The Streetwalkers of San Francisco
By LAURA MILLER
Published: August 20, 2000
THE ROYAL FAMILY By William T. Vollmann. 780 pp. New York: Viking. $40.
THE word ''obsession'' is a favorite of the publicists who concoct book jacket copy and movie ads. It suggests untrammeled passions, erotic and otherwise, and all sorts of bad, dramatic, extreme behavior. We ought to know better than to fall for this, especially those of us who have ever acted as confidants to the obsessed. The reality of obsession -- its incessant return to the same few themes, scenarios and questions; its meticulous examination and re-examination of banal minutiae for hidden meanings that simply aren't there; the cancerous way an idee fixe usurps other, more interesting thoughts -- is that it is confining, not rebellious, and not fascinating but maddeningly dull.
The writer William T. Vollmann is obsessed with prostitution, especially the down-market end of the trade, and he has indulged that fixation in several books. His novels ''Whores for Gloria'' and ''Butterfly Stories'' are entirely devoted to the topic, depicting desperate men in pursuit of chimerical dream-hookers who they hope will become their wives. Call it a bad-boy double play: the Vollmann hero first breaks the rules of bourgeois propriety by trading money for sex without the veneer of romantic love, then he breaks the no-strings-attached rule of prostitution by professing eternal devotion. But in the case of both books, any frisson of insurrection remains mostly Vollmann's; as narratives, ''Whores for Gloria'' and ''Butterfly Stories'' are monotonous.
Fortunately, the author has journalistic and novelistic impulses as well as obsessive ones. He is also astonishingly prolific, so that readers uninterested in his hooker fiction can savor both the vivid international vignettes in ''The Atlas'' and the ambitious scope of his series of novels about the colonization of the Americas. For Vollmann is a writer of considerable talent, with an encyclopedic urge to document overheard conversations, bar-stool autobiographies, lumpen manifestoes and mad soliloquies, and an itch to tell the story of the world and its people in unprecedented ways.
All three of those impulses feed into Vollmann's mammoth new novel, ''The Royal Family.'' It's the story of Henry Tyler, a private detective nursing a penchant for the seedy side of life and an unrequited infatuation with the wife of his brother, John, a contemptuous contract attorney. Henry is hired by a crude tycoon named Brady to search the Tenderloin, San Francisco's skid row, for an underworld character called the Queen of the Whores. By the time he locates the Queen, his sister-in-law, Irene, has committed suicide, leaving Henry bereft and ripe for the harvesting. He joins the itinerant band of streetwalkers and outcasts who form the Queen's inner circle, and eventually he becomes her lover.
The Queen, at first a shadowy quest-object, turns out to be a black woman in her 40's, fond of the occasional crack pipe, with ''an old, old face'' and scarred and tattooed limbs -- hardly the stuff that dreams are made on. But she possesses supernatural powers. Not only does she command the love and loyalty of an assortment of drug-addled incorrigibles, but her saliva and other bodily fluids have ''a narcotic and almost psychotropic effect,'' soothing the throes of withdrawal. She tithes the earnings of her girls, bailing them out when they land in jail and magically exacting revenge on those who hurt them.
Her nemesis is Brady, who plans to build a virtual-reality brothel in Las Vegas called Feminine Circus (apparently his genius for business does not extend to names) and wants to enlist the Queen for reasons that are never very clear. Eventually he decides that a clean-up-the-streets campaign will give a boost to his intended franchise, and he sends teams of vigilantes out to terrorize the streetwalkers and capture the Queen for reasons that continue to be unclear but grow considerably more ominous. The Queen hints at a betrayal to come, at her own impending departure, and the improvised family begins to fracture.
''The Royal Family'' is rife with dualities, parallels and profane riffs on literary touchstones ranging from the Bible to Nabokov -- the kind of patterns eager undergraduates delight in fishing out of a text. The Queen, Henry, John, the dead Irene, the crass Brady, a belligerent streetwalker named Domino, a pedophile who both helps Henry and cruelly taunts him -- they all have the gaudy, flattened, symbolic quality of figures on tarot cards. At the same time, Vollmann covers himself by scoffing at his own devices. ''If this were a book I wouldn't even read the rest of it,'' Henry says when the Queen predicts that Domino will turn her in. ''Christ and Judas is what it is.''
But if readers get discouraged and abandon ''The Royal Family,'' it won't, I suspect, be on account of its overblown themes. Like Fellini's or Genet's, Vollmann's romanticism is so titanic and fantastical that, artfully deployed, it's capable of convincing a reader by sheer force. If the pantomime allegories of his novel stagger and ultimately collapse, it's because their carnival-stilt legs can't support the massive bulk of the book.
It is primarily Vollmann's own fixation on street prostitution that's to blame. On this subject, ''The Royal Family'' is positively corpulent with anecdote and detail, of which let the following be a representative example (although it's exceptional in being printable by this newspaper): ''Just that day on Ellis Street he'd met a stinking girl who lived in the Lincoln Hotel and who had begged him for money for epilepsy medicine, a favor he'd granted her; she'd said God bless you and kissed him with her reeking herpid lips; she'd said: If you ever need a woman. . . .''
Instead of a strategic handful of stories in which a woman with a decaying and infested body desperately hustles a drunken john for the pittance needed to score a rock of crack, Vollmann favors his readers with something more like 40 or 50. The novel is a cornucopia of bleeding orifices, abscessed legs, crusted secretions and fetid genitals. Even at the peak of their ''sisterhood'' the Queen's bickering followers prove themselves willing to lie, cheat and steal from one another for the sake of a fix. They remain addicts first and foremost, and once the reader's initial jolt of shock, pity, disgust or titillation wears off, they're just as boring as anyone else who does the same thing over and over again.
Although Vollmann's interest in squalor isn't new, in the past it has come across as a callow bohemian equation of misery with authenticity. In ''The Royal Family'' he seems to be probing his fixation, trying out the principle of transcendence through self-abasement. ''She was willingly and proudly embracing her own degradation, like a Christian on the cross,'' he writes of one of the Queen's followers. On the other hand, the Queen is no Christian. She describes Jesus as ''our enemy,'' and her adherents call themselves Canaanites: ''I saw that Mark of Cain on your forehead right away, that loser's mark,'' the pedophile tells Henry.
The result is a baffling muddle. At first, the novel seems to set up Feminine Circus as a sanitized and therefore bogus counterpart to the gritty truth of the Tenderloin; Brady's is a brothel in which no matter how perverse the doings, ''nobody gets hurt.'' Yet Vollmann, who bases his fiction on extensive interviews with streetwalkers, has always rather prided himself on acknowledging the terrible hurts of their lives: they are often in mortal danger; they hate the work; they're motivated solely by a punishing need for drugs. In that case, the virtual prostitution of Feminine Circus really does seem like an improvement. In order to correct the imbalance, the author comes up with the preposterous notion of making Feminine Circus a front for a white slave outfit in which men pay to have real, brutal sex with deformed retarded girls. But if abject degradation is the road to holiness, then wouldn't Brady's brothel be a vehicle of the sacred?
Henry pursues his own destiny by renouncing all possessions and taking a blessedly diverting hobo journey. The novel culminates in his fleeting recognition that the Queen and Irene were ''a double-sided incarnation of Something Else,'' an excuse to suffer guilt and hopeless yearning, rather than the cause of either feeling. The reader, having watched Henry marinate in self-pity for the past 760 pages, will probably have beaten him to that conclusion. In the end, the spectacle of this potentially fine novel crushed by the weight of its undisciplined author's compulsions is the book's best argument for stripping things down to essentials.
Laura Miller is an editor for the Internet magazine Salon.com.
More Articles in Books >
By LAURA MILLER
Published: August 20, 2000
THE ROYAL FAMILY By William T. Vollmann. 780 pp. New York: Viking. $40.
THE word ''obsession'' is a favorite of the publicists who concoct book jacket copy and movie ads. It suggests untrammeled passions, erotic and otherwise, and all sorts of bad, dramatic, extreme behavior. We ought to know better than to fall for this, especially those of us who have ever acted as confidants to the obsessed. The reality of obsession -- its incessant return to the same few themes, scenarios and questions; its meticulous examination and re-examination of banal minutiae for hidden meanings that simply aren't there; the cancerous way an idee fixe usurps other, more interesting thoughts -- is that it is confining, not rebellious, and not fascinating but maddeningly dull.
The writer William T. Vollmann is obsessed with prostitution, especially the down-market end of the trade, and he has indulged that fixation in several books. His novels ''Whores for Gloria'' and ''Butterfly Stories'' are entirely devoted to the topic, depicting desperate men in pursuit of chimerical dream-hookers who they hope will become their wives. Call it a bad-boy double play: the Vollmann hero first breaks the rules of bourgeois propriety by trading money for sex without the veneer of romantic love, then he breaks the no-strings-attached rule of prostitution by professing eternal devotion. But in the case of both books, any frisson of insurrection remains mostly Vollmann's; as narratives, ''Whores for Gloria'' and ''Butterfly Stories'' are monotonous.
Fortunately, the author has journalistic and novelistic impulses as well as obsessive ones. He is also astonishingly prolific, so that readers uninterested in his hooker fiction can savor both the vivid international vignettes in ''The Atlas'' and the ambitious scope of his series of novels about the colonization of the Americas. For Vollmann is a writer of considerable talent, with an encyclopedic urge to document overheard conversations, bar-stool autobiographies, lumpen manifestoes and mad soliloquies, and an itch to tell the story of the world and its people in unprecedented ways.
All three of those impulses feed into Vollmann's mammoth new novel, ''The Royal Family.'' It's the story of Henry Tyler, a private detective nursing a penchant for the seedy side of life and an unrequited infatuation with the wife of his brother, John, a contemptuous contract attorney. Henry is hired by a crude tycoon named Brady to search the Tenderloin, San Francisco's skid row, for an underworld character called the Queen of the Whores. By the time he locates the Queen, his sister-in-law, Irene, has committed suicide, leaving Henry bereft and ripe for the harvesting. He joins the itinerant band of streetwalkers and outcasts who form the Queen's inner circle, and eventually he becomes her lover.
The Queen, at first a shadowy quest-object, turns out to be a black woman in her 40's, fond of the occasional crack pipe, with ''an old, old face'' and scarred and tattooed limbs -- hardly the stuff that dreams are made on. But she possesses supernatural powers. Not only does she command the love and loyalty of an assortment of drug-addled incorrigibles, but her saliva and other bodily fluids have ''a narcotic and almost psychotropic effect,'' soothing the throes of withdrawal. She tithes the earnings of her girls, bailing them out when they land in jail and magically exacting revenge on those who hurt them.
Her nemesis is Brady, who plans to build a virtual-reality brothel in Las Vegas called Feminine Circus (apparently his genius for business does not extend to names) and wants to enlist the Queen for reasons that are never very clear. Eventually he decides that a clean-up-the-streets campaign will give a boost to his intended franchise, and he sends teams of vigilantes out to terrorize the streetwalkers and capture the Queen for reasons that continue to be unclear but grow considerably more ominous. The Queen hints at a betrayal to come, at her own impending departure, and the improvised family begins to fracture.
''The Royal Family'' is rife with dualities, parallels and profane riffs on literary touchstones ranging from the Bible to Nabokov -- the kind of patterns eager undergraduates delight in fishing out of a text. The Queen, Henry, John, the dead Irene, the crass Brady, a belligerent streetwalker named Domino, a pedophile who both helps Henry and cruelly taunts him -- they all have the gaudy, flattened, symbolic quality of figures on tarot cards. At the same time, Vollmann covers himself by scoffing at his own devices. ''If this were a book I wouldn't even read the rest of it,'' Henry says when the Queen predicts that Domino will turn her in. ''Christ and Judas is what it is.''
But if readers get discouraged and abandon ''The Royal Family,'' it won't, I suspect, be on account of its overblown themes. Like Fellini's or Genet's, Vollmann's romanticism is so titanic and fantastical that, artfully deployed, it's capable of convincing a reader by sheer force. If the pantomime allegories of his novel stagger and ultimately collapse, it's because their carnival-stilt legs can't support the massive bulk of the book.
It is primarily Vollmann's own fixation on street prostitution that's to blame. On this subject, ''The Royal Family'' is positively corpulent with anecdote and detail, of which let the following be a representative example (although it's exceptional in being printable by this newspaper): ''Just that day on Ellis Street he'd met a stinking girl who lived in the Lincoln Hotel and who had begged him for money for epilepsy medicine, a favor he'd granted her; she'd said God bless you and kissed him with her reeking herpid lips; she'd said: If you ever need a woman. . . .''
Instead of a strategic handful of stories in which a woman with a decaying and infested body desperately hustles a drunken john for the pittance needed to score a rock of crack, Vollmann favors his readers with something more like 40 or 50. The novel is a cornucopia of bleeding orifices, abscessed legs, crusted secretions and fetid genitals. Even at the peak of their ''sisterhood'' the Queen's bickering followers prove themselves willing to lie, cheat and steal from one another for the sake of a fix. They remain addicts first and foremost, and once the reader's initial jolt of shock, pity, disgust or titillation wears off, they're just as boring as anyone else who does the same thing over and over again.
Although Vollmann's interest in squalor isn't new, in the past it has come across as a callow bohemian equation of misery with authenticity. In ''The Royal Family'' he seems to be probing his fixation, trying out the principle of transcendence through self-abasement. ''She was willingly and proudly embracing her own degradation, like a Christian on the cross,'' he writes of one of the Queen's followers. On the other hand, the Queen is no Christian. She describes Jesus as ''our enemy,'' and her adherents call themselves Canaanites: ''I saw that Mark of Cain on your forehead right away, that loser's mark,'' the pedophile tells Henry.
The result is a baffling muddle. At first, the novel seems to set up Feminine Circus as a sanitized and therefore bogus counterpart to the gritty truth of the Tenderloin; Brady's is a brothel in which no matter how perverse the doings, ''nobody gets hurt.'' Yet Vollmann, who bases his fiction on extensive interviews with streetwalkers, has always rather prided himself on acknowledging the terrible hurts of their lives: they are often in mortal danger; they hate the work; they're motivated solely by a punishing need for drugs. In that case, the virtual prostitution of Feminine Circus really does seem like an improvement. In order to correct the imbalance, the author comes up with the preposterous notion of making Feminine Circus a front for a white slave outfit in which men pay to have real, brutal sex with deformed retarded girls. But if abject degradation is the road to holiness, then wouldn't Brady's brothel be a vehicle of the sacred?
Henry pursues his own destiny by renouncing all possessions and taking a blessedly diverting hobo journey. The novel culminates in his fleeting recognition that the Queen and Irene were ''a double-sided incarnation of Something Else,'' an excuse to suffer guilt and hopeless yearning, rather than the cause of either feeling. The reader, having watched Henry marinate in self-pity for the past 760 pages, will probably have beaten him to that conclusion. In the end, the spectacle of this potentially fine novel crushed by the weight of its undisciplined author's compulsions is the book's best argument for stripping things down to essentials.
Laura Miller is an editor for the Internet magazine Salon.com.
More Articles in Books >
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