I read the first fifty pages of Hubert Selby's Last Exit to Brooklyn and then decided, No More. It's an ugly, brutal book, not one that's going to offer me either instruction or pleasure. I read two chapters -- the first about the murderous gang wars and the second the transsexual who dies of an overdose of benzedrine. Then I looked up the wiki article and realized that I was about to come face to face with "the novel's most notorious scene, in which a young prostitute is brutally gang-raped after a night of heavy drinking and is left for dead in a vacant lot." Sorry, not for me.
Not much about Brooklyn either in this grim novel; no local color, though the story is reputed to be set in Sunset Park or Red Hook.
Selby crosses William Burroughs (whom I also can't read) with Jack Kerouac. Plus innovative grammar, confusing punctuation, and inventive orthography.
Not my cup of tea. Sorry, life is too short,
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