by Ed Gorman

...Continued: BROOKLYN NOIR 2 The Classics Akashic Books $15.95 edited by Tim McLoughlin

I hadn't read Hubert Selby in a couple of decades. If, like me, you've forgotten the power of The Last Exit From Brooklyn, wait till you reread the The Tralala chapter here. This is the sort of protein writing that self-consciously "edgy" crime writers reach for but never get firm hold of. This is writing by an adult not an adolescant trying to shock and play grown-up by imitating jazzed-up "lit" styles. This is death by blunt truth not by literary pretense.

Nobody much remembers the Dorothy Parker story "The Big Blonde" anymore but in an odd way Blonde has the same arc as Tralala--except that Blonde charts the boozy and sad decline of a sad sweet woman who dies small quiet deaths in lonely little apartments; and Tralala describes a feral monster far more terrifying than any creature of horror fiction who dies publicly in blood and vomit and disgrace. I looked back through both DeFoe and Stephen Crane after I read this. This tale is implicit in their observations of their time and streets. But man Selby put it together in a way neither of them could have--or probably dared have--imagined.

"Steelwork" by Gilbert Sorrentino is my kind of contemporary (well, 1970) literary writing--i.e., Sorrentino finds the wide world far more interesting than the one of his ego. This is an anti-war story that reads like a Robert Stone piece punched up by Charles Bukowksi. For those of us who hung out in working class bars during the Nam era, this is a crushing reminder of what the war did to us all.

What a fine collection. My thanks to Tim McLoughin for such an intelligent and splendid anthology.