POSSIBLE SPOILERS for Last Exit to Brooklyn
My familiarity with his work is limited to reading Last Exit to Brooklyn and seeing the movie, and seeing the movie version of Requiem for a Dream.
Is Selby seen as a "sensitive chronicler of the underclasses and fringe-dwellers" or something different?
Personally, I think he held most of the sort of people he wrote about in abject contempt and enjoyed putting them in hopeless, hideous situations. Yes, he was a junkie himself, but I guess that involved a certain degree of self-loathing.
Except for the family having the wedding and the baby, who are attempting to live a mainstream, if poor, life, everyone in Last Exit is utterly disgusting. It's impossible to care one bit for them as they are presented. Georgette and the other Queens are shallow, manipulative, self-obsessed, egotistical and obviously self-hating. Vinnie and his gang are violent, amoral thugs. Tralala is a horrible consienceless woman who brings about her own brutally grotesque downfall. Harry Black is also a very small, wretched and self-serving man.
These are not stories about finding nobility in poverty and suffering. These are stories of petty villains getting their well-tailored comeuppance; figurative tales of living by the sword and dying by the sword. There's no redemption or sense of loss when they meet their ends.
Selby was a very intelligent man who through circumstance of birth grew up among these sorts of people, likely observing their self-destructiveness on a daily basis, and likely being victimized by some of them as well. I think this experience led him to utterly despise the underclasses and fringe-dwellers, and his books, at least Last Exit to Brooklyn, were written as a form of vicarious revenge against them.
by LibrarianBarbarian1