A week in books

Surprisingly few of the rough kids and wild men who shaped post-war American literature bothered to follow their own advice: live fast, die young and make a beautiful corpse. For every cult figure who did check out early (such as Jack Kerouac) you find a William S Burroughs, clinging on through several lifetimes of alienation and addiction to end up as a charming co-star for Matt Dillon in Drugstore Cowboy. The chalk-and-cheese young rebels of the Truman era, Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal, have been carrying on their feud ever since. Shift forward to those fatally reckless counter-culture types, and it turns out that the most reckless of the lot – Hunter S Thompson – is now happily issuing annotated volumes of his letters from the ranch in Colorado. Yet even Hunter has a way to go before he can trump the great ragtime pianist Eubie Blake – who said at his 100th birthday party that, if he'd known he was going to live so long, he'd have taken better care of himself.

In the mid-Sixties, no name summoned up the doomed and destructive excesses of US street life more perfectly than that of Hubert Selby Jr. Most of the ministers and magistrates who denounced the writer have long since moved to that junkie-free suburb in the sky. Selby himself, however, will be talking to Mark Lawson at the Queen Elizabeth Hall next Thursday, 23 May (tickets from rfh.org.uk, or 020-7960 4242). He arrives the year after Darren Aronofsky's film of Requiem for a Dream brought a flavour of his low-life lyricism to a fresh audience.

Selby also has a new novel to plug: Waiting Period (Marion Boyars, £14.95). It takes as its – tragically – timely premise the idea of the half-inspired, half-demented loner who is driven by his accumulated frustrations into a killing spree. The book delivers a buttonholing monologue in which the florid prose of Henry Miller fuses with the urban paranoia of Taxi Driver. As ever with Selby, the fury of a single crazy (in this case, the archetypal seething war vet) gives a focus to the systematic violence of the society that surrounds him.

British readers have a special reason to welcome any visit from this dark angel of the mean streets. Selby's Last Exit to Brooklyn was prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Act in 1967. The case had originally been brought privately by an MP, Sir Cyril Black (with support from Robert Maxwell). Then the DPP, breaking a promise given to Calder & Boyars Ltd, took it over for the Crown.

An often farcical cause célèbre followed. The first conviction was overturned on appeal in 1968 after a brilliant innings for the publisher from John Mortimer QC, and a brave attempt to clarify a muddled law by Lord Justice Salmon. After that, you might have imagined that the confused and absurd arena of British obscenity trials would shut down for good. In fact, it merely switched media – to comic books, video nasties, underground magazines (such as Oz). But the purveyors of the printed word were, with a few exceptions, left in peace. Without the Selby appeal, it's very likely that the publisher of this spring's most torrid tome – Cathérine Millet's The Sexual Life of Cathérine M. – would be facing sanctions more severe than the thunder of a few tabloid pulpits.

The trial of Last Exit to Brooklyn exposed huge flaws in the Obscene Publications Act. So why do its windy, woolly invocations of a tendency to "deprave and corrupt" remain on the statute books? They have proved utterly irrelevant to the main function that most citizens would, these days, expect from this area of law – the protection of coerced children, rather than the policing of consenting adults.