The Room

Paul Bryant

Rating: really liked it
The Room is the opposite of Last Exit to Brooklyn and there is a sad explanation for this. Last Exit was his first and The Room was his second. Between the two lay seven years of junk. He spent all the dough from Last Exit, which was considerable, on being a junkie in Los Angeles, where he had fled to get away from the junkies in New York. The Room is a book written by heroin.

Last Exit gives you a tour of hell, a panorama of suffering, drag queens, hoods, lathe operators, union bosses, working class wives, old people, bartenders. The Room gives you one man's mind. You're in it and you never get out of it for the whole novel. The guy is sick, the guy is insane. 288 pages of an insane guy muttering revenge fantasies about the police and about women. It's a cul-de-sac, it's a massive artistic mistake, it's a terminal book ending in the reader's death by asphyxiation due to lack of any oxygen, no windows, no perspective, no air, you die.

Who else followed a five star novel with a one star novel? Selby was unique.

Evan

Rating: really liked it
Devastating, and strictly for the most daring reader.

Uncompromising, stark, bleak, unremittingly repetitive, gruesome, sickening and despairing -- The Room is perhaps not as great as Selby's more narratively interesting masterwork, Last Exit to Brooklyn, but it is no less accomplished a novel. The story, if one can call it that, is a mixture of incomplete biographical memories and revenge fantasies as imagined by a prisoner in a cell who is apparently awaiting trial for a petty violent crime (or maybe he has already been convicted), but we're never sure because the prisoner is one of the most unreliable narrators ever committed to the printed page.

His life, in the little snippets we get, is unremarkable, marked by poverty and hints of a path leading to a life of crime. Back and forth he bats around obsessions in his mind -- the grayness of his cell (which reminds him of a toy model battleship he built as a kid), the cracks in the walls, the crappy prison food, the nausea in his gut, a zit on his face that drives him even more insane because it refuses to come to a head. But his most elaborate fantasies revolve around the officers who arrested him. As the book proceeds his obsessive desire for revenge against them (even though we never really know their side of the story) takes on the proportions of a self-righteous, self-aggrandizing crusade to abolish abuse in the entire justice system. He imagines his case being taken on by the best lawyers and newspapers and going all the way to Senate hearings -- all unfolded in minute detail. Of course, this all puffs himself up into a hero in his self delusion. Adding layer upon layer in his fantasies, he demonizes the cops as vicious rapists, and then imagines the most disgusting forms of revenge against them -- treating them like dogs in training and submitting them to the most explicitly brutal cruelties one can imagine.

There are parts of this book (including the rape of a female motorist) that will make you queasy, I promise you. Along the way, Selby exhibits total mastery of stream-of-consciousness thought patterns. The ways Selby describes masturbation, or the ritual of popping a zit, or the inability of coughing up a knot of phlegm in the back of the throat or removing an ingrown hair are as astonishingly real and true as they are grotesque. Needless to say, this is not the feel-good book of the century, although there is one passage describing a memory of a hand job session between the man and his girlfriend in a movie theater that is an incredible turn on. It's one of the few explicitly sexual passages (and there are many) in the book that is not sick and violent.

Written in 1971, it is one of the most angry, misanthropic examinations of one-man's totally hopeless view of the universe as you will encounter. "There's always something fucking you up," is sort of the guy's mantra. Rap has nothing on this book as a cop-hater's manifesto either. Having said that, it's view is anti-authoritarian, but in its place it offers no solutions, just the complete angry resignation of a man confined to a 6 x 9 cell. If you can take the book's challenging repetitive elements and the utterly barbaric fantasies, then you will be rewarded with a reading experience not to be forgotten. Again, not for everyone, to say the least, and hard to take even for me, but undeniably a formidable work of literary art.

(KevinR@Ky, slightly amended and corrected, 2016)

Ryland Dinneen

Rating: really liked it
I really wasn't sure what I was getting into when I bought this book. I knew it was dubbed as one of the most disturbing novels ever written and I did believe it, yet didn't think it would affect me much. I passed through American Psycho with flying colours and never uttered a gasp to A Clockwork Orange, and did not think this would be any different. To be honest, I couldn't have been more wrong.
The Room is basically the story of a man in prison (for reasons we are not too sure of) and his fantasies of revenge against the police officers that put him there. These fantasies start off tame (as in banging their heads together and running away) and soon grow into torture and full on mayhem (treating them as dogs and subjecting them to the worst pain imaginable, yet not allowing them to die). I personally found myself gasping at most of this book and feeling sick to my stomach, and believe me when I say that this does not happen often for me.
How do you compose a near 300 page book out of just a man in his cell? I asked that question numerous times before actually starting, and once started that question diminished. The thing is, the book does only take place there. The man (we never find out his name) has a seriously imaginative brain and this teleports us to incredibly different settings, numerous stories and narratives folding into one.
Besides all of this, The Room can be seen as extremely philosophical, and Hubert Selby Jr. isn't too shy to express his views on authority, as the reader can clearly see that his own opinions were blended into the text. His writing style (despite what many say) is actually brilliant and highly original. Unlike most writers he doesn't try and make every character seem like an English major - they speak realistically, and Selby Jr. uses a large amount of present day slang to do this. Yes, he makes many grammatical errors but that is what makes his novels so unique to him. It worked in Requiem for a Dream and it works in this.
Overall, I think The Room is a brilliant work of literature that I would not recommend to everyone. It is incredibly disturbing and hard to forget about - I feel as if I am still inside the pages, curling up into a fetal position and wanting to puke from disgust. I know that sounds bad, but trust me when I say that this book is unforgettable and one of the most difficult things you might ever read.

MJ Nicholls

Rating: really liked it
Selby’s second novel is his attempt at a knockabout comedy—drunk vicars chatting up girls on the village green, various cream-heavy pastries being lobbed into the faces of pompous landowners, amusing misunderstandings between bachelors and the parents of honourable virgins. The Room’s republication as a Penguin Classic will kick-start that much-needed Benny Hill revival the world has been begging for. On second thoughts, I might have the wrong book. This one explores the tormented psyche of an unnamed convict as he seethes in his cell, planning his revenge against his arresting officers in elaborate civic action and courtroom scenes, and indulging in horrible canine torture sequences in bile-stirring graphic detail, in case anyone might mistake this man as the victim of a brutalizing regime of injustice. Selby’s most inventive book structurally and typographically, and a contender for his most shocking and hopeless (tough competition), The Room is a pitiful howl from a personal abyss (Selby’s?) most people won’t care to hear. More scattershot than the word-perfect masterpiece Last Exit to Brooklyn (Selby was writing without Sorrentino’s editorial guidance at this point), this is still a wrenching and necessary novel from an unflinching visceral realist—long before Bolaño made that sound sexy.

The Literary Chick

Rating: really liked it
I am giving this 5 stars not because I liked it, but because it succeeded in what it was trying to accomplish. A beyond disturbingly horrible nightmare of a read but brilliantly executed. The completely anti-climactic ending left me stunned when I realized what it meant to the story. Another 'underground man' a la Dostoevsky. Hubert Selby, Jr. was quoted as saying that he could not read it for decades after writing it. Well, nor will I be able to. That said and done, I would not recommend this book to anyone.

Tom Quinn

Rating: really liked it
Obscenity as art doesn't excite me like it once did and antiheroes are no longer interesting in and of themselves, but I'm glad these books exist. Books like these are inevitable, books that say what's obscene just because they can, because it's important that we can in the first place. "I may not agree with what you say but I'll defend to the death your right to say it," and all that.

3 stars. Absolutely vile, but written with such artistry and craftsmanship that it just might be worth it. By using sensationalism to raise all the right questions, Selby stands well above the rest of the gutter literati.

Fede

Rating: really liked it
In this book there is but one character, locked up in solitary confinement in a 9×6 cell, with absolutely nothing to do but sit on his bunk, stare at himself in the mirror, sleep, squeeze a pimple and pacing around the room - day in, day out. Reality as such becomes nonsense, a chain of obsessive gestures. Time no longer exists: lights are never turned off inside the cell, making it impossible for the man to discern between day and night.
Nothing is supposed to happen in this novel.
And yet, a lot of things do happen. In, and to, his mind.

H. Selby Jr.'s nameless protagonist takes us on a journey through his claustrophobic, deranged psyche: a bottomless pit of hatred, frustration and desire that soon turns into a parallel world in which the wildest revenge fantasies can be satisfied.
Fantasies that get increasingly violent, morbid, insane all throughout the relentless stream of consciousness of this most unreliable narrator.
According to his fragmented version of the story, the guy was arrested for no apparent reason by two officers who, after knocking him unconscious, locked him in solitary confinement into a TB ward cell - and left him there. Whether it's true or not, he feels victimised, brutalised, abused. He also feels revenge is not enough. He's after something more, something worse than that, something so extreme that it can only exist in the mind. And his fantasy becomes a cesspool of horror and obscenity no reader will ever forget.
It's a frightening crescendo. He wants his torturers to learn what it feels like when days are endless, when life is worse than death, when one starts looking forward to being dead:

" O, how he wanted them to live. He wanted them to live a long, long time. And suffer. Suffer so bad that each second of each day will be an eternity, so they can experience the living hell of disgrace and dispise, so they can all be crushed by endless time. They will suffer years of torment for every second of pain inflicted to him. "

The 'dog training' chapters are, according to most reviewers, unbearable. Depravity, madness, physical and psychological torture, violence against animals. Except that it's not dogs, it's the two officers. The protagonist dreams of forcing them to sodomise each other, devour a rat, eat dog food and rotten meat in front of their families (that was actually done in the concentration camp of Sachsenhausen, where the German political prisoners were kept in kennels and forced to behave like dogs, barking and crawling on all fours).

Such is our man's revenge.
How revolting. How perverse.
The thing is, Hubert Selby Jr.'s characters are not so easy to label. In fact we also learn about a rape perpetrated by the cops while on duty (twenty odd pages that make the "American Psycho" sex/torture scenes look like "Little Women"). Is that true? Maybe. Or maybe not. But it does shed a different light on the protagonist's sadistic fantasies. Thus Selby Jr. wins in the end.

"To find that small pocket of weightlessness where no pressure is felt, where there is no tugging in opposite directions, no straining for a painless balance [...]. Where no light existed. Where no time existed. Where no need or desire existed. Where there existed no blackness. There, where there existed nothing, not even a void. "

So, five stars.
I know, this book is far from being perfect. It's not that I don't see the flaws; I see them very clearly indeed. I just don't give a fuck.
Beware of this book: it will affect you. Dangerously so.

Allan

Rating: really liked it
I have previously read four of Selby Jr's novels, the last in 2009, but was spurred to return to his writing when I saw one of my GR friends reading 'Last Exit to Brooklyn'. I started with this one simply because it was the first to arrive through my letterbox after ordering. Published in 1972, it was seen by the author as the most extreme of his novels, and one that he wasn't able to read again for 20 years after completion. I have to say, I can understand why.


The novel gets into the head of an unnamed prisoner, stuck in a small cell waiting on a court date for a seemingly small charge. And what a messed up place his head is. Due to the mundanity of trying to put time in in a cell with light on 24 / 7 and no facilities bar a bed, commode, sink and mirror, the character sinks into a dreamworld where he takes his revenge on the two police officers who arrested him, both in a fantasy court case and in person. Some of these scenes are extremely disturbing, I can't emphasise this enough. We also see him reliving incidents from his childhood, which have no doubt contributed to his mental state. Not a character that anyone could surely feel any sympathy for.


So why have I rated a book that I found genuinely disturbing so highly? Having read Selby Jr's more well known novels, I know that he has his own unique style, yet he is able to capture a mood or setting perfectly. In this book, one feels the claustrophobic atmosphere of the cell, and can see the character lost in his terrible thoughts. How Selby structures the writing while describing these thoughts perfectly mimics the process the mind goes through, sometimes working with parallel ideas etc, but does so in a way that is easy to follow. I can only imagine the dark thoughts that must've been going through his mind when writing this-suffering for his art wouldn't be in it.


All in all, this wouldn't be a book that you're going to enjoy, but is one you'll appreciate. Given how close to the edge some of his other books are, be warned that this is by far the most extreme I've read by him, and indeed I'd say by any author. I'm glad I read it, though.

Sarah

Rating: really liked it
This is one of the only books I have ever read that made me outright nauseous. Selby's violent and brutal and graphic descriptions of revenge were so real and vivid that I had to keep putting this book down to clear my head. But the fact that an author is capable of making me feel such a strong and real queasiness makes me completely in awe of him. He holds nothing back in this book. Selby makes Bret Easton Ellis's writing seem PG 13. If I was forced to choose between being locked in a room with Patrick Bateman or the 'protagonist' of 'The Room', I'd take Bateman any day. There is absolutely no element of satire in 'The Room'. While the narrative switches from the reality of the protagonist (who remains nameless throughout) to his fantasy world of beating the system as a hero to his graphic and horrific revenge fantasies, he remains completely serious amd dead pan throughout. There is no sense of humor in the character, and while the novel does provide social commentary and critique on the justice system in America and police brutality, there is nothing humorous or tongue in cheek about it. It's difficult to say that I 'enjoyed' this book -- I wouldn't even allow my mom, who is also a big Hubert Selby Jr fan, to borrow it. I didn't want her to share the repulsion and nausea that I felt while reading it. I am in awe that a writer can make me feel such physical emotions from his words. I can't say I 'recommend' this book, but I do believe that it one I will keep in my library forever.

Cristi Zani

Rating: really liked it
This ought to be, indeed, the most disturbing novel one can read. And also the most rewarding in terms of depth in the investigation of the most neglected and denied human proclivities.

It is a book about the either liberating or devastating power of dreams, about their equally destructive and elating potential.

When I got to the cops/dogs training part, I first wondered what cops had done to Selby to cause this utterly evil and crude, sadistic depiction of the obliteration of two souls. I had to get to the rape scene yet. Sooner or later, it all makes sense. The training is not just about revenge, it also explains indoctrination through pain, something we all have to endure if we're not firm enough. I will never be able to look at a dogs competition without thinking those owners would likely have people do those tricks for them if they could manage.

It's a novel about folks who are weak with the strong and strong with the weak until they almost subdue to a very hungry weak one if they're scared enough. It's a novel about the evils of absolute need.

When you scan through the MP's thoughts of revenge, his need for retribution, you realize Selby predicted Facebook feeds way ahead of time.

At this point, we really start swimming in shit, we scuba-dive into the MP's most secluded attitudes, the despotic violence of his own sexuality and his vulnerability, his sheer and catastrophic impotence in front of a continuously reiterated dissatisfaction. We ultimately see the MP's struggle against death when he most hopelessly delves into his own guilt and despair.

Then, we are shown the addictive power of segregation, the mind uncontrollably entertaining itself to madness, taking the whole body with it and crushing it, knowing that the pain is never equal to the guilt, that he deserves and wants more pain since his life started wrong and there's nothing he can do to mend it. The death of hope, the last thing to die.

It's a book about withdrawal, guilt, emotional numbness, impotence, and ultimately hopelessness. It's a not so gentle reminder that we must be living and loving, cause we all die anyway, at some point, alive or not.

This novel is a work of genius, and it is an awesome read.

Sean

Rating: really liked it
i read this a long time ago, but i remember it being so disturbing that i wondered if it was even legal to have this freely available in a pubic library. i was also fully convinced that there was no possible way hubert selby jr wasnt a serial killer.

P.

Rating: really liked it
'The Room' is one that should come with a big warning 'explicit content'. It is only for the very, VERY brave. Do not go into this expecting a great deal of semantic gymnastics or beautiful wordplay. Expect regular sexual and gratuitious violence to the nth degree. Selby's intentions are to go down, down, down into the deepest, darkest corners of a criminal's psyche to find what lurks in the cesspool of stunted, starved childhood memories. As he does this, prepare to be challenged mentally and morally, because Selby holds nothing back.

Knowing a thing or two about literary theory will help take the focus off the gross things Selby describes in great detail. If you wanna read it, make sure that you keep your attention on what he is doing as a WRITER, you will get more out of it. Storywise a lot of people will stop reading this one 10 pages in... but craftwise, Selby sets a new record that hasn't been challenged since Ellis's 'American Psycho'. My rating for the STORY is 3/5, my rating for the structure (which concerned me more) is 5/5.

I especially like the original ways in which he emulated claustrophobia and mental escape. The first two pages with the repetition of 'NORTH, NORTHEAST' is genius. The prisoner is faceless, nameless, insignificant. His plight is not Selby's real focus. What really matters is the way a mind seeks to deter inertia by playing out dark fantasies. Ultimately, 'The Room' is a disturbing psychological study into the pain and pleasures of revenge. NOTE: If you stick it out to the end, you will witness a most amazing emotional reversal of the likes I haven't seen before in writing.

UPDATED REVIEW:

I have put off writing about this book for as long as I possibly could for different reasons. The first issues from a very genuine difficulty I have of expressing myself when I really like a book – an experience that, I am sorry to say, is becoming harder to come by. The other reason (which applies to this particular book) is that due to the way it’s written, I feel it deserves two separate reviews: one for story, and another detailing Selby’s own unusual ‘homegrown’ writing style. This is why I gave the novel two ratings; 3/5 for story and 5/5 for technique. Why only three for the story you ask? Well, sometimes people skip pages to get around what I call ‘authors waffle’. You get this in almost every book, including Pulitzer prize-winners. The other reason is because of extreme graphic violence; violence that is convincingly and almost lovingly written. Selby’s novel falls into the latter category.

He certainly has a way of getting inside the twisted mind of a convict to make the reader feel like an accomplice to all those terrible fantasies. While I’m not the kind type to shy away from violence, everyone has a limit, and I found myself being quite severely tested. As it goes, I am still debating as to whether it really was necessary to go as far as he did in some instances, and maybe it’s this ongoing debate that made me sit on the fence with my rating.

But my own pedantic shortcomings aside, I am still going to try to explain how I feel about this book.
At first glance, the premise is no different to other prison-based novels. A small-time criminal is jailed for a petty crime and begins to await his hearing. However, the similarities cease here, as Selby’s stance to imprisonment culminates around notions of ‘inaction’ rather than action. His approach is in the vein of intuitive story-telling, bordering on what might be called the writer’s version of ‘method acting’. This is definitely not a character-based plot, as the narrative is driven by the concept of thought and the directions it may take ‘organically’ in a setting severely limited in the psychological and physical sense. This makes Selby seem very unsympathetic towards his characters, yet like all good writers he knows that this kind of detachment is vital. It leaves him free to use his sparse cast to the cause of the story.

Having said this, what is the ‘organic’ direction of thought in a prison cell? Selbys answer to this is very clear, as he cultivates an intensely inbred narrative that continually reflects and refracts back into itself. A man in a six by four cell cannot go anywhere. His past is behind him, his present is without stimulation and his future is uncertain. The inertia and weight of waiting turns all actions to the depths of the psyche and what lies there. Like a plant that becomes stunted and pale through lack of sunlight, so does the protagonist, as he turns inward to stagnate in his own turmoil. Time is a torture as he populates his days with past memories and elaborate revenge fantasies embellished with all sorts of sexual and physical degradation.

‘Well, anyway, time has to pass. But sometimes its so goddamn long. Sometimes it just seems to drag and drag and weigh a ton. And hang on you like a monkey. Like its going to suck the blood out of you. Or squeeze your guts out. And sometimes it flies. Just flies. And is gone somewhere, somehow, before you know it was even here. As if time is only here to make you miserable. Thats the only reason for time.”

A great example of the mounting frustration and rage that grows throughout the narrative is illustrated in the form of a pimple. Selby returns to this symbol to indicate first annoyance, alarm and finally total internal destruction followed by resignation. At the end of the novel the prisoner finds an almost shameful release from his terrible thoughts in the act of popping the pimple. The emotional breakdown that follows is a great example of how resourceful a writer Selby is.

“He leaned closer and touched the red spot with a finger tip. The beginning of a pimple. He squeezed it, then lowered his hands. Why bother? Itll just bruise the skin. I/ll wait until it comes to a head... if it doesn’t just disappear first.”

Selby’s novel also brings up the concept of ‘think crime’, as all the grotesque things dreamed up by the prisoner put the notion of guilt in a different perspective. The mind is a flexible thing, susceptible to the slightest impressions, but is the ‘thought’ of a terrible crime equal to the crime made manifest? Does thinking about it make you guilty? One could be forgiven at being shocked by the base examples of imaginary rape and torture; yet the quality of these daydreams are so vivid they give the impression of having happened on some scale, in the imaginary sphere which in this claustrophobic world is often more real than reality itself.

There is only one other aspect that surpasses the terror factor of the fantasies, and that is the awful realisation that man is capable of thinking awful things, and that if Selby could do it, so could we. The character; stripped as he is of identity, is still a human creation. In this abstraction of humanity, the reader finds a shocking alternative to the concept of innocence. Throughout the novel we never know the name of the protagonist nor his crime, only that that it is a small offence. His mind however gives us the impression of a monster. This begs the question, ‘how much is a person’s thoughts oriented by environment and hum much of it by his innate capacity for evil? Maybe it is this underlying question that made Selby dedicate it ‘with love, to the thousands who remain nameless and know.’ The thousands of inmates, whose identities are either forgotten by time or erased by the prison regime; the thousands who know exactly where the mind goes when it is also closed off.

Ryan Leone

Rating: really liked it
I wouldn't give this book five stars if it wasn't for the residual effects of Cubby's writing. I've read Requiem and Brooklyn, and didn't actually enjoy reading them���; but I was very affected. He has this way of making stories hurt your feelings.

I've done a prison term and have experienced solitary confinement. This book is about neither. It's a metaphorical account of human psychology. It explores the banality of violence and the repetition of fantasy. It's very abstract, cruel, morose, and depressing. I don't think many people understood the court transcripts and hellacious fantasy juxtoposistion, but it is very effective if you get through it. I felt something after reading this and not disgust, rather an unexpected sympathy for a suffering mind. Once again Selby does the greatest literary magic trick of all and demands empathy for the strangers that we would hurry past on the street.

Daniel Parks

Rating: really liked it
No one can break a heart in two like Selby. After finishing this book I was reminded of the time I showed the film "Requiem for a Dream" to my younger sister for the first time and how she ran out of the room with tears streaming down her face at the end. He tends to have that affect on people.

I've yet to read "The Willow Tree" or "The Demon," but out of "Requiem," "Last Exit" and "The Room" I feel like this one is his most intensely personal statement. Here is a man desperately trying (and indeed succeeding) to vent his crippling anger and frustration and bitter despair over the human condition. Here is a man that feels the world so strongly that it nearly destroys him.

It's not hard to imagine how someone in this condition (the author, not the narrator of the book) would self medicate with a drug like heroin as seemingly the only way to quiet the screaming horror in his exhausted mind. A lot of people have probably read this book and only taken away the intense anger of the narrator and all the brutal violence and callous evil depicted in some of the scenes, and there certainly is a lot of it, but others will hopefully take away the knowledge that there is something deeply wrong with this world. That there is a festering sickness in the world that has gone unchecked for far too long. Thank whatever god you believe in that there have always been artists like Hubert Selby Jr. who have been blessed with the talent and courage to show us and remind us that humans are still capable of feeling compassion for each other, and that it may not be too late to cure the sickness so that those who feel locked up with anger and frustration and sadness may finally leave "the room."

Geoff Stewart

Rating: really liked it
'Last Exit to Brooklyn' was the only other book by Selby that I had read up to this point and it's a book I am still evangelical about getting other people to read. There is a viscerality and a dynamism to the style, the typography, the vocabulary etc. etc. that I had just never encountered before and I can still feel that sense of something almost unbearably new and almost unbearably raw when I think about it.
'The Room' speaks the same language and I would argue in the end achieves the same thematic arc as LEB but as it spends the entire narrative embedded within the protagonists mindset there is an added element of claustrophobia that makes it an even more uncomfortable read. This is not to say that there is no sense of outside pressure and a growing darkness in LEB but simply to say that somehow in the relativism of those multiple stories there is a sense of a general humanity struggling to exist. In 'The Room' we are presented with one deeply flawed, injured and enraged individual's perspective and not allowed to escape from his nightmare for the entirety of the novel.
This was a pretty traumatic book and I don't find myself at the end of it feeling inspired to recommend other people to read it, at the same time I feel it has great merit stylistically and a gutteral social insight that few other writers attain.