Samuel Beckett having a very bad day: that's what Selby's second novel The Room amounts to. While there was always the sense of some larger force at work--something at least faintly mystical--even in Beckett's most self-indulgent moments, the only thing you get here is an insoluble lump of therapeutic writing. Beckett had a recognizable style; you could, with some effort, fall into the rhythm of his prose. He asked a lot of the reader but did not demand the impossible. In The Room, Selby seems bent on tormenting the reader. That may not have been what he set out to do, but his dull, pedestrian prose ensures that it is the end result. I have no objection to the content of the book, but if you're going to write a "novel" that consists of a single character ranting for nearly three hundred pages, you'd better make sure that he rants in an interesting, engaging way. Selby failed to do that.

Which is not to say that he was a bad writer, at least not all the time. Witness his short story "Double Feature," for example: it's evocative and believable, and the characters are sympathetic despite being a couple of self-sabotaging bozos. Altogether a lovely little piece of writing that doesn't have to belabor its point. The Room, however, is a headache from start to finish, and its lone character is an unsympathetic asshole. This simply wasn't an effective way to draw attention to the very real problems of police brutality and unjust incarceration. (It would be too easy to assign a one-star rating here, so I won't. Presumably, Selby had a vision for this thing; he just didn't fulfill it.) ( )