Requiem for a Dream

by Hubert Selby Jr, 1978. Published by Thunder Mouth Press. 279 pages.

Reviewed 11 May 2007

When I first started reading this book, I saw the faces of a lot of my friends light up. That’s a GREAT book, they told me. It was a little surprising, because my previous experience with Hubert Selby Jr. was reading “Last Exit to Brooklyn.” When people talk about reading “Last Exit,” it’s with a sense of residual devastation. It’s like recollecting a famine or a plague, a notable event but not one that you’d call enjoyable.
It wasn’t as though “Requiem for a Dream” seemed like a bright and cheerful book. The main plot follows the parallel addictions of an aging Brooklyn widow and her son. He’s a heroin dealer who’s hooked on the drug himself, and she’s a lost soul who gets addicted to amphetamine tablets prescribed to her as diet pills. It’s clearly a book about downward spirals, and yet people come away from it with a “Holden Caulfield” reaction; they feel as though they’ve spent valuable time with someone who really understands them.
Maybe it’s because “Requiem” strolls along at an amiable pace. There isn’t the sense of dread that pervades “Last Exit” from beginning to end. In “Last Exit,” we know almost immediately that the characters are already living in Hell. We know it, but the characters don't quite, and the plot rushes us toward the moment of ugly revelation. Here, on the other hand, there’s a sense of innocence. Although the book opens with a disturbing scene (Harry Goldfarb locking his mother Sara into her closet so that he can steal her television and sell it for money to buy heroin) the clouds seem to lift when we see Harry and his dealing partner Tyrone shooting up with their friends who work at the morgue. The drugs seem to disarm these supposedly rough and dangerous characters; it makes them cuddly and giggly. There’s a feeling of rightness, of return to sanity. Later in the book, as things become more desperate, I found myself almost hoping that Harry and his friends would score so that they could escape back into their protected world.
There are strong religious undertones in this book, which opens with Biblical quotes and reaches climax with a near-death experience in which Harry finds his soul caught between light and darkness. But as with “Last Exit,” the cause of our downfall is not partaking from the tree of knowledge; rather, it’s ignorance. In a key scene, Harry brings a new television set to his mother. She’s overjoyed, not by the set, but about seeing her son. Harry feels a flash of something like love, something that seems almost like a heroin high. Although the moment seems to capture his attention, he never comes back to it.
In “Last Exit,” another character named Harry finds himself in a gay bar and notices for the first time that the place he’s in makes him happy. In discovering his own homosexuality, this Harry seems to grow as a person, but he’s too naïve to translate discovery into understanding. Rather, it’s as if the newfound energy gives him only the power he needs to bring on his downfall.
A consistent idea in Selby's work seems to be that our desires are not sinful. Indeed, desire is like a compass pointing us toward salvation. But we have somehow lost the key to read the compass, or maybe we have been maliciously misled into believing that love and charity can be substituted with addiction and brutal domination of our fellow human beings.
In “Requiem,” television plays the role of the seducer, of the malicious misleader. As the heroin addicts grow less and less capable of dealing with the world, the orbit of their lives constricts itself until its radius is nothing but the short line between the tv set and the sofa. And then there’s Sara Goldfarb, who’s so enthralled by a bogus offer to appear on a television game show that she becomes a pill popping imbecile, condemned at last to electroshock therapy and brain-numbing Thorazine at the hands of the same medical establishment that encouraged her addiction in the first place.
Sometimes when Hubert Selby is talking about Sara, you get the sense that he’s become a bit like Erskine Caldwell, looking down on his benighted subjects and tsk tsk-ing about the way they’ve all been duped so bad by the Man. But at the same time, the book is more universal than “Last Exit,” less focused on revealing the secrets of a squalid demimonde and more interested in using the Brooklyn setting and characters to diagnose the illness that effects us all. Whereas heroin and amphetamines wreak havoc on people’s lives, Selby keeps reminding us that their effects on the system are predictable and well understood. The more sinister drug lurking in the wings is television, evolving, irresistible, always reaching out to a wider audience, distorting the needle of our inner compass, consuming us by equating consumerism with joy.