Summary: In Coney Island, Brooklyn, Sara Goldfarb, a lonely widow, wants nothing more than to lose weight and appear on a television game show. She becomes addicted to diet pills in her obsessive quest, while her junkie son, Harry, along with his girlfriend, Marion, and his best friend, Tyrone, have devised an illicit shortcut to wealth and leisure by scoring a pound of uncut heroin. Entranced by the gleaming visions of their futures, these four convince themselves that unexpected setbacks are only temporary. Even as their lives slowly deteriorate around them, they cling to their delusions and become utterly consumed in the spiral of drugs and addiction, refusing to see that they have instead created their own worst nightmares. - (Blackwell North Amer)
Kirkus Reviews
Selby's most effective strategy has been to pummel, to wear the reader down under an inexorable heaping-up of degradations; his last, The Demon, was an embarrassing flub precisely because he tried giving his characters middle-class options--and wound up with soap opera. Here he's somewhat back on track. The abomination this time is heroin addiction. Harry Goldfarb cruises the Bronx in the company of fellow addict Tyrone C. Love and Harry's girl Marion (also a junkie). They get together, do up, space out, play the dozens, watch TV: Selby's best stroke is bringing across the grinding tedium of the addict's day, as meaningless and mechanical as an assembly line worker's. To get the daily drugs, Harry will hock suffering mama Sam's TV, he'll haul newspapers onto trucks in the middle of the night, he'll deal the junk himself to his fellow-addicts. When Harry and Tyrone get a chance to deal big, life is very sweet for a while. Then the supply drops, and life becomes vulturine. One scene stands out: a midnight Christmas heroin distribution by the local drug boss, as starving junkies enter a no-man's land in the South Bronx (even the cops are staying away) to buy the junk and then try to make it out of the area alive before they're ripped off. Lurid, nightmarishly effective. But as always with Selby, there's the question: is the numbing banality of the writing intentional or not? Maladroit characters, clumsy clichÉs (the worst Yiddish dialect ever), a sentimentally overblown ending--the book feels half-written, half-hoped. Selby, it seems clearer and clearer, isn't interested in writing novels that involve the agonies of real people: he's concerned only with the agonies themselves. His crude skills sometimes make this preoccupation seem presumptuous, other times powerful. Here, we'd have to say, the mix is 50-50. (Kirkus Reviews, September 1, 1978)
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