Synopsis
Hubert Selby is probably one of the six best novelists writing in the English language.?Financial Times
Bobby is young and black. He shares a cramped apartment in the south Bronx with his mother, his younger siblings and the ceaselessly scratching rats that infest the walls behind his bed. Barely a teenager, he is old beyond his years. The best thing in Bobby's life is Maria, his Hispanic girlfriend. They are in love, and they have big plans for the summer ahead.
Their lives are irrevocably shattered when a vicious Hispanic street gang attack the couple as they walk to school. With Bobby savagely beaten and Maria lying in hospital, terrified and engulfed by the pain of her badly burned face, The Willow Tree takes the reader on on a volcanically powerful trip through the lives of America's dispossessed inner-city dwellers.
Into this bleak and smouldering hinterland, however, Selby introduces a small but vital note of love and compassion. When Bobby's bruised and bloodied body is discovered by Moishe, an aged concentration camp survivor, an unlikely friendship begins. As Moishe slowly, painfully, reveals his own tragic story, Bobby struggles angrily with his desperate need for revenge.
"Selby's place is in the front rank of American novelists ... to understand his work is to understand the anguish of America."?The New York Times Book Review
Also by Hubert Selby Jr available from Marion Boyars: Last Exit to Brooklyn, The Room, The Demon, Requiem for a Dream and Song of the Silent Snow.
Reviews
More than a decade after the publication of his story collection Song of the Silent Snow, Selby (Last Exit to Brooklyn) returns with a breathless and unconvincing tale of the fall and redemption of Bobby, a black teenager in the Bronx. At the start of the novel, Bobby and his girlfriend, Maria, are attacked by a Hispanic gang in punishment for their cross-ethnic dating. Bobby is beaten with a chain; Maria has lye thrown in her face and eventually dies. Refusing to be hospitalized, Bobby falls into the care of Moishe (aka Werner Schultz), a widower who survived the concentration camps (he claims, however, that he is not a Jew) and the death of his son in Vietnam. While Bobby plots an elaborate revenge against the Hispanic gang, Moishe seeks to impress on him the dangers of hatred and the importance of forgiveness, lessons he learned in the camps. Best read as a sort of fable, Selby's novel renders few details of ghetto life: the characters' incessant slang rings false, and the story's exact moment remains fuzzy (though the fact that the street weapons of choice appear to be knives and chains rather than semi-automatics would seem to put it somewhere in the past). Selby's characteristically chaotic prose removes the story even further from reality. What the novel does have is genuine passion, and Moishe's deep belief in forgiveness and acceptance win our sympathy, if not our belief.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
The first novel in 12 years from the once-notorious author of Last Exit to Brooklyn is an embarrassingly cartoonish amalgam of West Side Story, Edward Lewis Wallant's The Pawnbroker, and--I kid you not--Dickens's A Christmas Carol. It's the story, told in Selby's characteristic long, claustrophobic paragraphs filled with unpunctuated run-on sentences, of a young black teenager rescued from the murderous hatred that threatens his own life by a lonely concentration camp survivor. Bobby and his Hispanic girlfriend Maria are savagely beaten by a gang of spic muthahfuckahs and left in the street to die. Maria does not survive, but Bobby is rescued by an elderly widowed handyman, Werner Schultz (who for obscure reasons calls himself ``Moishe''), who restores him to health, then tries to dissuade the anguished kid from seeking revenge. As Bobby regains his strength, Moishe gradually reveals the details of his family's imprisonment, their liberation from the camp and new life in America, and the loss of Moishe's only son to the Vietnam War. Bobby subsequently tracks down Maria's murderer, but, at the crucial moment, is unable to kill him. This simplistic novel's flaws are too numerous for brief summary. Suffice it to say that glaring improbabilities (Moishe's basement apartment contains, among other wonders, a workout room and Jacuzzi) and unrelenting sentimentality make it impossible to believe in the reality of Selby's characters, much less feel anything for them. Brief glimpses of Bobby's fatherless family and Maria's grieving women relatives are only token attempts to vary a sluggish narrative that resorts to such bathetic effects as a cleansing snowstorm that briefly obliterates the city's grime and Moishe's makeshift Christmas celebration, which presumably dries up the last remaining flecks of Bobby's ``righteous'' anger. Almost 40 years ago, Selby produced a white-hot vision of America's mean streets that remains a classic illustration of realistic fiction at its most brutally eloquent. It's becoming increasingly apparent that he's fated to be remembered as a one-book wonder. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Famous for his 1964 Warholian masterpiece, Last Exit to Brooklyn, Selby hangs his sixth novel on a sometimes precious plot made famous in the 1966 Henry Hathaway film Nevada Smith. Five pages into the book, South Bronx teenager Bobby and his girlfriend, Maria, are jumped by four Latinos led by Raul, who beat Bobby with a chain and throw lye into Maria's face. When she is disfigured, Maria commits suicide, and Bobby, who has taken refuge with Holocaust survivor Moishe, vows revenge. Moishe teaches Bobby about the debilitating effects of hate; when the opportunity comes for Bobby to kill Raul, he rejects it. One reads Selby's work for the style?his prose seems like verbal jazz riffs?and the story is secondary. Though not for the faint of heart, this book is recommended for literary collections and those strong on contemporary urban stories.?Harold Augenbraum, Mercantile Lib. of New York
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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