THE ROYAL FAMILY - WILLIAM VOLLMANN

Now we’re cooking. I’ve read a handful of Vollmann before, some of his shorter stuff, both fiction and non-fiction, along with most of his huge book about violence, and I’m fascinated by him as a real-life character. I came to this interest through a short-term roommate, back when I spent a summer in Frisco, who was obsessed with Vollmann and claimed to have met him on the streets of the Tenderloin when they were both looking for prostitutes. This is the first of his major novels I’ve ever tackled and it certainly delivered on its promises. Vollmann has a handful of themes his always interested in and this book allowed him to really deeply dive into a few of them. He’s got an insatiable appetite for destitution and street life and this book really wallows in it. Ostensibly, the novel is about a private investigator who is tasked with finding the Queen of Whores in the tenderloin district of San Francisco and how his life slowly unravels, but, in reality, the whole thing is pretty plotless and meandering. Occasionally something resembling a plot with begin to snap into place, there’s an evil developer who is opening legal brothels that allow abuse and murder by saying all the girls are virtual and “not real” which isn’t true, there’s tension between the main character and his more upstanding brother and a tragic love triangle involving said brother’s wife, there’s a mystery towards the beginning about whether or not the queen exists. But all of these plots, such as they are, dissolve into the background and prove unimportant. What Vollmann is actually interested in is rendering the milieu and lives of these people, who he calls Canaanites since they all have “the mark of Cain” which is his term for people living outside of regular society. Born losers. Back when I worked at a homeless shelter, we’d make reference to people suffering from SLS, or Shit-Life Syndrome. Not only prostitutes and their Johns but pedophiles, train-hoppers, the homeless, pimps, small time crooks, illegal immigrants, etc. are all explored, some at great length. The writing is beautiful, Vollmann is quite skilled and you can tell he has a deep appreciation and love for these people and a fascination for these sorts of stories. It’s very lurid and dark, as you might imagine, and it meanders like crazy. This book could have been 300 pages shorter or gone on forever without much changing. There is a whole 200 or so pages towards the end where the main character is hopping trains and moving around the country which takes the action out of the Tenderloin that I felt could have been excised. I understand that Vollmann loves train-hopping, in fact he has a whole book on the subject which I read in college and is quite good, but it feels like he’s just shoe-horning all of his interests into one book. Likewise the subplot about the legal brothel, called The Feminine Circus, is there to try to show some of the ways that sex is used in broader society and critique these mores but it never really coheres for me. Everything outside of the Tenderloin was cuttable in my opinion. Likewise, the book touches on but could have gone deeper with racial issues (for example, the Queen is a Black Woman named “Africa”). That being said, the swirling stream of characters’ backstories and tricks and drug use and lives worked really well for me, it was fascinating and beautifully rendered. The book could be a slog at times, just given it’s insane length, but every time I’d catch myself zoning out a new section would pop up that was so bizarre and beautiful that I felt compelled to continue. Vollmann is one of the few writers who does not compromise at all, in terms of editing and length, to the point where he loses money, and I admire that. Someday I’ll get to his huge Native American novels but for now I’m sure I’ll be thinking about this one for a while.