Customer Reviews

The Royal Family

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

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.

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.

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.

I've just finished my 1st of reading this book, and I'm still recovering. It is a harrowing journey, but one well worth taking. It is difficult to write a concise review of such a towering work. It is worthy of being examined on many levels: Bibilical Allegory, Economic Manifesto, Psychological Case Study... whatever. It's also an immensely readable book with a fascinating plot. What I gravtitated toward in my first reading is the way the author depicts the razor-thin margin between the working class and society's outcasts: pimps, whores, pushers. The use of a private eye as a vehicle to explore the ways in which repeated contact with the swarming underworld can eventually overwhelm the observer and draw him into its oblivion is quite well done. What makes the book remarkable is the fact that the author is able to keep everything in focus and maintain the humanity of all his characters. Although it is a deeply allegorical novel of ideas, noting is left as purely "symbolic"... each element is also carefull rendered "real" as well... which may explain why he needed nearly 800 pages! To work with the book's photography references, the depth-of-field is enormous!

These a just some basic thoughts. This novel will continue to occupy and trouble my mind for years to come. Henry Tyler is a caharcter who will not only become lodged in your brain, but become part of your immagination. Brilliant.

The Royal Family is Vollmann's sprawling, epic examination of life on the streets and the depths that it can drive people to. It could also be considered a study on addiction, drugs, death, love and family. The book looks at its subject matter with such clear, uncensored eyes that some readers will find it simply too offensive to read, this book is NOT for the faint of heart.

Henry Tyler is a private eye hired to find the Queen of the Whores, an almost mythical wanderer of the streets that the more law-abiding portion of San Fransisco consider a legend, if they even know of her existence at all. Through a series of events involving a suicide and many, many trips to various prostitutes, Henry discovers the Queen and is brought into her underground world of drugs and prostitution. The 'Inner Court' of the Queen is the focus of much of the book, we see the world through the eyes of Tyler as he descends further and further into the murky depths of the black underbelly of civilised society.

The characters are surprisingly sympathetic. 200 pages into the book, I was in love with all of the 'inner court' prostitutes, if only because they are shown with such an unflinching sense of humanity that it is impossible not too. Sure, these women sell their bodies for money - and, in plumbing the depths of prostitution, we understand just how much the word 'sell' is apt for what they do - but they still have their dreams and fears, hopes for the futures and regrets of the past. Many are hopeless, considering the physical gifts they have to offer as their only positive aspects, while others have wearily resigned themselves to a life they hate because it is all they know. Above them all stands the Queen, she is their protector, their nurturer, their mother. Often, the novel looks at this relationship in a religious light, the characters themselves referring to each other as being united through the 'Mark of Cain'.

As events progress and Tyler falls obsessively in love with the Queen, he begins to fall further and further, eventually becoming everything his rich, successful brother John - who, interestingly, is just as unhappy with is life, although the bleak honesty with which Tyler begins to live allows him to see this, but not John - has always feared he would: homeless, diseased, poverty-stricken. I felt that the book did wallow too long in Tyler's disgrace, the last two hundred pages were somewhat of a struggle because, by that stage, I got the fact that falling into black was the only possible hope for him, but it seemed as though the author really needed to hammer this point home.

This book is extremely graphic and offensive. It looks unflinchingly at an unhappy way of life, and inside these pages you will find rape, murder, torture, pedophilia, incest, etc. There are very few rays of sunshine to be found, and for me, when I read it, I often felt depressed and unbearably sad for a few hours afterwards. However, I think that that is the books greatest strength. I have never had to even consider that section of the populace before, but because the book forced me to, I was able to come to a better understanding of 'the life', to sympathise with the struggles a person in that situation must face. I am now able to look at them as people rather than whores, as experiences and lives rather than useless shreds of humanity who sell themselves for money. And that is a wonderful thing, in my opinion.

This book may well sicken and horrify you -- in fact if it doesn't you might be dangerously stoic, but the unforgivingly visceral assault of Vollmann's juicy chewy prose is inarguably a part of this graphic examination of the seedy Hobbesian underworld of drug addicts and sexual 'deviants.' As Vollmann fans know, he loves San Francisco, but this novel more than any other is his desperate howling lovesong to that city. It will help you a lot if you've been there; if you haven't, you'll have to take his word for all the streets and neighborhoods and stores and coffee shops and hotels and parking garages that his characters visit. San Francisco is a deceptively small city, with its cultures and districts piled cheek-by-jowl one atop the other like a cracked and tiled mosaic: Stand in the financial district and turn around and you're in North Beach, turn around again and you're in Chinatown, turn around again and you're in the Tenderloin. This uncomfortable yet functional forced familiarity is reflected in Vollmann's cast of characters: The ethereally tender and matronly but [drug]-addicted Queen of the [...]; slacker private-eye Henry Tyler who unceasingly hunts her along the liminal edge of poverty and despair; and his brother John Tyler, the crisp professional junior partner at a prestigious law firm in $300 neckties whose girlfriend lives in Pacific Heights, of all places. The fact that John is eternally right around the corner, both literally and figuratively, from the kind of squalor and desperation that most of us can't even imagine -- a squalor into which Henry dives deliberately seeking salvation or penance or simply death -- is the source of this novel's nightmare fascination.

Vollmann is an amazing writer with skills that place him at the forefront of contemporary letters. The Royal Family is a huge accomplishment. I read this book a year ago and am only now coming to terms with what it says and how well it works.
But beyond the courageous scope of the book, and the utter depravity of significant chunks of the content, I think Vollmann's editor was over indulgent and let the writer go on too long and too repetitively. Brevity is indeed the soul of wit but here is not the place to find it. Some of the sentences are Proustian in their complexity. Cutting would have made the work even more effective, but this seemingly did not happen.
Why only four stars? Partly the length (we have lives to lead and need time for those lives), partly some of the linguistic inconsistencies. At times Vollmann writes better than almost any living writer (and many dead ones with immense reputations). But when he falls from these stratospheric heights there is a sense of being let down, as if he just rambled out of control.
But this is an unforgettable book of immense power, telling us about places and lives we should not ignore and now, thanks to Vollmann, can never forget. I am in awe at his accomplishment.
Sadly, as other Amazon reviewers have pointed out, there is not enough space to do justice to the work in a short review.

Where to begin with this post-modern bible of Canaan? What a beautifully ugly opera of San Francisco's Tenderloin; paean to society's wretched refuse! Yet another majestic, narcissisticly groveling novel is unleashed upon decent society by William Vollmann - this particular volume reveling in its own destitute spirit. With lines like, "A piece of my soul I'll sell you, by all means; like other prostitutes I've been amputating meaty hunks of myself for all comers ever since the Vice Squad shut Eden down" (754) how can you go wrong? Come follow Henry Tyler as he runs from Jesus . . . and "Brady's Boys", the vigilante do-gooder thugs using his name in vane.

Loaded boxcars of similes and metaphors that only Vollmann - under the influence of the Comte de Lautreamont - could concoct (neon signs shine like "stars", books open their "thighs", "octopus minded" wives grapple husbands, "I Ching ideograms" can be deciphered in the grating of Chinatown windows . . . ) specter through the shadowy night-scapes of the Royal Family; meanwhile, readers crouching like bats in hidden tree-perches of library-ensconced safety are vicariously aroused by the lightening-charged atmosphere of danger where magnificent train-wrecks of love and hate lurk behind each new chapter heading. Yes, turn the page!

Admittedly long and occasionally tedious in its relentlessness, as are most of Vollmann's epic novels, at times I wondered how & why I kept reading despite the total sensory assault of being barraged by broken sentences tracing the stumblings of broken people whose addictions and predilections for hate and filth are dumped on the reader's mushroom head page after page afer page as though . . . I was one of them! Was it literary S&M from which I could not extract myself? Had I turned into a mushroom; a writhing (book) worm perhaps?

Reading a book is certainly no substitute for actually observing and experiencing people, places or events yourself (which Vollmann obviously has) but The Royal Family is indeed magical in bridging this chasm. It precipitated several coffee-induced bouts of paranoid page turning through ungodly hours of the night, chased by first-thing in the morning fixes of mercifully short chapters strung out on the page like lines of coke; the come-down temporarily stayed by random, unconscious paragraph glances until . . . yet another craving strikes! The sun descends, and you somehow find yourself on a bar-stool next to Vollmann tossing down a couple-few drinks, and you converse with your new-found "family".

What more can I say? Any book that does this to you - makes an event out of reading, consuming chunks of your life, twisting the world around you into strange, impending car-crash scenes you never noticed before but cannot now look away - must be locked up and secreted away at once!

No, I can't really advise reading about whores, pedophiles, pimps, crack-addicts, the homeless, jobless, and other pathetic losers groveling in their own degradation, gloating under the mark of Cain, and spying from dark alleys for the black virgin, the mystical, mother and Queen of them all - last seen on the streets of San Francisco - because that would be proselytizing, and Bill wouldn't appreciate that. Since I'm not sure if it was more pleasure or pain I felt while plodding through this lotus-topped muck I'll only say that you'll need to condescend to these poisoned pages on your own in order to discover how you feel about it yourself; otherwise my encouragement would be disingenuous. The unearthed Gnostic scriptures, like The Royal Family, are filled with discarded, unacceptable luminescence like a lantern in the darkness, which had to be hidden away in Egyptian caves so that the fearful fathers of "God's official word" could control His word. The royal family runs from these vigs (vigilantes) and their Israelite hoards of righteousness that swoop upon the infidels and Canaanites to cleanse, purify, and repackage their sad sexuality for the "Feminine Circus" in where-else . . . but Vegas baby!

Henry Tyler, private detective and obsessed lover of his brother's wife seeks his Gnostic Queen, submitting to the evil forces of harsh prostitutes like Domino and Chocolate and Strawberry. We follow him from one familiar landmark to another, as we take Vollmann's self-guided tour of San Francisco as it stood in 1997 (his asides on "Bail Bonds" and "Geary Street", as well as now outdated descriptions of Union Square, are just a few gemstones embedded in the pavement we walk upon). To judge Tyler or Vollmann and this book as sordid and disgusting would be a mistake, but no different from the mistake those early church fathers made at the Niocene Council when outlawing certain "heresies". Do you, I wonder, have the gumption to discover Love amidst all this Sin? It will take a certain amount of self-effacement to purify your heart, to sharpen your vision so as to navigate the thick fogs of San Francisco.

After escaping the city and hoboing cross-country, riding the rods and rails from the Salton Sea to Seattle, Sacramento to Miami, what's left of Henry Tyler tirelessly continues his endless quest for the "Queen". He knows that he's afraid of Jesus. He seeks love, but because he "loves without doctrine" he wonders whether Jesus can do the same? The real question is: Can those who proclaim Jesus as their own do the same? At this point in the novel, some 754 pages (and several months in my case) you too will stink like Henry (that is, if you've had the gall and fortitude to get this far). How you come away from this "sordid niche" - survivor or victim - may not be up to you at all; no, it will be up to your QUEEN, in whose crown "The Royal Family" ever-glisten like refracting daggers of spirit-penetrating light. On your knees, open your mouth for your sacramental dose! Submit and worship at her beloved Tenderloin altar, the "Wonderbar".

Wow, what a tome. I mean, it's impressive. Nearly 800 pages. But I found myself having to push to get through it, and by 300-400 pages, I was waiting for the book to develop somewhere. Instead, Henry Tyler kept plunging deeper and deeper into debasement. Maybe that was the point, but was it really necessary to punish the reader along with the character? Mr. Vollman, will you please listen to your editor next time?

I wanted to really like the book, and I have to give Mr. Vollman credit for his vivid, sometimes horrible descriptions of people and events - not to mention his erudition and the extensive control of language he brings to the table - but in the end, I found myself expecting more from the book. I hope he does write that book about the hobo village one discovers at the end, but I hope Mr. Vollman has the sense to make his next book just a little more manageable.

Look, in the end, if you have a few weeks at your disposal and want to read a book that is well written, focuses on topics that most of us would rather ignore, and shows us the beauty inside every failure (and the revolting ugliness of success), then do go read this book. And when your'e done, you'll feel like you've accomplished something...

Even as an avid reader, I was a little intimidated by the sheer heft of this book, but I found myself devouring it as fast as I would a 150-page novella! The writing was so beautiful, simultaneously poetic and gritty, and the worlds Vollmann paints for us - surreal underground landscapes of hookers, hobos and criminals - are at turns realistically rendered and hallucinatory. Despite its length, this is one I can see myself reading over and over.