The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Understanding Hubert Selby, Jr by James R. Giles
John O'Brien

James R. Giles. Understanding Hubert Selby, Jr. Univ. of South Carolina Press, 1998. 164 pp. $24.95.

At last a book on Selby, a mere thirty-four years after the publication of his first novel Last Exit to Brooklyn, which was followed by the equally brilliant The Room. Giles’s approach is to place Selby in the naturalist tradition of Crane, Dreiser, and Algren, or more accurately, that in Selby naturalism is coupled with existentialism, which connects Selby with Dreiser, at one end of the spectrum, and with Genet, at the other end. Giles does a very credible job of explicating Selby’s work, placing him in a tradition, and providing relevant biographical details. What he is less good at is showing the artistry at work, which is precisely what has baffled critics (especially academics) and continues to leave Selby outside the discussion of postwar American fiction. Selby has nothing whatsoever to do with the “serious,” officially sanctioned fiction of the 1960s (Bellow, Updike, Malamud) nor the experimental works of such writers as Hawkes, Barth, and Pynchon. Belonging in neither camp, he had no camp. As such, he occupies the space that a writer like William Carlos Williams continues to occupy in relation to his fiction: the academics don’t get it, it doesn’t have the convenient handles that a Bellow provides nor the highly intellectual foundation that the early Barth offered, it doesn’t fit the ready-made modes that make him teachable. Instead, Selby plumbed an American speech, thought, and sensibility that is foreign to almost all of his contemporaries, looking like a naive genius to some and an unsophisticated, foul-mouthed naturalist to others. In the very attempt to give legitimacy to Selby as belonging to a tradition, Giles gives too little attention to what makes Selby unique in American writing. But the attempt to place Selby anywhere at all is long overdue, and Giles’s book, I hope, will begin to generate the discussion that Selby’s work deserves. [John O’Brien]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction Understanding Hubert Selby, Jr by James R. Giles John O'Brien James R. Giles. Understanding Hubert Selby, Jr. Univ. of South Carolina Press, 1998. 164 pp. $24.95. At last a book on Selby, a mere thirty-four years after the publication of his first novel Last Exit to Brooklyn, which was followed by the equally brilliant The Room. Giles’s approach is to place Selby in the naturalist tradition of Crane, Dreiser, and Algren, or more accurately, that in Selby naturalism is coupled with existentialism, which connects Selby with Dreiser, at one end of the spectrum, and with Genet, at the other end. Giles does a very credible job of explicating Selby’s work, placing him in a tradition, and providing relevant biographical details. What he is less good at is showing the artistry at work, which is precisely what has baffled critics (especially academics) and continues to leave Selby outside the discussion of postwar American fiction. Selby has nothing whatsoever to do with the “serious,” officially sanctioned fiction of the 1960s (Bellow, Updike, Malamud) nor the experimental works of such writers as Hawkes, Barth, and Pynchon. Belonging in neither camp, he had no camp. As such, he occupies the space that a writer like William Carlos Williams continues to occupy in relation to his fiction: the academics don’t get it, it doesn’t have the convenient handles that a Bellow provides nor the highly intellectual foundation that the early Barth offered, it doesn’t fit the ready-made modes that make him teachable. Instead, Selby plumbed an American speech, thought, and sensibility that is foreign to almost all of his contemporaries, looking like a naive genius to some and an unsophisticated, foul-mouthed naturalist to others. In the very attempt to give legitimacy to Selby as belonging to a tradition, Giles gives too little attention to what makes Selby unique in American writing. But the attempt to place Selby anywhere at all is long overdue, and Giles’s book, I hope, will begin to generate the discussion that Selby’s work deserves. [John O’Brien]

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