The Royal Family [Mass Market Paperback]

William T. Vollmann (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 1, 2001

Since the publication of his first book in 1987, William T. Vollmann has established himself as one of the most fascinating and unconventional literary figures on the scene today. Named one of the twenty best writers under forty by the New Yorker in 1999, Vollmann received the best reviews of his career for The Royal Family, a searing fictional trip through a San Francisco underworld populated by prostitutes, drug addicts, and urban spiritual seekers. Part biblical allegory and part skewed postmodern crime novel, The Royal Family is a vivid and unforgettable work of fiction by one of today's most daring writers.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

By the standards of the street, Henry Tyler is a good man, kind to hookers and the homeless, skilled at avoiding fights. He'd be the first to admit that his job as a private investigator is unsavory, and he turns away many prospective clients by suggesting that they may not want to hate their spouses any more than they already do. The love of his life, to his regret, is his brother's sweet, conventional wife, Irene. Henry's brother John, in almost black-and-white contrast, is cold and professional, all his yearnings focused on becoming full partner in his law firm. He manages to distance himself emotionally from everything but his mother and the hand-painted Italian silk ties that signify success to him. Although not overly fond of his wife, he resents Henry's longing for her, which seems to typify everything sloppy and extravagant in his brother's nature, everything that marks him as a loser.

On this classic framework William Vollmann has hung a gargantuan novel, by turns satiric, philosophical, lyrical, and baroque. It is a song of San Francisco. Rarely has a city been explored so tenderly and ruthlessly, from the mansions of Pacific Heights to the flophouses of the Tenderloin. In one of his many loving set pieces, Vollmann sends Henry Tyler through the streets surrounding Union Square, where a Peruvian quartet is playing to some weary tourist ladies.

Their lives were passing, vacations trickling through the hourglass; moment by moment this warmish blue San Francisco day was being wasted. They sat beneath lush palm-trees, and distantly a trolley-car sounded its bell as he heard the ladies talking about grilled-cheese sandwiches; then he was past them and could not hear anymore.

Tyler spots a gray-haired man digging in a garbage can. Near him, "reflected palm-tendrils swerved and curved in the windows of Macy's, and skyscrapers' terraces swelled and bowed there as if in the throes of an immense explosion. The Peruvians' music, gentle and strangely liquid, seemed the appropriate solvent for this image of dissolution."

When Irene--pregnant and neglected--kills herself, John disappears into his work while Henry, in a quest that parallels the course of his grief, devotes himself to the Queen of the Whores, a dark saint who protects the lowest of the low. It makes all the difference that our Virgil for this journey to the underworld is this good-natured and observant man, whose physical appetites never overwhelm his sympathy for the addicted and exploited. Henry remains firmly on the side of good, even when the boundaries blur before his eyes. At times, the author invites identification with his big-hearted hero, as when he veers into an agitated, first-person essay on the judicial evil of bail. Beat-flavored, with touches of Rabelais, Céline, and, oddly, T.S. Eliot, The Royal Family is Vollmann's most ambitious work to date, and a noisy, compelling world in itself. --Regina Marler --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

Ambitious in style, in range, and in sheer volume, Vollmann's massive new novel continues the controversial projects of Whores for Gloria and Butterfly Stories, in which the prolific author aims to create a detailed fictional map of a modern-day red-light district and of the people who try to live there. John Tyler is a successful San Francisco lawyer; his brother, Henry, is a dodgy private eye in love with John's Korean wife, Irene. When Irene commits suicide, the siblings' bitterness becomes apparent. A grieving Henry frequents the prostitutes of SF's notorious Tenderloin district; John edges towards marrying his mistress, Celia. A brutal businessman named Brady has hired Henry to track down the "Queen of Whores." Pedophile and police informant Dan Smooth finally leads Henry to the Queen, an African-American woman of indeterminate age and immense psychological insight. Rather than turn her over to Brady, Henry warns her about him. Gradually the Queen helps Henry shed his grief for Irene by leading him down the dark, dank staircase of sexual and social degradation. He learns about masochism, golden showers and other unusual practicesDand about love. But the Queen's command of her realm is imperiled: Brady wants to import her Tenderloin prostitutes for his Las Vegas sex emporium. Vollmann is after large-scale social chronicle; he includes characters from nearly every walk of life, and trains his attentions on processes not often seen by the faint of heart: cash flow, blood flow, phone sex, Biblical apocrypha (the Book of Nirgal) and the body odor of crackheads. But this hypperrealistic novelist also aims to present a metaphysics: the two brothers stand for two kinds of human being, the chosen and the outcast. As in all Vollmann's novels, the author's encylopedic ambition sometimes overwhelms the human scale; some supporting characters, though, do stay vivid. Vollmann avoids simply glamorizing the outcasts but remains, deep down, a Blakean romantic: prostitution is for him not only the universal indictment of the human race but also, paradoxically, the only paradise we can actually visit. 5-city author tour. (Aug.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Reading level: Ages 18 and up
  
• Mass Market Paperback: 800 pages
• Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics); First Edition edition (August 1, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 014100200X
• ISBN-13: 978-0141002002
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.5 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (21 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #460,013 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

33 of 35 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Vollmann in L.A. / This book., September 12, 2000

By 

D. Mauer (Los Angeles, CA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Royal Family (Hardcover)

My wife and I had the pleasure of seeing William Vollmann read from this book at Skylight Books in LA last week. He read the chapter about Beatrice, a Mexican woman who becomes a prostitute and whose life goes from poverty to complete despair and madness as she becomes a prostitute and addict. It is not my favorite part of the book, but it was great to see Vollmann and hear him read.

Afterwards he answered all of our questions (Next book in the 7 Dreams is done; it will be out next year and is about Pocohantas. He has finished a 4000 page (!) non-fiction book on the justification of violence. and get this - his favorite book of recent times is called A Tomb for Boris Davidovich by Danilo Kis. The book is out of print, but if you have a good used store (or just a good store) you may find it. I'm fascinated by what Vollmann thinks is really good writing: He also mentioned the Japanese writers Mishima and Kawabata, and in Eastern European authors the 20th c.

What else? I think he also said he was working on a book about the small countries of Eastern Europe in and after World War II. It was great to meet him after the questions. He was genuinely interested in what other people were reading and seemed like the kind of guy I'd love to hang out with for a while and have a few drinks in a crummy bar while arguing about good authors. His favorite books of his own are The Rifles and Butterfly Stories. The underage prostitute he rescued in Asia several years ago while writing for SPIN is married and doing fine (she is now 16 or 17?)

Royal Family; Very large book. After 350 pages I'm losing my breath and it is not yet half over. There are some very fine characters who walk very fine lines; chief among them is Dan Smooth; a pedophile who works for the feds. Yes, it is more straight forward than the Seven Dreams books or You Bright and Risen Angels. The sentences don't go on for days as much, but I don't think he has abandoned his experimentation as much as he has not found it appropriate for this one. So far, I think it a fine work about the love of loss, descents and fate, and - as usual - incredibly harsh realities ignored by most of us becuase we have the luxury of doing so. Thank you Mr Vollmann for coming out to our local book store. Thanks for continuing to write. Take care.

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Sordid, gritty depictions of "the life" in San Francisco's underworld, August 20, 2005

By 

D. Cloyce Smith (Brooklyn, NY) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Royal Family (Mass Market Paperback)

The first fifty pages of "The Royal Family" reads like the opening of a Dashiell Hammett novel (the seedy ambience of "The Glass Key" specifically comes to mind). Henry Tyler, a down-and-out private investigator, has been hired by a shadowy patron to find the "Queen," the self-appointed sovereign who oversees and protects the street prostitutes who haunt the Tenderloin's crack hotels and dark alleys. Even the last line of the first "book" (of which there are 36) has the feel of a noir thriller. Tyler attempts to pick the lock leading into the parking garage where the Queen is rumored to be hiding: "The lock opened on the fifth bounce. He stepped into the opening light."

In spite of this nifty, almost melodramatic hook, Vollmann has something else in mind instead of yet another piece of detective fiction. In addition to Hammett, influences extend to other San Francisco-area writers, first to the gritty realism of Frank Norris (as Tyler, like Vandover and McTeague before him, plunges into the underworld, taking most readers where they've never dreamed of going) and then to the desolate vitalism of John Steinbeck (when Tyler flees the Bay Area and mingles with the train-hopping hobos of the Central Valley and beyond). Along the way, the prose invites comparisons to Hubert Selby, John Rechy, and--yes--Thomas Pynchon. And I'm not even sure to which American literary tradition one might assign the book's vaguely supernatural elements.

While Vollmann has a dedicated "cult" following (and, although this is my first sampling, I'm nearly ready to add my name to the registry), there are two things that will probably keep his novels from garnering the wider audience they deserve. The first is their length--and this is especially true with "The Royal Family." Between sketches of the various destitute streetwalkers and drug-addled pretenders, he throws in just about everything: from a journalistic reflection on the mechanisms of the bail bond industry to a brutal satire on the commercial fantasias of Las Vegas. This isn't simply a novel, it's a Commitment. Still, I agree with Vollmann's decision to resist his editor's insistence to cut the book--the sections I admired or enjoyed will be different from the ones another reader will prefer. Better a smorgasbord than Lean Cuisine.

Yet the aspect of Vollmann's fiction that will probably keep him from ever getting an NEA grant is his willingness to explore and even to empathize with the most odious of characters. (And I don't mean to include in this caste the various prostitutes, since, if anything, the author--without glorifying the life--paints a sympathetic picture.) Among all the lowlifes to choose from here--and there are plenty--the creature that will give me nightmares for years to come is Dan Smooth, a pedophile who is exploited by the local authorities for his "professional" expertise yet harassed by the feds for their revulsion to his self-confessed illness. Smooth's fantasies are uncomfortably explicit, and--even as the reader is repelled by the experience--we can admire Vollmann's heroic willingness to enter such a mind and bring him, unexpurgated, to the page. But be warned: this book isn't for the weak of stomach--or the morally righteous.

What impresses me most about "The Royal Family," however, is that Vollmann maintains an enviable consistency of timbre and vigor through 800 densely typeset pages. There's rarely a dull moment, and there's hardly a misstep. I can't say I enjoyed the excursion--although filled with wit and even occasional laughs, this book is too bleak and sordid to be "enjoyed"--but I was certainly fascinated by the depictions of "the life" and dazzled by the brilliance of the prose.

12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Vollmann Returns, August 9, 2000

By 

J. Bjorne (Huntsville, AL. USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Royal Family (Hardcover)

The first thing which surprised me about this novel was that while Vollmann seems to be writing with a mixture of his straight-forward prose and more lyrical poetic imagery, this was actually a book which I could see the casual reader actually getting into. Maybe its just me, but the opening scene with Domino immediately drew me in and kept me shirking my duties at work to find out exactly what Tyler and Brady were up to. Vollmann deserves a wider audience, and despite its graphic content which may offend many, I believe this book has a chance at finding that audience.