| Title | : | The Royal Family |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 014100200X |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780141002002 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 800 |
| Publication | : | First published January 1, 2000 |
| Awards | : | California Book Award Fiction (Silver) (2000) |
The Royal Family Reviews
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True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice that produces beggars needs restructuring.
Before my change in career paths became a creature of definite construction, one of my required classes for graduation was 183EW, Engineering Ethics, one of a few choices in a category that every engineer was required to take part in at some point in their college career. Mad scientists and human experimentation and the torture of innocents in the name of the cold dry idol of Science, you know. Can never be too careful these days.
-Martin Luther King, Jr.
Anyways, the class was taught by a former History professor who decided it would be cost-effective to take the slides from the previous subject and, inserting a little of his own work (former military contractor), pass it off as a study of ethics through ages. Long story short, even with the TA going over the actual ethical systems and problems demanded by standards of education, it was a load of crap. However, near the end of the quarter, examples of these ethical disasters began to crop up in class as well as discussion. One of these cases was that of the 1971 Ford Pinto, which had a nasty habit of, upon being struck while going 40 mph or faster, simultaneously jamming its doors and buckling its gas tank, giving passengers an excellent chance of burning to death with no hope of rescue. When Ford was taken to court, part of their argument against fixing this issue was a "cost-benefit analysis" showing that, in the long run, it would be cheaper to let the customers burn. They lost, they paid, and they moved on to the roads and commercials of today.
Now, out of this entire class, this is where real progress could have been made, had the professor cared to make it. For it is likely that all the students' got out of this uncomfortable little history lesson was: don't cut corners, but if you do, don't get caught. You don't get consideration for human beings, you don't get public outcry over putting a cost on a human life, you don't even get anyone in the corporation sent to jail. No, you get a slap on the wrist and a story retold in Engineering Ethics classes, if the professor isn't feeling lazy.
I don't believe in instinctive goodwill in every human being anymore, or at least I don't believe it can survive in the majority of those who choose to participate in this society of ours. Not when I read a book like this and realize how much of my 'common sense' and 'modern sensibility' is instinctively disgusted by those who have fallen through the cracks and are left to suffer and survive on the fringes. What part of my ethics class taught me how to recognize the abusive stigmatization of women through rape culture and the outlawing of prostitution? What lecture did I miss that delved into race relations and the choke-hold that heterosexual white people wield over the finer things in life, from the top-tier governmental positions to the noxiously omnipresent ideologies in popular culture? Which discussion did I glaze over that expounded on the cycle that knocks a person down through violence, poverty, addiction, runs them through the jail cell and then the streets and back again, gets them so used to the futility of scrabbling towards a better life that they settle down into those hobos in the parks and those whores in the streets?
Because somehow I learned how to fear, be disgusted by, and finally ignore these people who adapted so well to their conditions that they no longer mind the smell or the haphazard twists of their brain. Neither the pain nor the worry reaches them any longer, and to a person who has through sheer circumstance of birth has managed to keep their 'civilized' faculties in check, this is downright unacceptable. How dare they intrude upon my life and remind me of the sordid underbellies of the world, separated from the realm of acceptable people by a few feet of space and infinite fields of ideologies? How dare they be so coarse, so foul, so lazy? Surely they deserve it, in some way? Surely they had all the chances I've had, so why did they waste them all and end up like this?
Surely.
It took many books to accustom myself to the fact that this wasn't the case, and it was this one that struck the lesson home. Vollmann has given us a rare gift here: an unflinchingly thorough and, more importantly, a painfully compassionate glimpse into the lives of those who survive the splicing of their selves to the system in their own ways, whether in the dank alleyways of Tenderloin or the heartless citadels of the Financial District. He went where I, a coward both out of personal flaws and physical necessity, could never hope to go, and brought back tales where there are no heroes. Villainous martyrs and martyrish villains, where one can smile and smile and be a villain, and another can whore and whore and be a saint. He does it through prose that effortlessly swings back and forth between the sanctified and the sullied, laying the fervor of crack-addicts alongside the emotion of the domestic living room, setting side by side the good of the Queen of Whores and the evil of the Prosperous Businessman, painting the world in the colors of shit and sealing wax, of cabbages, of cunts.
If it wasn't for the trigger-happy hypocrisy of book banners the world over, I would let myself wish that this book would be referenced in classrooms. For that to be, though, there would have to be a new breed of subject, one required for any human being that wishes to go out into the world with a degree in hand. Something that combines ethics with sociology and adds in dashes of empathy and literature, strips and ameliorates each component to make a new breed of goodwill, one that sees the larger scope of things and cares for each and every one of those that falls victim to the throes of an agonizingly selective system.
For whatever it is that schools are teaching us, it's not enough to overcome real world conditioning, and barely anyone is inclined to question the issues of something that grants them what they believe to be a pure mix of 'freedom' and 'happiness', free of guilt and depression and hankerings for anything different. Fewer still wish to study it and commit themselves to developing theoretical solutions that may never find a handhold during one's lifetime. It's a hopelessly huge problem, and with politicians and businessmen on one side and ones need for financial stability on the other, why bother even considering it?
Because the people and the literature and the subjects that consider the socioeconomic hydra often find themselves surviving for centuries, records to be found by those who will recognize the issues of long ago to be fully present today, perhaps in some other more insidiously pervasive form but there nonetheless, and be spurred on to combat them however they can, despite seemingly overwhelming odds and complete lack of success. These figures and stories of the past survive for a reason. One hopes that this book will be one of them.
-
Some books are very obviously flawed, contrived in ways which slow down the reader's progress and heavily tax his/her ability to dredge up empathy over the headache-inducing frenzy of loaded work-weeks. And yet these narratives are so divine in their earnestness, so far-reaching in their scope, that you are filled with this overwhelming, earth-shattering zeal to shower them with a holy love and not let even a drop of your skepticism dilute your admiration for the writer's boldness. Your cowardice and inaction dictate you honor his unstated wish and this is the least you can do anyway. Embrace it all - the two-faced treachery perpetuated by the torchbearers of civilization, the endless cycle of degradation and corruption and the myriad sorrows of all the characters which bleed into its pages. Take one swig after another from the truth flask until you have been purged of all your self-indulgent guilt-trips and left with nothing but a crushing hopelessness which devours all other emotions with a vindictive fury.
There's us, cocooned in the warm illusion of security, dissecting the politics of injustice from our ivory towers, wholly in denial of our bubble of happiness feeding off the despair of others. In an effort to scramble toward whatever glamourous concept of affluence it is we consider salvation, we do not see the charred wreckage of lives strewn all around.
There's the woman of flesh and bone who becomes a grotesque assimilation of mere genitals, who can only be an abstract embodiment of the abuse with no human face - a walking, breathing cunt for hire whose existence you acknowledge only when you require its use. Every once in a while she leaves crack-addicted babies with no fathers in the maze of foster care or dumps them like inanimate blobs of flesh in seedy abortion clinics. She only lives in those documentaries harbouring Oscar-nomination ambitions, at the precipice of our segregated utopias merging with the abyss of the Tenderloins of the world. And the sanctimonious laws state with conviction, that the Tenderloins and the red light areas do not exist.
There are the hobos, the panhandlers, the bums, the destitute - not allowed to be anything other than victims of their own ineptitude, worthy of a stray sympathetic glance and a few seconds of pity, to be religiously warded off our vaunted inner sanctums. There is Henry Tyler, a pathetic loser bearing the Mark of Cain, wallowing in eternal self-pity, choosing to live as a homeless man to find his Queen, his antidote to a desiccating loneliness. And then there's the Queen of the Whores with her magical powers and her crack pipe - just an emblem, a protector, a redeemer, a guardian angel, a modern day Jesus - and law-abiding respected founder of 'Feminine Circus' Jonas Brady, with his multi-million dollar franchise of selling men the right to rape, torture, and mutilate disabled girls, her nemesis.
They are all actors in an absurd pantomime. They are all real.
'Part biblical allegory and part skewed postmodern crime novel', the blurb announces with relish. But that doesn't even skim the surface of this tome.
I call this Vollmann's gift to the perpetual outcasts of society, the ones we have pushed so far beyond the edge bit by bit in our own mad dash for the center that they exist in a kind of parallel netherworld where all humanly concerns are put to rest, where violence and deprivation are the order of the day. I call this his sincerest attempt at chronicling their stories the way they may have approved of, however alien to our feral cravings for taint-free reputations, routine and fake dignity, however repulsive to our faux-fragile sensibilities. I call this a searing critique of the hypocrisy of the ones holding the reins of the civilized world, who would sputter with mock indignation when asked to legalize prostitution.
However small or insignificant, I call this book an act of redemption. -
The book is riveting. At times I wished I could leave its world. I was unable, a captive in the dense bleak circularity of emptiness seeking a fullness always out of reach. Yet, when I neared the end I grew sad of ever leaving these haunted beings trying to survive within the web of fear. The narrator is a private detective hired to find the Queen of Whores. He enters the Tenderloin riddled with prostitution and drug addicts. At first they seem to fit easily within these labels. Our detective is emptied from within and hangs onto the memory of his suicided lover, his brother's wife. What he finds in the Tenderloin are children who had been horribly abused, abandoned, or born with crack cocaine sizzling through their minute veins. The selves they had were too painful and horror-struck to ever live with. Desperate and empty these children were forced to run away, traumatized and blind-eyed. Quickly they were picked up by predatory pimps and fed drugs. Given or adopting a name they walked the streets. They had to turn a trick, make the money, cop the next fix that would wipe out the horrors and fears they or no child could survive. Once addicted the drug itself required daily renewal, or a number of times a day so tricks must be turned or face the nightmare of withdrawal. The fear is amped-up by the ongoing danger of being beaten, robbed or killed. This particular group attached themselves to the Queen who provided protection, some sense of security, and a mystical reverence to believe in. Each prostitute could be given any name since there was no self to attach it too. Their only desire could be for the next fix to fend off the always threatening overwhelming anxiety and hell-fired drug withdrawal. Their vision could extend no further and their belief in their Queen was so vast that her suggestions became their physical placebo reality. Encased in an inescapable circle survival was their remaining instinct. Their only adequate attachment was to the Queen and that was acolyte to godhead, child to parent. Within this group of emptied souls, this Royal Family, distrust of anyone prevented any meaningful attachment. They related to each other from the backstage safety of veiled distance, the remoteness of anonymity. Served up into hell, they had no say over it.
The narrative shifts to different settings where others are whoring but it is no longer called such since they wear the costumery of, waitresses, sales-people, bail bondsmen, attorneys, judges, entrepreneurs. No social caste escapes. The spidered web of fear entangles all. The costumes and customs, hierarchies are different providing silvered and golden solvents to hide the addictions to, work, sex, status, pride, ownership, accumulation, power, food, intellect, etc., which money provides as shields. The process seems the same-but for the grace of god that could be me. It not only could but is in different forms to avoid our insecurities, fears, aggressions, to maintain the image we have conjured of ourselves.
We watch our detective as his search for the Queen becomes an obsession to heal his own bitter lonely emptiness. He is referred to as Hank, Henry, Tyler. He too has many names since he has none. However he is searching, believing a soul is within his reach, although he can only love-be attached-to what he cannot have. Where he can fit in is with the Queen's girls, women walking the street, the skank hotel rooms, alcohol, crack. In time he too prays at the feet of the Queen, hoping to merge with her through the ingestion of her bodily fluids, her placebo wizardry. They become a couple. His childhood dreams are answered.
As with all gods made false by our needy desires The Queen over time fades and the Royal Family splinters. This is one of the best rendering of time passing a reader can hope to experience. Time passing is one of this book's exquisite themes. Hank is left without. His Queen is gone, as is the old neighborhood of the Tenderloin. He is left to search for her but in time he searches in order to search, another addiction.
This is my first Vollmann. I read in some non-GR reviews he cannot write well. Whatever that might mean I thought this was the best example I have read of style dictated by content. This was the only way this story could have been written. The sentences are straightforward, easy to access even if their contents are not easily stomached. There is never a judgement, a prejudice. It is simply told. I was there stripped of all my comfortable preconceptions. I lived in those bars, hotel rooms, alleyways, on those streets. Yes, he is repetitive. If he wasn't I would have been disappointed. That is the existence of street life within the vicious circle of these women, within the life of junkies. Simply telling that would have flattened out the narrative and erased the vitality that makes this book pop. He showed it, he rendered it, I lived it. I now understand which is something far different, and I believe deeper, than acceptance or approval. Understanding others is where Vollmann has led me and for that I am grateful. -
Swept away by the alternately sensuous and utilitarian prose, the incredible diversity of emotions I encountered while reading this book defied strict categorization and boggled my mind. It felt like my brain had tipped sideways and any trite notions of innocence I might have held in reserve in the untouched corners came tumbling out.
Through the course of these 780 closely packed pages we are made to witness strange intimacies and acts which at first seem unnatural, but upon closer inspection, reveal incredible human depth. The Royal Family is a portrayal of flawed loves, damaged souls, and transgression as a form of mourning. The medication of human contact is everywhere in evidence, as is the deep-seated need for love, which we bear like a curse - the “mark of Cain”. Dan Smooth’s religious dogma and hypocritical proclivities are among the most disturbing aspects of this very incendiary text. For instance, the parody of scriptural language most evident in chapter 476. One aspect of Vollmann's trickery, aplomb, dexterity and blasé scribblings are that they are preternaturally sublime.
If the many quotes from scripture do not distract, along with the inclusion of Buddhist and Gnostic texts, the Book of Mormon, Zoroastrianism and other sects, flit through the pages with varying degrees of appreciation and misappropriation. The direct blasphemies are another form of psychological distress manifested throughout. The pleasure of self-destruction infuses the book with a dark, heady intoxication. In the end it proves to be a genuinely moving, massively detailed epic of limited scope that penetrates deeply into a closely related set of realistic characters. Clearly an outrageous masterpiece orchestrated for the precious few brave enough to drown in its effluence.
The vast majority of its action is contained in the Tenderloin district like an eternally boiling pot of cast-off unsavories. Through realistic dialogue, and an unbelievable variety and richness of slang, Vollmann's journalistic investigation of broken lives and lives glued together with Elmer’s is by turns touching and memorable. Perhaps we all know at least one person who took a turn that led them down into dark days, someone cracked or cracking up, or virulent with amoral or physical diseases, or who somehow, in their wandering, began to resemble what we would normally dub "inhuman." But in their wretchedness, they are often far more human than their soft-cheeked, pale, freshly laundered counterparts in their air-conditioned ranch style homes. The concept of disease in all of its forms infiltrates each layer of the district described until our notion of disease is turned on its head. Humanness is not an easily defined term. But it is easily defied, constantly on the stand, and the jury is out for most of our existence. Desperation and dependence are the bricks and mortar of these lives, as they cascade from one high to the next, skirting the law, hiking the skirt, and drawing down one John after another into the whirlpool of vice, where they might have belonged, if circumstances had been different, or their pleasure prolonged...
It takes place in the off hours, in a cacophony of haggard voices on which the city feeds. Vollmann takes his subject very seriously, as seriously as his other historical contexts in the Seven Dreams series. This is the fruit of research, not some quirky self-indulgent fantasy ego-trip. This is a magnificent display of the condensation of life. But it could very easily be labeled by some as obscene, and relishes the contradictory definitions of obscenity. Is there any way to separate the obscene from literature, and does doing so protect or harm our sensibilities? History might have settled these questions for the time being. But in the book's defense, its intentions may not be as complex as its execution.
The tiniest details emerge as telling character facets. This is a character-driven novel, slow-moving and methodical in its unflinching examinations of the minutest qualities of human beings. Does this book’s impetus and execution stem from a fascination with transgressive individuals or an obsession with perceived injustice? Vollmann was very familiar with the real-life people on which these characters were based. He interviewed them. But how much deeper did his involvement go? How did he get some of this insight? How much is simply made-up or extrapolated scene by scene into the deep ravines of dark, unaerated rooms? As far as the interpretation of firsthand accounts go, the verisimilitude on display is astounding.
Adultery, and the art of bringing off the tacit affair is a tired trope, but Vollmann gives it life so it may function as a backdrop to his main character's motivations. But of course, the possibility of idealized love goads our anti-hero forward. His selfish desires propel him into the heart of the district and leads him to become an adopted member of this "family." But underlying his indulgence is a concern for the other players. The repetitive street life, and the bar-room anecdotes are his antidote, his coping mechanisms.
The novel functions through strong character development: Tyler, the Queen, Domino, Dan Smooth, Irene, Chocolate and others. Grief, aimlessness, self-abasement, the saturation of the body and the mind with need, want, love, psychological torment, the people sitting around in a bar talking, are all seminal (pun intended) glue reinforcing the moral ambiguities and lovely, simply lovely immersion the novel affords. It epitomizes the sought-after emptiness, the eager, underachieving human soul, grafted onto chaos, spurned by our own, fallen, and continually falling into the state of spiritual death.
The transgression becomes so familiar you will become inured. Not one single line of the book might be expected to cause arousal, rather, the language is designed to suggest poetic forms, to coalesce into abstract wonders of dream sensations, resulting in a miasmic seething, and you are forced to wallow in a dense accumulation of disgust until Stockholm syndrome sets in - we are captives of our own fascination. Shrouded in a fogged hyperawareness, innocence is lost, desensitization is incurred, and anhedonia blossoms. But with it comes a slew of other emotions, the depression, the isolation, the cool slide into ghostliness. And the fact that aging is sort of an embarrassing, humiliating descent into uselessness and dependence and death.
It juxtaposes the sacred and profane and on at least one occasion directly equates prostitutes to saints and specific religious personas to prostitutes, weighing moral standpoints and building a case. Vollmann’s sympathies are clear straight off the bat.
Perhaps every city is diseased, and feeds on its own desires. In “obsidian darkness” families are born. The Tenderloin morphs into a surreal landscape, at times nightmarish, but beautiful in its rich perversity, luscious, hollow skyscraper cliffs hem the reader in, dripping seedy joints crowd the well-trodden streets, and sagging shadow people haunt passersby at the mouths of abyssal alleyways, against the car horn white noise and screeching cats, one can almost hear the underground seething potential energy, the sizzling beneath the grungy pavements, the potential for corruption about to burst forth and flood the leaning high-rises, which will come toppling down in a rush of bank notes and bathwater, mingling into the gutter-moat leading into that vast uncharted territory called "Otherness."
The troubles of Cain, the life led by a modern Cain, an essay on authority and power, how “many follow one,” the concept of secular divinity in the titular Royal Family of the book, the meaning of non-blood relations' inherently familial bonds, and how families are forged in hardship and love all occupy the central force of the novel. Many brilliant scenes make use of the same patterns of sudden, impulsive delights wrought into sad, withering despair, with a recurrent tone of heartbreaking loss, sadness and oppression hanging over it all.
The rich imagery and the character studies in the midst of life’s tragedies feed into the plot of a tired detective, seeking after the lost loves that lives on in his fantasy-world, while he further retreats into the heart of his own troubles. The humor, pathos, atmosphere, lyricism, and historical details are all on point. Vollmann is an overachiever. The language of nostalgia pervades the whole. The skittering wreckage of damaged lives are too alluring - you can't look away. The beating pulse of city life, its ways and means and blood and marrow definitely echoes with his other illuminating novel, Butterfly Stories. I am as yet a Vollmann neophyte, but know I will traverse the rest of his oeuvre.
Abuse, deformity, pedophilia, the transgressive essence of erotic literacy, wrought out with demented surrealism, rife with innovation and condemnation, the animal in man, and the mental inertia, all point toward the sadness inherent in any examination of collective humanity. Everyone is unfaithful to something or someone. Even if only themselves.
The prolix familial squabbles add another layer of captivating cohesion, as do the casual drug deals, the professional jargon, the shifts in stresses and pleasures, the motif of royalty as a perceived allocation, the moments of twisted spirituality, the balm of charity, how kindness can relieve briefly the day-by-day despair of powerlessness. These are the domains Vollmann weaves together. Figurative language is used to communicate understated emotion. Everywhere, he is always improvising, concocting significance out of the insignificant. Life happens in the interstices, and his characters inhabit the interstices of society. Obsolescence weighs them down. Life passes by like an impressionistic blur, while the dreams the characters hold dear display photographic vividness. Shamanistic influences pervade the text, but the sources are often mysterious.
Tyler’s brooding, his surrogate love objects, his incapacitation, all lead to the conclusion that his love is his disease. Addiction is a powerful force in society, and it comes in myriad forms. But this book also touches on the justice and injustice of the System, and how people make use of harmful antisocial delusions, and get caught up in obsession, until Vollmann's consistent moral calculus slowly clarifies and justifies the excessive inclusions, the twisted worldview of the brutally honest novel.
We all belong to mythological families, whether online or in person. We join "clubs," which, broadly defined, are social groups, and cultivate an image for the benefit of ourselves and anyone in our circles. Sources of love and its purpose are sometimes unknown, but TRF posits many interesting theories about how such a culture of prostitution could survive.
Vollmann also inserts a dramatization of the pluses and minuses of the commercialization of sex - the oldest profession. How it is combined with corporate greed is not the most compelling statement of the novel, but it does lend a Hollywood-esque component, an inflation of grandiosity.
The marital strife, hypocrisy, octopus-minded overanalysis, the Narcisissm and social performance, the spirit of exploitation, all converge in Brady’s pet business, which is just the commodification of women. Loneliness, the power of money and memory, and the uncomforted dispossessed occupy most of the novel's run-time. There is not as much instant gratification as you might expect, but it is ever-present in the characters' psyches. When stated so bluntly, the almost mythic proportions of stereotypical male erotic fantasies are slightly hilarious.
In summary, Vollman doesn't coddle you. He sticks you with the hypo of his intellectual daring. If you can pry your fingers from the covers by the end and pull yourself out of the vortex of his creation you will feel a heavy nuance of appreciation for his accomplishment forevermore. -
WTV, in an interview: “If freedom means anything, it’s about being repulsive as well as being able to do flower paintings.
...I believe that we have to focus on the Other.”
*************
"She was a good person exactly as often as she could afford to be. What she thought of as standing up for herself might sometimes appear to others as bullying; for her it represented the exercise of a sacred moral principle. As for friendliness, she showed her goodwill whenever she could. By keeping track of all the favors she did, she not only honed their edges, so to speak, into glittering utility—for what favor, once forgotten, gets returned? —but also verified her own goodness. And when necessity struck, as it so often did, then she laid friendship aside, and proceeded by the most direct route to manage whatever needed to be managed. If someone took offense, that was unfortunate, but to Domino's way of thinking, almost everyone was either a declared or an undeclared enemy anyhow. Domino thus was one of the most reasonable women in the world. Her moral calculus was honest, practical and consistent."
We are hardwired to be uncomfortable with complexity, contradiction, flux, paradox. Foucault et al have made very clear the power dynamics behind categorization, behind the act of sanding down all the rough and confusing edges of life until everyone and everything can be neatly labeled. Refusal to recognize the extraordinary complexity of each and every person on this planet is the source of much that is wrong with our society.
Because, of course, if one writes a prostitute who acts on occasion in a loving manner, one must be guilty of perpetuating the "whore with a heart of gold" trope, right? And a white, middle-class American man can have nothing of value to say about the experience of impoverished, abused african-american women, right? And a novel featuring one character pissing into the mouth of another, cannot also be beautiful, moral, spiritual, right? Because writing of the stench, the rotting skin, the putrid pussies of aging whores cannot be an act of love, right? And an author who uses his experiences in, and inserts a character with his name into, his novels, must be writing autobiographically, right? And an author who has admitted sleeping with the very prostitutes he purports to respect, to care about, must be a hypocrite, or, worse, an abuser in his own right, right?
And a novel of Realism, of Reportage, can't also be one operating at the level of Myth, right?
Lets imagine the following:
1. X is a minority, a Subaltern, abused and voiceless. Powerless.
2. B is a member of the powerful elites.
3.By definition as a Subaltern, X has no way for its experiences to be reported or expressed outside of its community in its own voice.
4. B takes advantage of X, abuses it in the way the elites always abuse it, and, in doing so, produces a work of art that communicates X's experiences in an accurate, honest, complex way to the elites.
Is this a bad thing or a good thing?
Does it make a difference if B is honest about his actions, and explicitly incorporates them (recognizing their problematic nature) into the text and the discourse around the text?
This may look a bit like a "does the end justify the means" question, but I think it more subtle than that.
“This is the heart of it, the scared woman who does not want to go alone to the man any longer, because when she does, when she takes off her baggy dress, displaying to him rancid breasts each almost as big as his own head, or no breasts, or mammectomized scar tissues taped over with old tennis balls to give her the right curves; when, vending her flesh, she stands or squats waiting, congealing the air firstly with her greasy cheesey stench of unwashed feet confined in week-old socks, secondly with her perfume of leotards and panties also a week old, crusted with semen and urine, brown-greased with the filth of alleys; thirdly with the odor of her dress also worn for a week, emblazoned with beer-spills and cigarette-ash and salted with the smelly sweat of sex, dread, fever, addiction—when she goes to the man, and is accepted by him, when all these stinking skins of hers have come off (either quickly, to get it over with, or slowly like a big truck pulling into a weigh station because she is tired), when she nakedly presents her soul’s ageing soul, exhaling from every pore physical and ectoplasmic her fourth and supreme smell which makes eyes water more than any queen of red onions—rotten waxy smell from between her breasts, I said, bloody pissy shitty smell from between her legs, sweat-smell and underarm-smell, all blended into her halo, generalized sweetish smell of unwashed flesh; when she hunkers painfully down with her customer on bed or a floor or in an alley, then she expects her own death. Her smell is enough to keep him from knowing the heart of her, and the heart of her is not the heart of it. The heart of it is that she is scared.” -
"And yet Tyler said to himself: Someday I want to show backbone. I want to do something daring, good and important, even if it destroys me. —And he waited to be called to that worthwhile thing."
The Royal Family is an achingly sad tale of love & loss, of Henry Tyler's search for meaning in life. Its world, peopled by whores, addicts, pimps, panhandlers, tramps, hobos, & the homeless, is Vollmann's tribute to the voiceless, the dregs of society, for Tyler's story is inextricably mixed with theirs.
In a broader frame, it's also a tale of two cities-San Francisco & Sacramento – an elegiac homage, TRF does for these what Joyce's Ulysses has done for Dublin but first things first:
“The poor you will always have with you…” so says the Bible.The duality of this world is reflected in the book's themes & characterizations – the Queen of the Whores is a non-descript person of the kind you wouldn't ever notice; yet she has the power of magic & healing.Tyler is the eternal loser yet trying to help others in his own small way & so on.
On one level, this book is a scathing satire of a system that is so blatantly "rigged against" the downtrodden, pushing them further & further towards the peripheral oblivion. The long, digressive chapter An Essay on Bail, makes Vollmann's ethical & humanitarian concerns loud & clear but Vollmann's ambition for this book is an allegory of the human condition.
By embedding Biblical allusions & symbolism in the text, The Royal Family has come to mean something huge – it's no longer about social justice alone – crime, after all, is punishable in a secular world but how do you tackle the inherent evil?
Expelled from Eden, mankind is in a fallen state & the * injustice* goes way back there - the "chosen ones" will always win; the people with "the mark of Cain" will always lose - Vollmann made the spiritual nature of this book very clear in these lines:
"Sunflower's pain and crucifixion is emblematic of the theme of the book – in fact, central. The Dostoyevskian notion that suffering and degradation is paradoxically ennobling, perhaps even sacred, first gets illustrated to the unbelieving Henry right here. The whole book is about how he learns to follow Sunflower's path."
Without the aid of religious interpretation, Tyler's wilful self-degradation would seem capricious & facile to a casual reader. Buddhist self-renunciation has been invoked in Tyler's meandering journeys but Buddhism doesn't revel in filth & decay – it's extremely disciplined & focusses on moderation in every aspect of life. Tyler's free fall has more to do with the legend of Cain :
"But grant him this: In the end he (Cain)did at least wear his Mark with defiant pride, and set out most adventurously to take up housekeeping with Lilith’s daughters and other whores in the Land of Nod, which I’ve always assumed was the place that heroin addicts go to.(...)And Cain, I read, begat Pontius Pilate, who begat firstly innocent bystanders, and secondly good Germans, and thirdly Mr. Henry Tyler, that newly ageing lump of flesh with the same stale problem of an irremediable spiritual impotence—nay, rottenness—of which he had not been the cause and for which there could be no solution."
Like Baudelaire, Vollmann has also taken Cain as a symbol of the forever oppressed.
One also sees Sufi mysticism in Tyler's desire to share the tragic destiny of his royal family - in accepting the Queen's life of filth & shame, the lover has assumed the identity of the beloved. In this identification then, lies his solace The search thus continues just as the Sufi mystic always keeps longing for a merger with his God.
It's in this sense that the train journeys of the final section take on such a poignant meaning & become essential to the narrative.
The shadow of Dostoyevsky's morally ambivalent world hangs over this, but it's also the America of Steinbeck ( "the most American of them all") & Twain which finds expression in the tramps & hobos, in the relative freedom of trainhopping, not to forget the highlighting of yet another marginalised section of American society with the train journeys taking Tyler further & deeper into the American heart of darkness.
The plot here is thus working on multiple levels – the mark of Cain leading Tyler to a life of shame & wanderings, combining with his spiritual quest to find his Queen, combining further with the private eye part of his "most extended trace", & adding to it Vollmann's ethical concerns of the forever bleak moral & social landscapes & he has pulled it all with aplomb!
Steven Moore called Thirteen Stories Thirteen Epitaphs, Vollmann's saddest book - & that is cause TRF hadn't been written then!
It was so easy to have gone schmaltzy; it helped that Vollmann's journalistic instinct let him tell the tale in a detached, non-judgemental way - people are deeply flawed here but you are able to see their essential humanity. I know that sounds cliched but when you look at some of the characters here who could pass for monsters, & yet, are able to retain your sympathy, then that's no mean achievement.
The cover art also divides people - some have loved it for the concept, others have approached it with misgivings. In fact, the lurid jacket cover is so misleading! —It is commendable that despite dealing with subjects like prostitution, sex shows, pedophilia, & adultery – TRF never ventures into titilation territory – if anything, it'll put you off sex!
Here's a description of the Vollmannian prostitute:
Doesn't do much for desire, eh? Vollmann's reverential treatment of whores might leave a casual reader nonplussed so it helps to know where he is coming from – In his essay "Honesty", Vollmann writes about his fondness for prostitutes, it is a rather long quote:
"I think I have always been ashamed of my body. I was born with as many moles on my back as a leopard has spots. These are not flat circles of pigments,but actual protrusions (...) I never take my shirt off ( ...) The inner person,I fear,is equally disappointed in himself(...) Nowadays I get plenty of fan mail (...) I cannot rid myself of the superstition that they love the fact that I am for sale,not the fact that I am me." He goes on to recount his first experience with a call girl after he was rejected by his fiancée: "This woman did not care about me as a person(...) There was no need to feel ashamed of myself in front of her because my self was irrelevant to her. I could be happy and she could be happy. We were both getting what we wanted."
When he began to study the world of San Francisco street-walkers, he realised "Just as in this society, everyone thinks that money is the most important value… to such an extent that it’s become invisible. Parents tell their children, you know you have to learn how to sell yourself. Of course they’re outraged by prostitutes selling themselves, but that’s what we are, we’re a culture of prostitutes.*"
Quoting from the essay again: "Compared to us, the prostitutes were Renaissance women. They dealt with all comers, sizing them up instantly and usually accurately (after all, their lives depended on it). They worked on the street corners, standing in the world, not out of it. They owned themselves. It was their choice to go with the man or not. What they sold was comfort, relief, joy, pleasure, friendship, love of a sort, happiness. They were patient and wise, their wisdom that of a mother who cleans her baby's filth so many times that filth can no longer touch her. They had the knowledge of the woman who gives birth, the pathologist who opens chest and skulls, the policeman who's seen every kind of cruelty, selfishness, trickery. What didn't they know?
So many times I've seen a whore take off her clothes, and her body is so burned and scarred and slashed and shriveled and starved and drugged and bloated and bled, and yet she is not ashamed; she stands honest; she says: "This is me." And when I saw that I said: "I'm going to try to be me, too."
This is not a perfect book:It could've done with some tighter editing.( & then my heart bled when I read this) : "I would rather not have my books published at all than suffer them to be abridged for merely commercial reasons. (...) I have made my bargain with the Devil and don't begrudge it. I write my heart out on everything I do. Then I send the pieces off to the butchers."
I wouldn't recommend this book to everyone: reading about the sad lives of whores & losers in general isn't everybody's idea of candy - and that is exactly my point this book is not candy. Period.
Empathy is the king here: Someone existed, another person not only noticed that existence but also immortalised it within the pages of this book — that is called "being human."
Recommended for: Vollmanniacs, Lovers, Losers, Seekers.
* * *
“Who dies best, the soldier who falls for your sake, or the fly in my whiskey-glass? The happy agony of the fly is his reward for an adventurous dive in no cause but his own. Gorged and crazed, he touches bottom, knows he's gone as far as he can go, and bravely sticks. I sleep on. In the morning I pour new happiness upon the crust of the old, and only as I raise the glass to my lips descry through that rich brown double inch my flattened hero. I drink around his death, being no angler by any inclination, and leave him in the weird shallows. The glass set down, I idle beneath the fan, while beyond my window-bars a warm drizzle passes silently from clouds to leaves.
How to die? How to live? These questions, if we ask the dead fly, are both answered thus: In a drunken state. But drunk on WHAT should we all be? Well, there's love to drink, of course, and death, which is the same thing, and whiskey, better still, and heroin, best of all—except maybe for holiness. Accordingly, let this book, like its characters, be devoted to Addiction, Addicts, Pushers, Prostitutes and Pimps."
* * *
Must reads:
Steven Moore reviews Vollmann's books:
http://www.stevenmoore.info/vollmannr...
Larry McCaffery's review of The Royal Family:
http://www.flet.keio.ac.jp/~pcres/fic...
*
http://bookslut.com/features/2005_11_...
"I wanted to write a book that was searching and was spiritual in certain ways, and Doestoevski (sic) was a master there. It was interesting to think about him and The Bible and the good and bad things in that. And to consider Buddhism and addiction. Some of the Gnostic scriptures were important to me in this book, The Royal Family. But the main thing was to be honest and to give some of the characters the drive to understand their worlds and make sense of their selves. The more intellectual ones are going to use Doestoevski,(sic) and the others are going to use crack. They're trying to go to the same place whatever that place is."
http://www.freewilliamsburg.com/may_2... -
This detective novel set in San Francisco at the end of the last century provides a glimpse of the fear and madness the early christians must have lived from the bottom of their underground chapels. The Royal Family could be the moral code of whoever lives outside morality. And, in that regard, it’s an heterodox christian novel, close to the sadian moral that teaches devotion in damnation. The epigraphs, often taken from the apocryphal gospels, settles a subversive and non-canonical ethics by which the novel relates the passion of those who bears the mark of Cain. And it’s also a book about grief as a religious experience.
-
This book was a huge disappointment to me.
I read the early whore stories and Rainbow Stories and didn't much like them. They seemed purile and immature. Well -- ok.... Vollman, who's unquestionably a genius of sorts, was only about 30 or so when he wrote these.
Turning to this - after the first 150 pages, I was prepared to see this as the 'great american novel of his generation' -- my thought was that Vollman at 32 *wanted* to be a writer; but that Vollman at 42 WAS a writer. The opening of this book -- John, Henry -- was flawless.
But the next 300 pages were, for this reader, at least, tedious, repetitive, and of little interest. And worse, much of it was downright silly. Henry, a four-dimensional figure after the first 150 pages, was reduced to a cardboard cutout by page 400 -- what a waste! -- and most of the hapless whores and addicts of Vollman's Tenderloin were little better. Their characters are virtually interchangeable, their idiom was interchangeable; if I didn't remember that one was Mexican and another black, I wouldn't have known who was who. And principal characters like the Queen and Justin were utterly unbelievable. I'm not a big fan of surrealism and fantasy -- and so maybe part of the problem is me. But I'm not convinced of that.
The fact is, these types of people -- for all their woesome misery and suffering -- are, for the most part, precisely *because* they are reduced to their animal simplicities and needs -- even ARTIFICIAL animal needs (drugs) -- living two-dimensional lives. There is little cognition, little striving, little refraction, reflection, spirituality -- no growth -- and so they are, after a while, sad but quite uninteresting. Consequently, it is hard to write about them and sustain it for 800 pages -- unless the writer shows great discipline (and that, certainly, is a quality that many will think Vollman lacks) and analytical scope. But instead he treats them like slightly comical homeric heroes, and the epicization simply doesn't work -- it rings utterly false.
To me, of course.
And yet -- even in the midst of this literary dross and failure (sorry -- to all the Vollman fans who are my GR friends) -- there are passages here of such surpassing brilliance -- like Domino tottering down the Tenderloin night into the flashing lights... that one can only shake one's head at the opportunity that Vollman missed.
I write this knowing full well that I'll earn the contempt and laughter of people who -- I'm the first to admit -- are far richer (and far more experienced) readers of contemporary fiction than I am.
So I offer this review in the spirit of Hank offering up his love to the Queen --
Well... not really. -
"¿En qué andas?, volvió a preguntar el tatuado, interponiéndose en su camino como un centinela en un mito antiguo.
Busco a alguien a quien nunca encontraré, dijo Tyler. Me alejo de la gente que me conoce."
Hay obras que marcan un punto de inflexión en tus gustos, en tu aventura lectora, y que de alguna forma supondrán un antes y un después a la hora de valorar el resto de los libros que llegarán a tu vida, estoy segura de que esta novela de Vollmann es ESA NOVELA. Parto de la base de que La Familia Real ha sido mi primer Vollmann, un autor del que había oído maravillas pero que por otra parte me causaba un profundo respeto, sin embargo, como estoy en un año literario en el que me estoy sacudiendo mis prejucios y mis miedos, y me estoy lanzando a leer autores hasta ahora intocables, pues resulta que..., ¡¡¡ohhh sorpresa!!!, que la lectura de esta novela ha supuesto una de las experiencias más gratificantes, más inmersivas y absorbentes de mis últimos años. La Familia Real no es una novela difícil, no es densa, como creía, pero sí que es una obra que me atrapó desde el primer momento y con la que conecté inesperadamente, y digo inesperadamente porque tenía todas las papeletas de lanzarme al vacío de mi zona de confort. El cosmos de personajes, de lugares, de emociones con la que la imbuye Vollmann, la convierten en una de esas obras que una vez terminada, no te abandonará ya. Y es cierto que al terminarla (un final que he ido alargando) me ha dejado un cierto vacío, tanta fuerza tienen sus personajes, que ya eran viejos conocidos.
"Se coló en un convoy de vagones de grano que, lentos y solemnes, como Irene cuando se cepillaba los negros cabellos, le llevaron lejos.."
El personaje central, o guía de esta novela es Henry Tyler (¿podría ser Henry Tyler el mismo Vollmann?), un detective de San Francisco perseguido por el fantasma de su amor ideal, Irene, que resulta ser además la mujer de su hermano John. Irene se suicida y deja a Henry totalmente desamparado, abriendo todavía más la brecha entre ambos hermanos. Henry es un detective privado que es contratado por Brady, un magnate sin escrúpulos, que planea construir un burdel de realidad virtual en Las Vegas llamado Circo Femenino y quiere reclutar a la Reina de las Putas por razones que Vollmann de alguna forma deja en el aire.La Reina de las Putas es una prostituta esquiva y misteriosa que parece haber formado una especie de microcosmos acogiendo bajo su ala a otras prostitutas desprotegidas en Tenderloin, el barrio más peligroso de San Francisco.
A priori, parece un argumento no muy complejo porque aquí tenemos la eterna dicotomia del amor/odio entre dos hermanos donde se establecen eternas referencias bíblicas a Caín y Abel, y por otra parte, esa búsqueda de Henry de la Reina en el inframundo de San Francisco, le da a la primera parte de esta novela un tono que se podría asemejar a la novela negra: el detective atormentado vagando en los arrabales para llenar un vacío existencial, y que por otra parte, bajo la excusa de una misión imposible, busca otra cosa..., quizás desconectar de una obsesión que no le deja vivir en paz. A medida que avanza la novela, somos testigos de que Henry Tyler siente una inclinación hacia ese inframundo repleto de personajes fuera del sistema, prostitutas, abusadores, camellos, indigentes… todo un universo de personajes que va conociendo y del que de alguna forma cada vez le resulta más difícil alejarse, porque Henry también es un outsider, un ser perdido, obsesionado por algo que quizás nunca haya tenido.
"¿Te crees que una mujer es sólo algo que usar y destrozar, sin importar lo que ella quiera? ¿Te crees que puedes ponerme las manos encima? ¿Te crees que puedes hacerme frente?."
La Familia Real es una obra magna por la forma en la que está estructurada y por la ingente cantidad de referencias, biblícas, filosóficas, sociales... que parece que pueden desbordar pero nada de eso. Vollmann divide la novela en 36 partes, o libros, que contienen 592 capitulos que recorren América en una crónica social que hubo momentos que me paralizaron, en otras me indignaron y casi siempre me emocionaron profundamente. Se reconvierte llegado un punto en una novela épica (Coffee Camp) y en otros momentos en una novela completamente intimísta (Celia), con todo lo que eso conlleva porque se nota que Vollmann está obsesionado con el mundo de la prostitución, con la comercialización del sexo, con el negocio que esto supone a gran escala, y lo cuenta desde dentro, Henry Tyler es el mismo Vollmann camuflado, sus personajes de ficción son los mismos personajes con los que este periodista se ha mezclado, con los que ha convivido, y esto se transmite en cada poro de la novela.
"No me opongo a -explicarla-, pues no la comprendo. Pero la quiero más que a cualquiera de los demás personajes de este libro, salvo quizá a Domino, y me niego a abstenerme de elogiarla: si los astrónomos y los éticos lograsen alguna vez demostrar que Dios se parece a ella, el descarriado y exhausto Caín no tendría que huir más.."
Me ha llegado al alma esta novela, porque incluso en pasajes sórdidos y muy duros, entiendo que el mayor talento de Vollmann consiste en ponerse en la mente del personaje que tiene enfrente (Henry, John, Smooth, Beatriz, Domino, Celia, Sapphire...), imagino que le viene de su profesión de periodista, empatiza para poder contar la historia, y desde luego, de esta manera, el lector conecta. Una maravilla de novela editada por Pálido Fuego. La traducción es de José Luis Amores.
"La Reina dijo: Domino, da igual si tienes a cien chulos detrás de ti. Mantén tus valores. Mantén tus escrúpulos.".
https://kansasbooks.blogspot.com/2021... -
I wish I knew my Bible better for The Royal Family as I’m positive that all of the allegory and parable within would dazzle me even more. Alas, I don’t read non-fiction.
I'm not going to attempt to tear this sucker apart. Significant English Thinker (SET) Jonathan did just that very thing yesterday, and he done did a much finer job than I ever could. To be honest, my interaction with philosophy is relegated to work (I have a weird job) and I prefer to keep the already overlapping spheres of my personal and professional lives far enough apart to be able to differentiate which one I loathe more at a given time. Thus, I don't know my Foucault from my fondue (they're both French, right?) and my philo-spiritu-epistemo threshold pretty much begins and ends with a poster I have of a kitten, a tree, and the legend "Hang In There." Call me shallow; I've stared into the abyss for enough years to realize that I'm the only one blinking.
As my last WTV review directly addressed what I feel to be problematic regarding people's inability to parse fact-from-fiction/writer-from-human, I'm not going to ‘go there.’ I've already ‘been there, done that.’ I ‘brought it’ and you've ‘been served.’
So where does that leave us? Rightly where it should: focusing on this towering achievement. Beyond the several-dozen levels this book can operate on (choose your own), the fact of the matter is that The Royal Family is strikingly conventional in its linearity, character development, arch, etc. This isn't faint praise. We've all seen what Vollmann can do by blowing up the traditional form, so how does he fare reassembling it anew? Damn well, Jackson. The major characters here aren’t just sketches or stage props for WTV to manipulate for Maximum Emotional Heft (MEH). The two major players—Henry Tyler and Domino—are his most fully-realized. So, despite the presence of an insect-arachnoid she-goddess that expectorates a psychotropic saliva (what, you thought there wasn’t one?!?), when the blows land—and they do, faster and more psychically-damaging than you can imagine at times—they are brutal. Two words: Dan Smooth.
I will say that this is the only WTV book where I see a strong antecedent in Pynchon, something he gets labeled with for page-count more than anything. There are more than several nods (?) to Gravity’s Rainbow that I caught, beyond the obviously scatological/sexual. I am not going to mention plot points in either in case anyone hasn’t read them (which you should remedy right quick if that’s the case). This isn’t a criticism as I am a virtual Sapphire myself to Pynchon’s Queen. We need more writers of Pynchon's caliber and I think our best modern analogue is WTV. Check it:
"He bristled into a posture which was for him as natural as that of an antibody encountering in the dim red bloodstreams it frequented some unknown cell which threatened that ruby light of home and seemed to darken it into the inkiness of baleful sorrow."
Same sentence by 99.99% of other authors:
"He sat down."
But I will leave it, like I did above, to a more eminent thinker than myself to have the last word via the below link. If you’ve read it, you’ll get it. If you haven’t, please do so then you can. Either way, it won't ruin any plot for you. Take it away, Amazing Diminutive Irishman (ADI)…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NgzMA... -
PREFACE: EMBRACE, DEBASE, DISGRACE, ERASE:
From Queen of the Desert to Queen of the Whores
Hey, Werner, man, Nic here! We've absolutely gotta film this book! I have to play Henry! I can't think about him, without seeing myself in the role! We're peas in a pod! Brothers! Twins even! Sup! Sup! Sup!:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uu6DR...
'Til the break of dawn, baby!
"There's Such a Thing as the Bliss of Evil"
Werner Herzog responds:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFDbv...
A Man with Limitless Backbone
"This sounds crazed and immodest, but I actually believe I have a shot at winning the Nobel Prize or some other prestigious award someday. If Viking sticks with me that long, I think they may benefit from keeping me happy and by keeping the books intact. I am also getting more and more foreign sales these days. May the company please, please, just be patient."
Bill Vollmann, "Crabbed Cautions of a Bleeding-hearted Un-deleter - and Potential Nobel Prize Winner" (1998)(he would subsequently win the National Book Award for "Europe Central" in 2005. So there! Now for the big one!)
This is the BBC World Service
"On the surface, The Royle Family appeared to be humdrum and low on incident - but such ordinary appearances belie the fact that it was a groundbreaking work of exceptional comedy invention."
Prolegomena to a Critique of Pure Indulgence
I can't get enough of Unser Bill's uncut transgressive length.
I love the way Unser Bill hangs his threadbare hobo narratives on the pegs of old testaments and sagas.
Let me complete the adoration of the majestic.
Does phantasmagorical mean fantastic or deluded?
Is this Unser Bill's best (or worst) novel?
Anyway, don't moralise! Get on with it!
THE SADEIAN INHERITANCE:
The Criminal Imperative
"But seriousness commands us to recognize that it's the multitude of laws that is responsible for this multitude of crimes..."
Marquis de Sade (quoted by Bill Vollmann)
The Criminal Imperative (Again)
"Crime is the soul of lust. What would pleasure be if it were not accompanied by crime? It is not the object of debauchery that excites us, but rather the idea of evil...
"[In the pleasure of torturing and mocking such a woman,] there is the kind of pleasure which comes from sacrilege or the profanation of the objects offered us for worship."
Marquis de Sade
The Sadeian Paradox
The Sadeian paradox is that:
* if there wasn't a law against it, it wouldn't be illegal or sanctionable; but
* if it wasn't illegal or immoral, it wouldn't be transgressive, which is at least half the pleasure (for libertine and reader alike).
Angela Carter on Sade: The Childish Triumph of the Will
"The triumph of the will recreates, as its Utopia, the world of early childhood, and that is a world of nightmare, impotence and fear, in which the child fantasises, out of its own powerlessness, an absolute supremacy."
Vollmann on Sade: The Dark Tunnels of Shared Self-Obsession
"He is very funny and brilliant and elegant sometimes; he writes sentences as delicious as a spoonful of vanilla icing; but he is one of the most selfish people on earth...
"He rails, vituperates, gloats, fantasises, chuckles, masturbates, dreams...he dares, he searches, he casts the lamplight of his intellect into the dark tunnels of self-obsession..."
From "Rising Up and Rising Down"
Simone de Beauvoir on Sade: The Absence of Mitsein
"If ever we hope to transcend the separateness of individuals, we may do so only on condition that we be aware of its existence [the ethical darkness]. Otherwise, promises of happiness and justice conceal the worst dangers.
"Sade drained to the dregs the moment of selfishness, injustice, and misery, and he insisted upon its truth."
The Vollmann Imperative(s)
"...we should strive to feel not only about Self, but also about Other. Not the vacuum so often between Self and Other. Not the unworthiness of Other. Not the Other as a negation or eclipse of Self. Not even about the Other exclusive of Self, because that is but a trickster-egoist’s way of worshiping Self secretly. We must treat Self and Other as equal partners."
Bill Vollmann, "American Writing Today: A Diagnosis of the Disease" (1990)
SOUNDING BRASS AND CLANGING CYMBALS:
1 Corinthians 13.1
"If I speak with the tongues of men and angels, but have not love, I am become sounding brass, or a clanging cymbal."
Exalt and Pepper Spray
The third volume of "The Prostitution Trilogy" is the one that will really make or break your Vollmann fandom.
If you're lucky, it might establish that you are truly oblivious to the flaws in his authorial vision. You will embrace this as a holy book. Five stars. On the other hand, it might prove that you have supernatural powers of forgiveness. The questionable parts might be dismissed as apocryphal. Three or four stars. On the third hand, it might leave you feeling vaguely sad and embarrassed to learn that your graven idol has such feet of clay. One or two stars.
This novel severely tested Steven Moore's support for Vollmann. After reading his review, I dreamed that I walked into the toilet at a party, only to find Vollmann with his arms curled around the porcelain bowl and Moore holding his head out of the water. Steven was comforting him, saying, "It's alright, Bill, you can stop now." Only Bill replied, "No. I can't stop. I must go on."
And so it is that Unser Bill goes on and on.
The Land of Nod’s as Good as a Wank
Vollmann shoehorns his story into the Biblical legend of Cain and Abel, the two sons of Adam and Eve.
In order to populate the world with their progeny, there had to be women. It’s believed that Cain and Abel were each born with a girl twin (although there’s some suggestion that Abel had two triplet sisters), the plan being that they copulate incestuously with the other’s twin. Cain, however, wanted to couple with his own twin. It’s speculated that he killed Abel when she was offered to him instead and God declined to intervene on Cain's behalf. Thus, the murder of Abel is explained by Cain’s desire to unite his two almost Platonic halves or selves. The love he felt for his own twin is in fact self-love or narcissism.
Rejected, Cain turns his back on God, authority and limitation. He is condemned to wander for the rest of his life in the Land of Nod, which Vollmann equates to the netherworld of heroin addicts and whoredom, i.e., the realm of the Queen of Whores and her "Royal Family". Vollmann describes its inhabitants as Canaanites, who wear the Mark of Cain, the symbol of God's sanction. Here, everybody looks out for themselves alone, and nobody is their brother’s keeper. It’s a land of narcissism and masturbation, not the kind of Heideggerian Mitsein that Beauvoir and Carter imagined post-Sade.
A Loss for Words to Say
This Canaanite framework is swallowed whole in the novel and never truly digested or capitalised on. For all its dirty romanticism, the problem is that, at the heart of the matter, in matters of the heart, the protagonist, Henry Tyler, is essentially a loser. Only he never had what he believes he has lost. He covets, he craves, he lusts after his brother John’s Korean wife, Irene. He believes he would have made a better husband to her than John. It’s not clear whether he ever had sex with her. However, there is no suggestion that he would do anything with her, but have sex, if he had got or had his way. After her suicide, he is plagued by dreams, from which he awakes with the taste of her cunt juices on his face and lips. Henry walks around for the rest of the book like a sombre love zombie. The whores think he is a misogynist. To the extent that he loves only one woman who does not exist, they believe he hates all other women. They, rightly, believe that he is in love with his own loss, rather than anything else more real or concrete. He is no longer of this world.
This love is no Mitsein. Surely Mitsein is more than some high diddle diddle motherhood statement or bumper sticker?
No. This is a trickster-egoist’s way of worshiping Self secretly, that is transparent to anyone who reads the novel closely, instead of bending over backwards to forgive or excuse (or luxuriate or auto-redeem in) its self-conscious transgression.
I can't imagine Vollmann ever writing a worse novel than this. We're just lucky he recovered in order to write "Europe Central".
Excremental as Anything
The novel is a seemingly interminable cycle of body fluids and solids.
Twice in the space of two pages the rain “vomits” into the gutters. Not even Nature is pure. Henry and the Queen express their lust/love for each other by exchanging mouthfuls of spittle. Jesus apparently made water into wine. Vollmann imagines it being made into urine. The smell of piss and shit and semen is pervasive. The entire narrative and writing process is preoccupied with flesh and ejaculation and excretion and defilement. This is my body, my blood, my seed, my piss, my shit. I excrete, therefore I am. I am my own excretion. I am no better than my excretion. And what I excrete must be preserved, distributed and worshipped in exactly the form in which it first arrived. It can’t be cleaned up, edited, beautified, polished, which is no surprise, because, after all is said and done, you can’t polish a turd.
I Went Down to the Crossroads
Don't get your hopes up. There's no redemption in this world. It's too late. God is dead. We've learned that Man is not spirit made flesh. Besides, Henry hasn't been expelled or banished to the East of Eden. He has chosen the Land of Nod. He's an outlaw, a rebel, a nihilist. He's in control. He's not seeking redemption. He's seeking indulgence, which he calls absolute freedom. I wouldn't call him an Atheist. His non-belief is too reactionary. It's too steeped in the symbolism and imagery of Catholicism. He's given up on God, but he still wants the adornments, the Mark of Cain.
There is no better fate for "The Royal Family" than to be placed on a pedestal and flushed with success. It's the ultimate Faustian Scheidt!
In a way, though, I hope the author continues undeleted, unedited and undeterred. It's the surest way he'll win whatever reward or prize he deserves!
YOU DON'T NEED AN M.F.A. TO WRITE A CROCK OF SCHEIDT LIKE THIS:
"Dark tracks of ecstasy down which slid blinking lights and fluffy lights, rays of warmness on cold tracks..."
"Dauntless Brady swung the car back into the groove of traffic, undazzled by blinking lights on metal, dazed only by the other cuntsharks...."
"That's a spurious and specious linkage, said Brady."
"Tyler sat listening to the heavy clop of that glossy-shoed girl so sour-sweet with the sweat drops glistening from her meaty shoulders as she ran through the cold night."
"There were frothy things on her breasts like silver spit."
"The crazy [whore's eyes were] gleaming like the wristwatches of hopeful young lawyers."
"She was licking her lips in the light of the crack pipe flame as she bounced on the bed, rubbing her clitoris."
"The fact that Brady might be capable of dealing severely with people who disappointed him might have contributed to the alacrity of a different subaltern."
"What of the Tenderloin...comprised a worthwhile puzzle whose solution might enlighten him?"
"A sunburst of hair, short arms over boobs bigger than the wheels of a Greyhound bus. Her sweater was as nice as light."
"It was a fresh cold winter's eve of shiny raincoats and headlights of stalled traffic like luminous pairs of dinner plates stood on their edges; the pavement had become an ebony liquid which reflected upside down the people walking on it, stuck by the soles of their shoes to their inverted selves."
[Ed: Let's face it, an editor could not possibly improve upon that sentence!]
"So Tyler felt compelled to touch this woman as often as he could, in order to thereby scour away the sooty gloomy thoughts that blew in upon his shining mind."
"Her hand was fiery with hot sweat. Her fingers were squeezing his with all their strength. He could not stop himself anymore. He brought her fingertips to his lips and began to lick the hot, delicious sweat."
[Ed: And you thought you were the only surviving sweat-fetishist?]
"A callipygian woman snailed her way through the rain."
[Ed: I wish some callipygian women would move into my neighbourhood!]
"His starched shirt was as white as the solid left behind after sodium has consummated its marriage with ethanol."
"This time he would finally get to know another soul. He'd be with her, talk to her, listen to her, memorise every episode of her life, know her in every possible way."
"Cupidity won out."
"It had all begun as a matter of moral and intellectual curiosity."(it = paedophilia)
"The wings of her bra glowed green like a lunar moth, and it was mystic and beautiful and so religious."
"She fed upon the diseased sperm of thousands of men, drinking it down without complaint, transubstantiating it into sacred suffering."
"Tyler continued to pursue the Queen of Whores, because he was convinced that the secret tremendousness in which she lived would be lovely."
"He thought of Luther's strange doctrine that sin resides in the flesh, not in the conscience...Her puke was corrupt, but not her, never her."
"He had wanted to be her one thing, but he was too low and evil."
"Domino's hand on her vulva felt as scorching as one of those dark boxcars sitting in the hot California sun."
"His penis was the most expressive part of him."
"He awoke with the taste of Irene's cunt in his mouth."
"If this were a book, I wouldn't even read the rest of it."
"Lost in the cave of enlightenment [her cunt], he had to grabble his way without that ambiguously useful perceptual eye known as consciousness."
"She straightened, wiggling smilingly on top of him like a little girl settling herself bareback on a trusted and docile family horse."
"She pissed long and loud into his opened mouth...he swallowed her reeking, foaming stream...It felt as if her piss had become his tears."
"Somedays her breasts resembled his balls - proof of the homology of the sexes."
"Domino's mons was furry, broad and generous like the refreshing green mound of park on Gough and Sacramento."
"He had memorised her like a poem and now he could recite her."
"His penis was tall and thin like the antenna on the left rear of a police car."
"She urinated into his mouth and he hallucinated with ecstasy."
"Suddenly he felt such anguish that ideas vanished and to save himself he thrust his tongue up the Queen's anus."
...which is probably as good a quote as any with which to end this review!
SOUNDTRACK:
AN EXEGESIS OF COLOURFUL BILL VOLLMANN AND HIS YEARS OF PILGRIMAGE (AS TOLD IN ROBYN HITCHCOCK SONGS):
Robyn Hitchcock - "A Man's Gotta Know His Limitations, Briggs"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDyM4...
[Actually finishes at 5:28: maybe the recording process didn't know its limitations, Briggs!]
"We've all got a Briggs in us
Somewhere down the road
I don't know about you folks but
This Briggs will explode."
Robyn Hitchcock - "Raymond Chandler Evening"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xWwU...
"I'd like to reassure you but
I'm not that kind of guy."
Robyn Hitchcock - "Dark Princess"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4fXUx...
"When I'm naked, I tell no lies
You are fur-lined, but you're wise
When you're golden, I'm your beast
Seven minutes and you're released
Turn up the silence
Turn up the snow
Turn up the glove you wear
Turn up the love you show
The love you show
I kneel before you, bearing a crown
Merciful princess, won't you look down?
I'm drinking your waters, I'm clutching your sleeve
You're further inside me than you'd ever believe
Than you'd ever believe.
This one goes out to the Dark Princess
I looked for her and she found me."
Robyn Hitchcock - "Queen Elvis"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KVGSZ...
"See that man who mows his lawn,
He'll hang in drag before the dawn.
Some are made and some are born
To be Queen Elvis.
Justify your special ways,
Justify your special ways.
Two mirrors make infinity,
In the mirror you and me.
Find out just what love could be,
Queen Elvis.
Honey, have you got the nerve,
To be Queen Elvis?"
Robyn Hitchcock - "Cynthia Mask"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qcy5-...
"You're dressed as yourself
You walk down the pavement
The people that pass
They think that they know you
They're too busy thinking
To see who you are.
Disguise yourself
As you or another
A brick or a spider
In hunger and silence
The yawning cross
The hill full of pebbles
Inside you forever
Inside you is all.
Cynthia mask
You're wearing a Cynthia mask
Cynthia mask
I know how she feels
But can't say a word because
Nothing is real in here
Not even her."
Robyn Hitchcock - "Judas Sings (Jesus and Me)"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SLApc...
"You're so degraded, you're so alone
Nothing can save you, not even the phone
This is the capital of
Bad luck and dope
You're so corrupted, you're so extreme
God and the angels are out of your dream
This is the century of
You don't believe
In anything but what's up your sleeve
So what's up your sleeve?
Nobody loves you but Jesus and me
I've got my reasons so does he
I want your money but he wants your soul
This is the world
If you want the world
I said I loved you, and it was true
Nobody knows that better than you
I'm not political, I do what I should
I don't mean any harm but
I mean no good
Nobody loves you but Jesus and me
I've got my reasons
He wants your mystery but I want control
This is the world
If you want the world."
THE SOUNDTRACK OF OUR LIVES:
Rolling Stones - "Dead Flowers"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YRdx...
"Well, when you're sitting there in your silk upholstered chair
Talkin' to some rich folk that you know
Well, I hope you won't see me in my ragged company
Well, you know I could never be alone
Take me down little Susie, take me down
I know you think you're the queen of the underground
And you can send me dead flowers every morning
Send me dead flowers by the mail
Send me dead flowers to my wedding
And I won't forget to put roses on your grave."
Rolling Stones - "Dead Flowers" (Live in Texas, 1972)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RS_yy...
Robert Johnson - "Cross Road Blues"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GsB_c...
Cream - "Crossroads" (Live at Royal Albert Hall, London on November 26th, 1968)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=becWr...
Cream - "Crossroads" (Live at Royal Albert Hall, London in May, 2005)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pX6J5... -
6/8/17 - Representations of drug-addicted street prostitutes in popular culture - exhibit c, this song and video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UAWcs...
Obviously a woman living on the street and selling her body to smoke crack/meth would not be able to maintain such flawless skin as the model in this video. Sentimental as fuck, but nonetheless I kind of like it. A 'guilty pleasure,' I suppose.
*
8/12/16 - Went to a production of Genet's Deathwatch at a small theater in the Tenderloin last night. Waiting in the theater cafe before the show, and overhead some of the other patrons having a conversation about what a bad neighborhood the TL is. I have to say this annoys me. First of all, what is meant by 'bad'? It's true there are a lot of panhandlers and street prostitutes in the Tenderloin, but these people are really no more dangerous than any merchant soliciting your money. You can always just say no (or not say anything), refuse, and keep walking.
I don't think fear of street crime is always irrational (I've been mugged at gunpoint before, though not in the Tenderloin, and can confirm it's not a pleasant experience), but still I can't shake the suspicion that talk of 'bad' neighborhoods often has more to do with an aesthetic objection to the existence of certain kinds of people. Alas, I think this is especially true in SF, where many citizens feel they have a right to wipe the unpicturesque off the street. It's not an edifying spectacle to see bourgeois people pay money to have their sensibilities shocked at an avant garde cultural event, and then afterwards hurry into their Uber so as not to spend another minute in a bad neighborhood.
*
Biking through the tenderloin last night I heard one woman yelling about another woman to the passing cars: "Don't talk to her, she's dirty, she's got syphilis, she's a syphilitic whore!" (1/31/16)
better not to shy away from gaping despair...
*
HI TWITTER, WE'D LOVE TO WELCOME YOU TO THE NEIGHBORHOOD, BUT WE HAVE TOO MANY CHARACTERS. - sign seen outside a motel in the Tenderloin right before Twitter moved in on Market street
The Royal Family felt familiar to me in an empirical way. I know these streets, at least to some degree. The main character actually lives four blocks from me. In part it's the story of gentrification, almost a protest novel, although Vollmann does not sentimentalize the opposition, or urban underbelly. Nor does the question of charity arise, because if anything he's desperately hoping the tramps and whores may be able to help him, that he can learn from them.
*
"But what if some sacred vapor infused her ecstasies and depths? What if her endless struggle for junk and more junk were a meditation of perpetual equilibrium as valid as Buddha's stillness on a lotus leaf?" - the Royal Family, pp. 273
Compare Simone Weil:
“There is a resemblance between the lower and the higher. Hence slavery is an image of obedience to God, humility an image of humiliation, physical necessity an image of the irresistible pressure of grace, the saints abandonment from day to day an image of the frittering away of time among criminals, prostitutes, etc...” - from "Decreation"
Despite her quasi-conversion to Catholicism, Weil retained some fairly heretical ideas until the end. For instance, that creation is God's distance from us, and that it is necessary to "decreate" ourselves in order to achieve union with God. I believe this kind of thinking falls well outside canonical Christian theology, and is more properly at home in Gnosticism.
Vollmann uses epigraphs generously throughout the Royal Family. Weil never makes an appearance, but he does quote the gnostic gospel quite a bit. I think the novel can be read as an epic of decreation. San Francisco is presented in stark, almost feudal terms. On the one hand, yuppies; on the other, whores. Between these two orders there are no gradations. The only exception is Henry Tyler in his somewhat heroic quest of downward mobility.
This book is angry and horribly sad at times. It's pretty much everything I could have hoped for. -
The Royal Family is so richly enigmatic, one thinks they're unraveling the mysteries of the universe when they read it. This is a book of immense sadness, where loneliness knows no bounds. One can imagine its author, possibly the greatest writer alive, William T. Vollmann, sitting at his desk skimming over his first draft of The Royal Family and then saying to himself with a mischievous grin, "Okay, now how do I make this even sadder?"
For one, what's sadder than the tale of Cain? And because Vollmann doesn't hesitate to inform you of its importance one bit: Cain was the firstborn son of Adam and Eve who was cursed for killing his brother, Abel. From the Wiki: A mark was put upon him to warn others that killing Cain would provoke the vengeance of God, that if someone did something to harm Cain, the damage would come back sevenfold.
Enter Henry Tyler, our protagonist, who starts off as a private eye lured into the scummy underworld of San Francisco's Tenderloin via the cold hard cash spewing out of Brady's almost cartoon-like mouth (visions of pain and Mr. White's blistering megalomania in You Bright and Risen Angels) (If I get hired, that means something just went wrong, he liked to say). Henry's job is to find the legendary Queen of the Whores to combat Brady's own empire of sex, his sex-themed Feminine Circus that would only be rivaled by Disney Land. Henry does as he's told. He, who is a wolf who continues to lick the blade when it comes to Irene, the real one, the fake one, it doesn't matter. Henry slowly becomes the capability for sorrow within us all. He is pitifully human. The Royal Family, which has nothing to do with England's monarchy and everything to do with the allegiance the Queen of the Whores has created, is perfectly imperfect; its moral compass dwells, just as the opening quote states, But seriousness commands us to recognize that it's the multitude of laws that is responsible for this multitude of crimes (De Sade), within close proximity to a financial society that remains acceptable; Oh, they're a lot like the rest of us, Mrs. Adams, Tyler said. They just tend to act a little more on their feelings, is all.
When Irene suddenly, although not completely unexpectedly commits suicide, the severity of his love for her grows. But just like Cain, Henry isn't given clemency to end his suffering. Throughout The Royal Family's massive scope, he is visited by her ghost countless times. He awoke with the taste of Irene’s cunt in his mouth. echoes all the way until the last few pages. (Although it is never admitted that he was ever that intimate with her, she was, after all, his brother's wife, and the only thing that matters is what he believes in his head, and the unified declaration that he "back-stabbed" his brother, or murdered him just the same as Cain did Abel.)
When he finds her, and falls in love with her, or wants to so bad he'll do anything to forget Irene, the Queen of the Whores makes him envision Irene as a child. Inside, you’re little, same as her. You wanna be her friend. You wanna play with her. But you can’t, ‘cause she’s dead. This, the agony of losing a loved one, the agony of not attaining the love you so desperately want while its sitting complacently in front of you, is the heroin of life, the late-night jitters, the craving for just one last hit. Love can morph into any of these parasites. So Henry suckles at the teat of the Queen and feels saved, brand new, but Irene returns to him still in this newer better love because Irene's love is everyone's love; there is no difference whose physical body is distributing it. Matthew 12.46 states: While he was still speaking to the people, behold, his mother and brothers stood outside, asking to speak to him. But he replied . . ., “Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?” And stretching out his hand toward his disciples, he said, “Here are my mother, and my brothers! For whoever does the will of my Father in Heaven is my brother, and sister, and mother.”
Ultimately, this is a novel about longing for what is unattainable, even though the ramifications of the Genesis myth has taken hold across the world for centuries with no foreseeable end to our combined suffering, including modern day (1997 or thereabouts) San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Sacramento. And then a mythical absolution of love. Not the physicality of it, but a reclaiming of its hold over you, as if every love gained and lost was just the right piece to complete the universal puzzle.
Over the course of 780 pages, Henry works to believe what he wants versus what is. Through San Francisco’s financial district, including Henry’s dickish brother, John (Just pretend that he is a crazy and potentially violent panhandler who must be humored.; who is paid for his own cock-sucking, camouflaged in business suits and clean shoes), his deceased wife, the angelic Irene who Henry loved (he loved her for her gentleness, her acceptance of him, and her easily satisfied needs; her soul cried like a wounded bird’s, and he heard the cry.), to the mythical Queen of the Whores (the metaphorical Her pussy tasted like crack. The girls could drink from it all day and their cravings would go away. But the more they drank, the more addicted they were.), the Tenderloin pushers and prostitutes addicted to her love, who did their job of alleviated Henry of his pain alas for only a short period of time (the important thing was that she had tried to bring him joy, sexual or otherwise with the ladies of the night), and the homeless that border the Vanishing Point, like a wounded dog, Henry rolls around in his lost love, each crumb equivalent to crack.
Together, the prostitutes' and Henry's marks on their foreheads burn feverishly in the night.
It's a brilliant move on Vollmann's part to not go into detail about Irene's and Henry's relationship when she was alive. Once you lose what you had right in front of you, you begin to question even the most minute detail. It wouldn't have been right for Vollmann to spill the beans on everything, lest he wanted the reader screaming at Henry like someone watching a horror movie when some stupid idiot goes down into a dark basement. Same thing with the many-colored and eccentric prostitutes he errands with in the scum-ridden Tenderloin. Those crack addicts and rape victims who Henry pities at first (just as John pities Henry; it all depends where the one who gives out pity stands), don't need intricate back stories to explain their current debauchery because the same thing that had happened to them in childhood occurs in the present. Thus is the Mark of Cain. History repeats itself. Domino (the slimiest although prettiest and most sensitive prostitute) became mentally scarred a long time ago. She was more than likely beat or raped as a kid. She struck back. They struck back even harder. Nothing changed. And that kind of hardship in childhood is exponentially worse than what a mere adult can imagine, if not maddening to comprehend, so Vollmann leaves it up to us to mostly fill in the blanks, because, as always, your own imagination has no limit to the horrors it can create.
Is it no wonder that resident pedophile, Dan Smooth, goes to such elaborate lengths to torture Henry about the glory of childhood innocence? Henry went into the sodden turf of the miserable streets with an inclination that he could help the others marked by Cain or maybe, just maybe, regain some of the love he felt with Irene. By the time we reach page 656, Henry's still obsessing over Irene, when her birthday is, the anniversary of her death, the countdown before all of these dates, etc., other characters have come and gone, some tragically, some leaving no trace, the Queen's black magic no longer functions, then Dan Smooth informs Henry, God’s speaking now, so you’d better listen. I’m telling you loud and clear, boy, that the reason you’ve let everyone down is because you can only love completely what you don’t have. This message communicated to him by the worst villain in the entire book, because villainy doesn’t make their advice invalid; and Vollmann, here and elsewhere in his extensive resume, tells you that villainy is the only thing we can count on. I think you never cared all that much for your sister-in-law. I think you only cared about losing her. It’s loss you’re in love with. That’s why you hang onto it.
There is always something worse, something worse than the whores of the Tenderloin, worse than the waning homeless who drift into despair, who tell Henry just by the sheer virtue of their continued existence: Don’t futz about it. Go into the mud with a gun to your head and finish it. Even Dan Smooth (our pedophile and “hero”) started off small-time, in a normal suburban setting, who only became depraved and sick after various insults to his own sanity. And that's the kicker, people who become depraved start out the same as you and I; we are all at varying degrees of tipping points, but only a few of us actually go over it.
The End Is the Beginning Is the End (I borrowed this title from a Smashing Pumpkins' song written for the 1997 disasterpiece, Batman & Robin, which bears no semblance to the majesty of The Royal Family in any way whatso-goddamn-ever.)
The ending (or whatever I'm calling an ending), which lasts 150 pages, may seem unnecessary at first, but soon reveals itself as a means to winding down the 450 pages of tightly condensed narrative(s) that came before. This isn't a book with a beginning, middle and end. Long after the "climax" hits, characters begin to dissolve unconditionally; people have to be put to rest; we have to be given room to move on peacefully. There is no gunshot at the end like coming off a year’s worth of heroin. We feel rattled because we are supposed to. The story progresses just in time for us to shed our clothes in order to stand solvent and bare to what it is we worship.
So how can a book like this possibly end (if it does at all)?
From the Gnostic Scriptures: Matthew said, “Lord, I want to see that place of life where there is no wickedness, but rather there is pure light.” The Lord said, “Brother Matthew, you will not be able to see it as long as you are carrying flesh around.”. Early on in the book: The car reeked of vomit. He thought of Luther’s strange doctrine that sin resides in the flesh, not in the conscience, because law has power only over flesh, not conscience. Her puke was corrupt, but not her, never her. We are all Satan worshipers down here. SMILE AND YOU’LL ALWAYS GET TRAPPED CUZ DEMONS ARE HERE. someone writes on a hotel wall. We were split into three sects after Cain’s wrongdoing: torturers, saints, and eccentrics. Henry is a saint, who believes he suffers so the rest of the world doesn't have to. Don’t you understand the sadness in my head! I can see it all crumbling around me and no one seems to give a fuck! What does not kill you makes you stronger sounds incredibly trite, but true here and elsewhere. When one ascertains that their sadness has no end, only then will the world open up wider, and any old day in October can be as glorious as someone's wedding day.
What has to happen is that Henry eventually goes into the wild, as the tale of Cain enters its ugly fruition: Modern interpretation of the Hebrew verse 12 suggests that Cain went on to live a nomadic lifestyle as well as being excluded from the family unit. He attempts near the end of the conclusion's 150 page radius, to let a higher power take over. Try not to try. But still, I hate Irene! I hate Irene! I hate Irene! I hate Irene! I hate Irene! I hate Irene! I hate Irene! he pleads on the last few pages. Henry is mere hours away from being devoured by sadness. He lets it have its way with him. He is a whore to it.
Although things can and will get worse, they can also get better.
Once the blonde learned that for her grief was precisely the same as rage, she thought that she would craze and break suddenly.
Henry picks up a copy of The Teaching of Buddha before he heads off into the abyss. In it, it reads, To believe that things created by an incalculable series of causes can last forever is a serious mistake and is called the theory of permanency; but it is just as great a mistake to believe that things completely disappear; this is called the theory of non-existence and Things do not come and do not go, neither do they appear and disappear; therefore, one does not get things or lose things. Henry is the Bodhisattva leaving his squalor to live among the poor and homeless in order to attain enlightenment. And depending on your intransigent journey into this book's broken heart of darkness, he either succeeds or fails.
Words from a deadbeat good for nothing crack addict homeless whore: Maybe what you call love is just the feeling of needing to be loved.
Additionally, the Mark of Cain is not real in any sense except for metaphor. The prostitutes and the homeless squatters and Henry are not cursed. They believe themselves cursed, and as long as you believe that, you rightfully are. And if you continue longing for what has been taken away from you, which is just the same thing as longing for pain, which it has become, it will conquer you, and the Mark of Cain may soon become the needle marks in your arm.
John, Henry's big-shot brother, is a character we don't know much about. We know he's an asshole. We know he looks down upon his brother. But is he Cain as well? We only meet him after Irene is introduced into their lives, even while Henry remembers the two of them fishing peacefully together as kids. Is irrecoverable harm irrecoverable harm? Does it not matter that Henry is Cain, that they are blood-related, but only that they are two humans that share the temptations of this vast wilderness? Aren't we all applicable to pain and suffering just by being born? Everyone may just be Cain. And even though Vollmann strategically doesn't bestow upon us what kind of emptiness Irene filled for him in the possible hundreds of pages that proceeded this book, I do know that page -542 must have been just as delirious and sad and great. -
Friend William1 recently suggested that among his gr Friends, The Royal Family is either single star’d or five star’d. And thus the book is one which does not tend toward an ambiguous reception. Which got me thinking.... let’s take a look at the Rezeptiongeschichte of TRF on gr (admitted that it will be light on the ‘geschichte’). I’m not out to get William1 on this question, just want to look at the numbers.
Disclosure. William1 and I differ somewhat regarding fiction and its evaluations. We’ve had many a respectful discussion. My best guess, given what I know of his reading preferences, that he’ll likely not be five=staring TRF. For myself, I’m a confessed Vollmanniac, perhaps the largest raging Vollmanniac on all of gr. So you’ve got my bias, prejudice, and disposition on record. On to the numbers....
TRF was published in 2001. Today, 12th of February, 2015, it has 412 ratings and 58 reviews. 89% of raters ‘liked it’, according to the gr ratings details, which translates to 89% of readers rating it three, four, or five stars. 3.85 star average rating. Four and five stars account for an even third each of all ratings, 23% three star’ing it. 7% two=star’d it and 3% of all gr reader/raters rated it one=star.
For comparison, his most popular book on gr is Europe Central (2005). EC has 1393 ratings, 187 reviews, 3.89 average star’age, 88% ‘liked it’ (ie, 3, 4, 5 star’d) with 6% 2=star and 5% one-star. In other words, statistically identical. 5243 people add’d EC to the tbr and 1609 people add’d TRF to their tbr.
TRF is Vollmann’s eleventh most popular book on gr. Of that top eleven it has the fifth lowest average star=rating ; the four with lower ratings are the other two volumes in the Love Trilogy (Butterfly Stories and Whores for Gloria) and two volumes of non-fiction (Riding Toward Everywhere and Poor People).
Perhaps someone wants to make some pie charts and bar graphs and maybe some circles and stuff. Do something with all the db data rather than simply complain about amazon’s mining.....
Of course the initial claim doesn’t pertain to all of gr, but to William1’s Friend list. I don’t have access to that specific list, but his may be close to mine (?, probably not?) -- of his 564 Friends, he and I have 48 in common. Frankly, literary judgements accepted from individuals with whom one is acquainted are much more reliable that judgements made on the basis of a thoughtless database. At any rate, this thoughtless database provides an average rating of 3.85 stars for TRF.
Here’s how my Friends circle breaks down. Of my 181 Friends, 48 have add’d it. Here’s their star’age ::
5* - 11
4* - 3
3* - none
2* - 2
1* - 1
unstared - one person (I think maybe ‘flabbergasted’ would describe his review comments)
So, on to the community reviews. I’ll attend solely to those ratings which are accompanied by at least a word or two in the review box. The star rating system is so much garbage that one can’t make any kind of intelligent surmises on anything like an individual basis, so all those unreview’d ratings we’ll simply abandon to the statistical chomping machines.
One star with review -- six (15 total). Four of them are one=liners about skimming it, hating it, whatever. One says “grade A shite” and one has a pic of Nicholas Cage. Neither of which make much of any sense. But such is the land of one=star gr reviews.
Two star with review -- seven (29 total). Only two of these have both an extended discussion of the rating (basically the readerly experience of disappointment, if I understand correctly) and Likes from the community. A third review has an extended discussion (tl;dr) but no Likes. The fact of having no Likes is not trivial. It is an indicator of participation or non- within a larger community of readers on gr.
Three star with review -- seven (95 total). These six reviews (one with more than a single paragraph) have a total of two Likes.
Four star with review -- eleven (136 total).
Five star with review -- twenty-three (137 total).
[and unstarred twice more, once with ‘Recommended’ and once with ‘Wish me luck’.]
Which I kind of think is how it ought to shake out. Most readers will read what they already know they are already predisposed to enjoy/appreciate/value/etc. Setting aside those weird comments in the one=star territory, what one finds in the two=star territory is a disappointment of expectations. Which happens. But for the most part, in this day and age, it is nearly unavoidable that one will come to be informed about and oriented toward the next book they will pick up. I think this predisposition of the average reader to read something they already know they will like accounts for one of the most common average=rating bar graph shapes -- heavy on the top, light on the bottom. But someone with more statistical skills will have to crunch through the significance of those various reappearing shapes of that bar graph.
I suspect too that it is also the case of the totality of books an individual has rated, that the majority of readers will have a preponderance of five and four star ‘reads’, or at least that’s what I would wish for them.
There are of course other motives for picking up a book and writing a review on gr. But I think the most common motive, as indicated in the numbers here in the case of TRF (according to my interpretation of them) is that one is fully expectant of enjoying that book. -
Sometimes I hate William T. Vollmann. I have been reading at least one of his books since I first picked up Europe Central last October on a chance find at my local second hand bookstore, and I now find it hard to read anyone else. I just find him and his books so very interesting, and in this world, that means more to me than any form of perfection.
The first line of this book could be read as a warning: “The blonde on the bed said: I charge the same for spectators as for participants, ‘cause that’s all it takes for them to get off.” Well, I did both throughout the reading of this book, and got charged accordingly.
But I’ve got to be honest with this one: Vollmann knocked me around a bit, and it’s going to be a while before I can fully get my head around it. I’m not even sure if I could review this book properly if I tried, as what it has to say is so immense. I put this book down three times and read other things just to try to escape it, but do you really think I could stop thinking about old Henry Tyler, Maj, Domino, and the rest of the crew that haunt the Tenderloin? Hell no. The Tenderloin? They haunt me! There were parts that I just found myself slogging through vicious, degrading, hard-to-read ugliness, but as always, Vollmann’s writing and his empathy for his characters just pulled me through time and time again. I think my heart broke about 10 times during the reading of this magnificent beast, and I constantly went back for more.
This isn't one of those books that just lingers in the back of your mind for a while afterwards, it burns itself onto your skin and into your mind. I'll remember this one until my final days, and I'm sure I'll read it many more times. It’s a beautifully told story of love, loss, and the life of those that carry the 'Mark of Cain’, those that live below the line most see as “society”. WTV gives a voice to the so-called 'dregs of society', the 'looked-down upon', and does it so well, so delicately, and with so much empathy, you’ll come out the other side a different person. At times it felt like ripping skin off bone whilst experiencing the most brilliant euphoria, with its unflinching depictions of degradation, pain, and sorrow, coupled with the dirtiest of highs. Scenes are at times hard to get through, the language depicted is coarse, but the writing is always beautiful, yet not always perfect. No book holds the rank of perfection in my eyes, but the best ones show their scars, and there are plenty of scars on show here. It could be WTV’s best, but I’ve still got quite a few to get through before I could start calling that one. I got so invested in this book and its characters that I didn’t want it to end. So much so, that I left the final 150 or so pages unread for some time, just so I knew there was more that I could turn to, more I could discover within. Leaving it and not knowing what happened burned me like the ideas and images had before it, but it was a good burning sensation you know, one that you enjoy like that paper-cut you just keep pressing against. Maybe I've become a little more like the characters in The Royal Family, or maybe I'm just more aware of that side of me and of society now. I've spent a little time in the darker corners of the world, in those places you shouldn't find yourself in, but there you are, staring down the desperation, and I've read few things that captures that grimy essence like Vollmann does here. I can't remember the last time I was dragged deep into a book like this, but I'm sure it was a very long time ago. Simply said: a beautiful masterpiece. Bravo, Mr. Vollmann. Bravo. There are few alive better than this man.
Update: November 3, 2014
Just delved back in over the last few days and re-read the last 200 pages (or so) of this magnificent beast, and yep, just as darn good as it was the first time. This will be one I'll read many more times. -
One could, on a superficial level, with a twitchy upper-lip, condescend the conventionally "unpleasant" subjects and characters of Mr. Vollmann's book. But then one would be wrong in doing so.
The book is harrowing indeed. Vollmann takes you to places where you'd never in your over-privileged life ever think of going. He shows you how acts that to you may seem hideous and just disgusting, can be (are) acts that to someone on the darker side of the world just routine things of daily life, that to someone are the only ways to feed themselves the most basic amount of food required for survival.
Vollmann's ability to empathize is just astounding. That's what stands out the most.
And he has a point, that even though the whores indulge in the lowest kinds of actions, even though they smell like fecal matter, even though they don't take baths, are careless and stupid, and just crack-hungry and selfish most of the time, and that no matter what society says about them . . . they, too, are just human.
But even with the myriad sex-scenes, the drugs, violence, the fucking, the fuck ups, the book doesn't lose its seriousness. And even with that mind-boggling empathy, Vollmann doesn't lose his moral calculus. Because Vollmann doesn't pander. He knows too much and so knows just how much to give away so that the reader doesn't eventually bask in the superficial and lose a grip on reality. He doesn't drool at his own creations. He knows what he's doing and where he's going.
The reason I'm hesitating to give it 5 stars is the book's length. I think this book could well be about 50-70 pages shorter, especially in the middle parts. But then again it's just been an hour since I've finished reading it; and I'll get a clearer opinion with time.
But overall, what a great book! -
Well mercy me, looks like I still have a taste for this kind of book after all. You might call it elevated filth, the sort of novel that encourages empathy with the folks on the margins (well, ok, it's hard to empathize with Dan Smooth, but the rest of this crew sure deserves it) and exposes the hypocrisy of decent hardworking Americans. Vollmann plays to all his strengths here: his unbelievably eloquent and experimental prose, his rich understanding of how societies and power dynamics operate, his ability to dream up the wildest story you have ever read. He also anchors it with much more well-rounded characters than usual: the motherly Queen of the Whores, the alienated Henry Tyler (and his cynical brother John), the wounded cynic Strawberry, and Beatrice, who manages to keep a little romanticism even in the worst circumstances anyone can imagine (she fascinates me; is she naïve? Is she stronger than any of the other characters? Both?) Bits of this novel will almost certainly test your limits for what's too difficult to read - I mean, there is [I]so much[/I] heroin use and [I]so much[/I] grime and, as you might imagine, [I]so much sex[/I] - and Vollmann damn near lost me with an over-long chapter about "the girl with the octopus mind." I'll also confess that, as someone who worked professionally with kids up until Black Plague 2.0 hit, I found Dan Smooth hard to take. Still, the total effect of this book is pretty shattering; the penultimate, centered on homelessness and riding the rails, is one of the best extended bits of fiction I've ever had the pleasure of reading. Buckle down, because this is one you really ought to check out.
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It’s difficult to write about this beautiful and utterly vile novel in the midst of these beautiful (because life!) and utterly vile (because of the collapse of democracy) times. It’s hard to put into words why I love novels about the spiritually sacred aspects of human degradation and suffering. I am not a Christian. And yet I yearn, as we all do to a certain extent I suppose, to understand human suffering beyond a mere physical expedient for survival, particularly how we make each other suffer needlessly in all of our bullshit political/economic/social hierarchical systems.
The theme of The Royal Family (stated at the outset) is Steadfastness—but not steadfastness in its usual Medieval Christian application to the vocation of the knight, or the monk or nun serving God, or even the saint, but rather the addict and the prostitute. Addiction, too, is a form of steadfastness—and perhaps our only refuge, these days, our only escape from all of the bullshit mentioned above—unless one is Romani and can take refuge in a culture of protest. Addiction produces, of course, surrender on the part of the addict. A surrender far more profound, in my opinion, than that phony surrender to God that’s part of the 12-step program. How can you take control of your addiction by surrendering? I don’t get it. (Then again, I’m a piss-poor addict, I suppose.) Perhaps it’s that old dichotomy between good and evil—fight evil, surrender to good. Obviously good and evil are such ad hoc terms that they’re largely meaningless—and super over-manipulated these days. So why not surrender to degradation, submission to others, to poverty, disease, abuse, and to love? Why is it nobler to smugly resist and to judge and morally enslave others than it is to open oneself to unconditional love? For a woman particularly, that’s a kind of suicide—or martyrdom if you wish. At any rate the self-sacrifice we hold most holy. In this novel the whore, and then the loving servant of the whore, are the true holy figures—although outcasts bearing the mark of Cain. They are more beautiful the more they embrace their degradation and destruction at the hands of pitiless life in a world of power relations gone mad.
Other great novels have covered this territory—the complete woks of Hubert Selby Jr., Cain's Book by Alexander Trocchi, and much of Jean Rhys’s work jump to mind. But The Royal Family is also set on my old stomping grounds, San Francisco’s Tenderloin and the desolate caves of Capp and Mission Street. It’s familiar yet takes me into the worlds of people I only glimpsed in my time in San Francisco, people a rung in the social world just below the young Punks, musicians, and artists with whom I hung out. Oh, the pure druggies—some of my peers were headed that way, but were at an earlier stage of steadfastness than these permanent residents of the dispossessed netherworld of the Canaanite—and whores and criminals (by criminals I mean the financial district suits exemplified by the aptly-named John in this novel) were all around us, but social circles prohibit a lot of mutual understanding even between people who live across the hall from one another in tenderloin tenements. (You can read my own book of SF tales, Poison and Antidote for another vision of these same streets from a younger and more artistic perspective from the decade preceding that described here.)
Besides the subject matter—which, along with the best of the works cited above, clearly blew me away with sorrow and pity—the form of this novel is another postmodern revelation. I kept thinking of it as the modern Moby Dick insomuch as it dealt with that other word for steadfastness: obsession (the protagonist’s, Henry’s, addiction to unrequited love not quenched nor even dented, it seems, when the queen answers his passion because all love is sadly transitory) and the slippage between essay/information, narrative, shifting points of view, all tied together with an only slightly intrusive authorial voice reminding us always that as real and gritty as it all seemed it’s a work of the imagination. An imagination just as likely to produce a novel this fantastic as it is to create a bank, or a sex casino as successful as the Feminine Circus. It’s up to the dreamers to reshape this crumbling bourgeois world.
My only negative thought, particularly early on in reading the novel, was “shouldn't this underworld of addicted whores be described by a woman writer?” Now, trying to understand how female U.S. voters were able to elect Orange Mussolini it occurs to me that the saddest thing in the world is to embrace the horror of power, to embrace moralism: as P. P. Pasolini says, “Moralism is the wolf that squelches the lamb.” With God on their side, they torture us with impunity and make evil appear to be good. This novel is a healthy antidote to all that bullshit. -
Utterly devastating. A phenomenal work bursting with heart and insight for the people often forgotten. A terrific ode to the profession of prostitution and the broken hearted men who frequent their lives. Detailed with an eye for the absurd, a remarkable ear for all strands of slang and speech, and a plot that thrusts forward not by any convention other than emotional logic. The character of Dan Smooth is worth the price of this book alone and the many hours you will spend reading this, wondering where it had been hiding all your life. This is why literature exists and thrives and helps people stay alive - like most great door-stopper sized novels this is a book you will certainly want to revisit. William T. Vollmann's "The Royal Family" has joined the ranks of my favourite books of all time, American or not. Incredible. A very generous book despite its length, try not falling in love with this crazed cast of characters and their uncanny world.
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Supongo que podría empezar hablando de Vollmann como de un viejo conocido, por quien se guarda una vieja admiración compartida por otros tantos lectores, y señalar sus tics habituales: el escritor de las putas, fumó crack y en los 80 visitó el Afganistán en guerra. Pero como es día par y festivo supongo que no toca plegarse ante las prédicas de los suplementos culturales. Digamos que puedo comprender la admiración que despierta este hombre, que es visto como una especie de cruce entre el escritor aventurero a lo Joseph Kessel y un Melville ansioso de parir libros gruesos y densos. Su obra tiene la virtud de abarcar como la experiencia física más visceral como recoger numerosas técnicas y referencias cultas. Posiblemente éste sea el libro que más justifique su fama: hallamos a un escritor ambicioso, que ha buceado en rincones insólitos de la sociedad para poder escribir con propiedad y detalle, sin recurrir a fórmulas y tópicos y de ello crea un basto laberinto verbal en el que confronta la abyección y la santidad y finalmente las fusiona hasta hacerlas indistinguibles. En no pocas novelas de Dostoyevski hallamos prostitutas virtuosas y de buen corazón, las de Vollman también lo son a su manera, pero también son adictas al crack, roban, traicionan y aún y así se nota la enorme simpatía que el escritor profesa por esas criaturas, las situadas en los peldaños inferiores de la sociedad. Con esta ambiciosa aventura literaria, Vollman se erige aquí como un verdadero explorador del abismo, aunque no lo hace desde la comodidad de un apartamento de la zona alta de Barcelona sino que se arremanga y baja al barro y se ensucia para tirar adelante una exploración poco común de la sociedad norteamericana, dónde conviven el emprendimiento, el consumo desmedido y una caótica vida mental derivada de una moral puritana. El cuadro, todo hay que decirlo, no es intachable. También contiene los que para mí son sus defectos: no pocos pasajes desmañados, cierto apetito por la palabrería y un afecto autocomplaciente por los surfistas de la neurastenia y los enamorizados enfermizos (en Europa Central era Shostakovich, aquí el malogrado Henry Tyler).
Simplificando hasta niveles casi groseros, se podría decir que los elementos más esenciales de la trama es la historia de Henry Tyler, un detective que recibe el encargo de buscar a la Reina de las putas y por eso se adentra en el Tenderloin de San Francisco, que era el territorio más degradado y espacio para mercadear con drogas y prostitución. Tyler se adentra en ese mundo y poco a poco queda más y más atrapado, hasta que al final forma parte de él, en parte por solidaridad y en parte porque se ha enamorado de la Reina de las putas. A su vez también está enfermizamente enamorado de su cuñada, cosa que John, su hermano abogado, sabe de forma más o menos explícita. El encargo de la búsqueda de esta reina lo realiza un empresario llamado Brady que quiere ofrecer una especie de gran casino-prostíbulo en Las Vegas y necesita de esa reina como reclamo central. Con el tiempo Brady se asocia con John porque éste es un abogado que trabaja para un importante bufete de San Francisco y hace posible toda la pirotecnia legal que da un aspecto respetable a un negocio abominable que encarna con mayor brutalidad la capitalización de la carne ajena. Ahí las prostitutas
sirven como válvula de escape para los más bajos instintos de sus clientes, aunque los clientes se acogen al absurdo subterfugio que ahí todo es virtual. Tyler ronda esas calles y poco a poco se familiariza con las prostitutas, las cuales suelen arrastrar un pasado tormentoso lleno de abusos y violencia, unas mujeres que para evadirse de la vida también suelen estar enganchadas al crack por tal de soportar a clientes que representan lo más bajo de lo más bajo. El problema viene cuando Brady no se conforme solamente con buscar a la Reina de las putas y se proponga eliminar a la competencia promocionando unas brigadas de patrulleros civiles que bajo una hipócrita campaña de purificación de la moral pública se dedica a cazar a las prostitutas.
Desde una perspectiva más alejada se podría decir que Vollmann crea una especie de anti-Biblía del mundo moderno, un libro que hace de unos pocos rincones de San Francisco una transposición del Israel bíblico. Un submundo poblado por prostitutas, chulos, criminales pero también aparecen abogados, policías, agentes de la fianza o agentes federales. Los adictos al crack conviven con los maltratadores, los explotadores con los borrachos y los pedófilos con los atracadores. De la misma forma que la Biblía hay reyes, también hay oprimidos por los colonizadores romanos y esclavos de los egipcios, aquí, traspuestos al mundo moderno, hallamos a los marginados, los vagabundos, las drogadictas y maltratadas. Todos ellos viven inmersos en su propio mundo, como si no fueran conscientes de él y Vollmann tiene la gran virtud de no juzgar a ninguno de ellos, a todos les deja expresarse de forma natural y así obtiene un espectro poliédrico que refleja idea de una sociedad formada por capas muy dispares, que él acierta a diseccionar, y dónde los poderosos pisotean a los vulnerables, explotan sus cuerpos de las formas más variadas e imponen sus leyes hasta que al final revientan sino son capaces de romper con esas dinámicas destructivas y degradantes. A pesar de todo, se intuye que este libro de Vollmann está escrito para ellos (por eso aludía a esa noción de Biblia moderna). Lo de Historias del Arcoiris e Historias del Mariposa no son más que meros ensayos antes de alzar el vuelo y alcanzar La familia real, donde sus exploración de los rincones más oscuros de la sociedad explota con toda su fuerza y dimensión: una telaraña de micro historias y subtramas orquestada con una solvencia admirable, dónde el autor puede narrar una violación, hablar de las injusticias y paradojas del sistema judicial norteamericano o idear una escena íntima entre madre e hijo con idéntica consistencia y autenticidad.
No son habituales esos escritores capaces de aunar en una misma poética las pulsiones corporales más sórdidas con la actividad intelectual más refinada, menos aún que tomen partido por los más desfavorecidos, y adecuar su escritura hasta lograr que los diálogos te hagan olvidar que hay una mano ajena confeccionando la escena. Desgraciadamente, en lo que se refiere a Henry Tyler no siempre se puede decir lo mismo. La narración muchas veces se siente tele-dirigda y su obsesión por la dichosa Irene no parece muy justificada. Sí, no es mentira que el tema principal es la obsesión y por lo tanto algo plenamente subjetivo, algo que otra subjetividad (la de quien lee) no tiene porqué compartir, pero si un escritor va a escribir un libro de 800 o 1000 páginas y ese asunto va a tomar un valor capital, creo que es tarea del escritor exponerlo de forma más convincente, ofrecer un anclaje más allá de la maquinación caprichosa e impuesta. Vollmann se esfuerza, nos muestra a una mujer tímida e introvertida, cuya fragilidad nos tiene que enamorar, y a la larga también desvela gestos torvos, poco amable, en fin, un personaje que no es de una sola pieza. Lástima que lo que pretenden pasar por gestos deliciosos y dulces no sean más que pequeñas chorraditas y que sus insistentes reapariciones harten más interesen.
En esa mujer Vollmann quiere representar una especie de transposición de Dios, una presencia que es el centro etéreo de los procesos mentales del personaje principal. Lástima que no resulte demasiado convincente. Quizá tal ambición es un poco exagerada. Tampoco Beatriz, la prostituta mixteca, goza de un relieve consistente. Se nota que Vollmann escribe un poco a tientas, sin la misma seguridad que por ejemplo la belicosa prostituta Domino, un personaje muy logrado y que ocupa una posición sumamente importante en esta colmena de personajes.
Pero si digo la verdad, estos defectos que acabo de resumir son fácilmente exculpables gracias a la exuberancia de la narración, que se sostiene a pesar de los no pocos desvíos en el avance de la narración. Lo que de verdad me ha hecho bajar de 5 a 4 estrellas ha sido que las 200 últimas páginas el ritmo está muy desinflado. Son demasiadas páginas que uno atraviesa sin aburrimiento aunque sin demasiado interés. Henry ha rechazado tanto aceptar las ventajas de su clase como compartir o aceptar sus valores y por lo tanto ese vagabundeo por los trenes de mercancía es algo plenamente consecuente, el problema es que lo que ahí se cuenta tiene un interés bastante menor y por mucho que Vollmann escriba con detalle e imparcialidad de un mundo deprimente, da la sensación que la obra se alarga un poco al tuntún.
Aparte de eso, es de aplaudir la audacia de la iniciativa de José Luis Amores, capaz de traducir con tanta destreza y editar con semejante excelencia un libro tan extraordinario, alejado de las corrientes comerciales, que ofrece una moral que deja en suspenso las expectativas del pacto social y es capaz de convencernos que si no es a través de Vollmann jamás nadie nos hubiese hablado de ese mundo tan concreto y extraño hasta lograr que nos resulte asimilable y comprensible; y que además ha sido capaz de dotarle de un sentido tan amplio y rico, llegando a crear una ética a su propia medida, refractario con los valores y las ideas dominantes, con las cuales no parece estar muy de acuerdo. Tras La Familia real jamás podremos ver el Tenderloin (o cualquier otra zona semejable) a la forma que los noticieros y programas sensacionalistas intentan representarnos. -
It has now been five days since I finished this monster of a novel, and I still find myself thinking about it on a regular basis. Scenes will creep into my head as I am showering, lying in bed, or during slow times at work - and I am almost tempted to pick it up and start right over again. By the end of the book, I really felt as if I knew the characters, as if I had been right there with them through all of their struggles, their mistakes. Some I liked, some I pitied, most I detested, but they all felt like real people. I will definitely miss this world - however sad, sick, and depraved - that Vollmann has created, though I find solace in the fact that he has quite a large bibliography to move on to.
I think The Royal Family was a good choice as my (though maybe not your) first long work from Vollmann (I had previously read only Whores For Gloria - which I enjoyed immensely - and it ended up being quite the logical next step, which was a pleasant surprise), as it shows off a lot of different styles, and it takes a lot of risks, stylistically, that really hooked me from the start. I fell in love with his descriptions, his dialogue, his tangents (an essay on bail bondsman right in the middle of the narrative? Yes, yes please), and the ways he plays with formatting. I feel lucky to have found out about Vollmann, as I hadn't expected to find anyone ever again who would rival my favorites. Oh, how wrong I was. I have found a new author to obsess over, to scour used bookstores for, and, if it should come to it, perhaps even give up a few meals in order to fill up that new shelf that he so clearly deserves.
I truly cannot wait to dive into the rest of his oeuvre. I'm sold. This man can write, and has found himself a new fan.
I wish I had more time to write something better, but others have already said everything better than I could ever hope to. I will say this: read this book, it is worth it. Yes, it is long, but not long enough. -
Deeply spiritual literature. I cannot imagine anyone journeying the entire way not emerging a more sympathetic, thoughtful, and better person.
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Centered around the Tenderloin district of San Francisco, and populated by its prostitutes, johns, addicts and wanderers – as well as the bankers, executives, and nine-to-fivers who must, on occasion, avert their eyes as they pass through – The Royal Family is a deep dive into the lives of those surviving on the fringe of society. When not overlooked entirely, those on the margins are often shown in a negative light: as either an annoying obstacle for the so-called productive population to step over, or as an an insidious disease worthy of our pure contempt. And even when those who are well-meaning attempt to construct a narrative which portrays them in a sympathetic manner, they often fail by having their subjects lack even the sheer semblance of agency. Vollmann attempts to remedy this by not just telling stories about life in extreme conditions, but by allowing the inhabitants of these foreign worlds to have a voice of their own, to tell their stories the way they ought to be told, and to tell them through the voices of characters that are deeply human – possessing an ability to be beautiful, inelegant, enchanting, revolting and captivating, and sometimes all at once. Divulged in a voice of sensual overload, Vollmann is our secret guide into this strangely spiritual world which, for too many will remain unknown, and therefore misunderstood.
On the surface of this sprawling novel is a fairly simple detective story: Private detective Henry Tyler, hired by shady businessman, Mr Brady, is inexplicably tasked with finding the Queen of Whores. But while many P.I.'s cases can be solved by the repetitive actions of good detective work – running traces, following leads, interviewing subjects, rinse and repeat – others aren't so simple. For instance, what if what we're searching for is salvation? This may require a different type of repetition: a perpetual reiteration of desperate acts. Because out of these repeated acts of desperation, there's something inside us that becomes exposed. Some intangible, raw, elemental part of our being is bared, and only in constantly exposing this vulnerable essence can we find true deliverance.
To me, this is the real soul of the novel. The notion of, what Vollmann has identified as salvation through degradation, that those among us who suffer the most may find themselves more noble or maybe even divine. We see this in the Capp Street Girls. We watch them assume a possibly cosmic purpose, with an almost Christ-like ability to take on the pain (and maybe even the sins) of their johns – and perhaps those of the entire world. We watch Tyler become the very embodiment of degradation,
This was my first experience with Vollmann. It's hard for me to put into words how I felt during the reading of this novel. While it would, in fact, be true to say that my emotional state ranged from disgusted at times, to moved nearly to tears by the sheer beauty at others, that would be too simplistic. There was something too emotionally real about this highly complex work, and to put it into such simple terms would ultimately be unfair. I will say this, though, while I might not be able to render my emotional experience with this book in a totally concrete fashion, I can say with one hundred percent certainty that I'm ready for more! -
Vollmann hace con cada oración que sean bellas todas las vidas, sobre todo aquellas arrastradas por el dolor, la pena, la adicción, el rencor y la vergüenza. Esta no es una novela fácil. A mitad del camino uno se encuentra con un "Ensayo sobre la fianza" (sí, fianzas judiciales), que requiere detenerse, reflexionar, internarse en un mundo al que uno no quisiera llegar. Pero ese el valor de Vollmann: llega con su prosa y con su experiencia a los lugares incómodos. Me quedo con la impresión de que el autor desconfía de todas las ideas y por eso necesita vivir todas las relidades sobre las cuales quiere escribir: prostitución, investigaciones privadas, negocios, leyes, itinerancia ilegal en trenes, entre muchas otras. Admiro su determinación y su honda comprensión del mundo. Como asume una forma directa de conocimiento, no desprecia la historia de ninguno de sus personajes. Escucha al pedófilo tanto como escucha al juez. Pero, si a un grupo defiende esta novela, es a los desprotegidos: a las prostitutas cuyas vidas son intercambiables, a los que sufren por amor o soledad, a los que no tienen trabajo, a los que no se adhieren a la hipocresía cotidiana.
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Just a brief note before I begin. Among my friends The Royal Family is either five stars or one star. So I take it this is not the kind of book one feels ambivalent about. Well, I loved his Europe Central and have high hopes for this one. I understand he's particularly good at writing about sex, which is very hard to do. We'll see.
Quickly fell off the go cart. Will give it another try. Enjoyed what I read but was distracted by other books. -
No es un cinco estrellas, es un 10, un 15, un 20.000 estrellas. WOW, Vollmann, WOW.
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"Tras la tristeza viene la felicidad, tras la felicidad viene la tristeza, pero cuando no se discrimina ya entre la felicidad y la tristeza, entre una buena acción y una mala acción, es posible alcanzar la libertad."
Las enseñanzas de Buda
"En la alambrada de concertina que daba a la autopista habían practicado un boquete con un cortafríos. El ferrocarril o el ayuntamiento lo habían remendado, de modo que habían cortado otro. Así era la vida." (Pág. 995)
Tratado monumental sobre la marginalidad, la exclusión social, las drogas y la prostitución, todo ello cubierto de una pátina religiosa que aumenta la épica del relato.
Henry Tyler, el cananeo, y su hermano John. Caín y Abel. La Reina de las Putas e Irene, actrices y objetos del bicéfalo amor de Henry. El resto de secundarios, larguísima lista, configuran un mosaico humano fascinante.
Destaca igualmente la carta de navegación que Vollmann elabora del San Francisco más vivo y degradado (sospecho que ya, en gran medida, desparecido o desdibujado), así como el relato de los libertarios viajes en tren de mercancías y la forma de vida aparejada a este fenómeno.
Un fascinante viaje dantesco donde el abrazo a la indignidad y la ignominia aprieta en ocasiones con fuerza asfixiante. -
As someone said this is not a happy book, I guess that can be said of most of Mr. Vollmann's books, but this book resonates with a sadness and once your down your down, though it does have it's moments of one's feeling of joy and happiness. Parts are like reading a noir novel, and other parts like a travelogue of hopping and hoboing on freight trains. Last part was a tour of the Salton Sea, Slab City and Niland area. Googled it to get a feel for the terrain, the mountains and locale and having spent time at Ft. Irwin kinda have a good idea of the heat. Glad I stuck with it and read it, well worth the time and effort.
