Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote:

Back in the 60s, I read only one of the six stories in Selby’s book– “Tralala,” which is about a teenaged hooker and which occasioned a celebrated obscenity trial when the Provincetown Review published it in 1961 — and I was dissuaded from reading farther. As powerful as this story was, its sledgehammer aesthetics were more brutalizing than sensitizing, and while it had all the authenticity of a personally conducted tour of hell, it left me feeling bruised but not wiser. In comparison to, say, James T. Farrell’s heartbreaking short story “The Scarecrow,” which deals with a related subject, “Tralala” has the effect of a bludgeon.

Written in a vernacular, beat-influenced, run-on style — closer to Allen Ginsberg than to Jack Kerouac or William S. Burroughs, but personal enough to have a pace and rhythm of its own — “Tralala” relates the brutal career of a hooker named Tralala in a single unbroken paragraph. The story is a catalog of cruelties — cruelties that are initially inflicted by the heroine (who rolls drunk soldiers and seamen or sets them up to be rolled) and at the end are inflicted upon her. We know nothing about her family or her psychology (apart from her nihilistic avarice and her pride in her “big tits”), and, to Selby’s credit, there is no pseudomoralistic implication that her own eventual suffering represents comeuppance: the tone of moral ugliness and meaningless suffering remains pretty much the same throughout.

In one episode, for instance, Tralala knocks a soldier with a wounded leg unconscious. Angry and impatient that he has wanted to spend a whole hour talking to her, she pockets his cash and throws away his wallet. When he turns up later at the bar where he initially picked her up, begging for his ID card, she and a couple of hoods stuff his bloody handkerchief into his mouth and beat him to a pulp. “Before they left Tralala stomped on his face until both eyes were bleeding and his nose was split and broken and kicked him a few times in the balls”; when they later hear that he might go blind in one eye, they all enjoy a good laugh. About 15 pages later, in a single sentence that extends for about four pages, Tralala is gang-raped, tortured, mutilated, and possibly killed in a vacant lot; four of her acquaintances look at her broken body and roar with laughter.

I’m fully aware that Selby’s prose is by design and in principle a cry of rage and horror against such nastiness, but in practice it seems to come much closer to a masochistic celebration of it, which is not all that far off from what is branded simple fascism in the work of someone like Mickey Spillane. As critic Tony Tanner puts it, “The comparative absence of stylistic resistance to such hellish conditions makes Selby’s book rather demoralizing.”