Requiem for a Dream by Hubert Selby Jr.

My second read with Selby Jr. was another wonderful ride down into the nadir of the human soul.  We get an up close and rather uncomfortable view of four hapless characters.  Selby Jr. is not one to wear rose colored glasses and knowing that, the reader must accept that their bleak fates are inevitable.

Sara Goldfarb, a lonely widow living alone in Brooklyn has high hopes for her son and when she gets a random call from a gameshow, believes her days of solitude will soon come to an end.  Wanting to look her best, she begins a regimen of diet pills that soon escalates into an addition that ends in her involuntary admission to a psychiatric facility along with ECT treatments.

Sara’s son Harry is not exactly the young man a mother could be proud of.  He continuously steals his mother’s television to hock for drug money and doesn’t seem to recognize his mother’s isolation and eventual spiral downward.  Harry hopes for a big windfall through a large score of heroin, but ends up using more than he sells, exacerbating his addiction.  His eventual ruin leaves him with not only an arrest, but a an amputation.

Marion Silver, Harry’s girlfriend, is a privileged, yet rebellious “artist” who enables Harry’s addiction with funds from her family as well as her therapist/part time lover.  As her dreams of opening up a cafe/art gallery with Harry appear more and more unlikely, her recreational drug dalliances turn into full fledged addiction.  As her needs grow, her desperation takes her into a life of prostitution.

Tyrone C. Love, Harry’s best friend loves his girl, Alice and his subdued drug habit.  His dreams of a better life fizzle as he loses his girlfriend and looks for a big score with Harry on a road trip that leads to his arrest and abuse on a chain gang.

I’m not sure Mr. Selby would recognize Brooklyn in its current environs so perhaps we’d meet somewhere else with a little more edge.  I’d still love to ply some tricks of his trade as his gritty and unromantic style is one to be envied.

My rating for Requiem for a Dream is a 9 out of 10.

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Next up, David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest…