Rechy, and was unfortunate, seemed to say "this is the homosexual world," Selby does not say this at all; he says "this is Brooklyn."

Mr. Selby has a magnificent perception of the sounds of speech and the flow of language. To record on paper what he actually hears, he has devised what is largely his own system of orthography and punctuation. For those of us who forget that language is first of all speech and only secondarily and artifically what we see on the printed page, this system is at times annoying and even bewildering.

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