Geoff Stewart's Reviews > The Room

'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.