The Willow Tree is the first
Hubert Selby Jr. novel I have read since high school, and with the reading of
this novel came a few realizations of the kind of person I was back then;
filled with intense passion and curiosity, but very little knowledge. Even now,
his novels, or at least the memories of them, still intrigue me with its
graphic violence and relentlessly moral storytelling. But now that I have grown
up, I find a lot of the elements that made me like a book like this when I was
younger really fail to satisfy me, much like the books of Bret Easton Ellis and
Chuck Palahniuk, but the book does still maintain its core heart that made his
books the emotional roller coasters that they were. It is very hard to walk
away from one of Selby’s books without feeling someone just bared all of their
wounded heart to you. This book starts rather quickly, with the chaotic event
that starts the book down its dark path happening within the first ten pages.
Bobby, a young black kid, and his Mexican girlfriend Maria, are attacked by a
gang, with Bobby being badly beaten, and Maria is badly burned when lye is
thrown in her face. While Maria is taken to the hospital, Bobby runs away from
his damaged home life and falls under the tutelage of Moishe, a Holocaust
survivor whose caught between fostering Bobby’s need for vengeance with his own
memories of his time in concentration camps, and trying to save his soul and
avoid his mistakes. The real problem I found with this book, and the past books
of Selby, was that his ideas seemed to overdrawn to fit the length of a novel. The
books I fondly remember, like Last Exit to Brooklyn and Song of the Silent
Snow, worked because the ideas were in short form, and gave off the desired
emotional impact in the proper way. I’m not sure if I should recommend this
book wholeheartedly, but I do feel Selby is still deserving of his cult status.
Rating: 4/5
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