Whores for Gloria [Hardcover]

William T. Vollmann (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 8, 1992

From the acclaimed author of The Rainbow Stories comes this fever dream of a novel about an alcoholic Vietnam veteran, who devotes his government check and his waking hours to the search for a beautiful and majestic street whore--a woman who may or may not really exist.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This brief novel by the gifted Vollmann ( You Bright and Risen Angels ) finds Jimmy, a drifter in San Francisco's Tenderloin demimonde since his discharge from service in Vietnam in the late '60s, struggling with a feminine ideal given the name Gloria. In his mind, she assumes the identities of wife, ex-wife, virgin, whore, representing an abstracted need which Jimmy must fill. And so he vows, "Starting now and for the rest of his life he was going to work at seeing Gloria and remembering her." His main means: engaging prostitutes (including transvestites) for sex and storytelling. Based on their tales of their lives, he cerebrally romances each into a more or less palpable vision of his beloved. Jimmy's possession of Gloria is realized by Chapter 28, yet it is also strongly implied that Gloria never existed. The concluding Chapter 29 (exuberant and vivid, it contains the finest writing in the book), however, blows this hypothesis away, as it does Jimmy. So coy and nondefinitive are the work's main parameters that the heart of the matter--erotic, moral, psychological--remains beyond our grasp; akin to a piano sonata with variations, the novel raises new and different expectations not altogether fulfilled.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Jimmy, a down-and-out Vietnam vet, spends his disability checks drinking in skid row bars and paying streetwalkers to tell him their life stories. Later, alone in his hotel room, he reassigns the memories he has collected to Gloria, his imaginary girlfriend. In his 1989 collection The Rainbow Stories ( LJ 6/15/89), Vollmann himself wandered the streets of San Francisco paying prostitutes for talk. Apart from the heartbreaking frame-story of Jimmy, this new book seems to consist of outtakes from the earlier book--gritty scenes of almost surreal depravity and squalor. Unfortunately, Vollmann the urban anthropologist subverts the efforts of Vollmann the novelist. In the end, one wishes he had devoted less space to the whores and more to Jimmy and his hallucinatory quest for love. A minor work by an important author.
- Edward B. St. John, Loyola Law Sch. Lib., Los Angeles
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 138 pages
• Publisher: Pantheon; 1st edition (January 8, 1992)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0679403426
• ISBN-13: 978-0679403425
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.6 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #812,626 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

29 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Hors commerce (mais bien sur), May 1, 2006

By 

My Uncle Stu (Atlanta) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Whores for Gloria: A Novel (Contemporary American Fiction) (Paperback)

I read an interview with Mr. Vollman, I think a couple years ago, I can't quote directly but he said he thought that prostitutes were very spiritual people. They save marriages, they provide comfort to the loneliest, most desperate among us. In practically the same breath he observed that they spread disease and sometimes rob their johns.

That kind of duality is at the heart of much of Vollman's writing. On the surface, Whores for Gloria is one desperate, delusional man, so eager for even the illusion of relatedness that he attempts to recreate Gloria with bits and pieces of other prostitutes. It isn't fully clear if Gloria herself was ever real, but regardless, it is now a quest to fill that void collage style with physical samples, such as hair clippings, as well as emotional artifacts. The most poignant scene may be the protagonist hiring a prostitute, and wanting nothing more than to hear happy childhood memories. The prostitute complies as best she can but, story after story, the narratives veer into disturbing material.

The hardest thing for the human to do is to hold opposite opinions about one thing at the same time. The more intelligent and observant one is, the more painfully aware of the absurdity of this task, the more painfully aware of the mental contortions necessary to maintain the illusion of meaning. This is where the magic lies in true artistc genius, such as a Thelonius Monk solo or, in this case, Vollman's writing. I've never read anything that better communicates simultaneous beauty and ugliness. And no better forum than gutter sex, which Vollman renders both repulsive and compelling. And he doesn't do it by being overly clever. He does it through the chaos of brute honesty. Whatever compositional gymnastics go into the writing, the end product is very readable and deceptively simple.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Gritty and Compelling, October 11, 2004

By 

C. Baker "cbaker" (Washington, DC) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Whores for Gloria: A Novel (Contemporary American Fiction) (Paperback)

I've read that Vollman is the next great American novelist and you can certainly compare him to Pynchon. I wouldn't go quite so far as that, but he certainly has an evocative, if sometimes difficult to follow prose style, that one will either find very annoying or very gratifying, depending how well you get into his groove.

This novel or novella is quite good. Vollman depicts a very gritty, grimy, and sometimes gross Tenderloin district in San Francisco known for it's prostitutes, strip clubs, and other nefarious goings on. The story is about Jimmy, a low life, down and out, alcoholic who is in love with a prostitute named Gloria. The catch is Jimmy is so addled by the end of the novel we never really know whether Gloria is real or a figment of Jimmy's imagination. In some ways Gloria is an amalgamation of a number of street girls that Jimmy congregates with. Whatever the case, the story is compelling - the way watching a train wreck is compelling.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Messes with your mind, in a good way, September 29, 2005

By 

Robert P. Beveridge "xterminal" (Lakewood, OH) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Whores for Gloria (Hardcover)

William T. Vollmann, Whores for Gloria (Pantheon, 1991)

Published just as Vollmann was beginning to make a name for himself as a critical darling, Whores for Gloria propelled him into the world of underground literature with a fervor rarely seen. What separates the now-towering Vollmann from his flash-in-the-pan contemporaries is that Vollmann's shock-value work actually has some real meat to it.

Whores for Gloria is the story of Jimmy, a drunkard who lives in San Francisco's Tenderloin district and pines for Gloria. We have no idea who Gloria really is, and we often get the idea that Jimmy doesn't, either. In an effort to rebuild his memories of Gloria in his mind, Jimmy begins paying the area's hookers to tell him stories of their childhoods, which Jimmy then maps onto himself and Gloria, attempting to make her (or his vision of her) achieve flesh-and-blood status.

As the title is likely to convey, Whores for Gloria is not a suitable-for-all-audiences kind of book. However, one isn't going to get the prurient-interest-for-the-sake-of-prurient-interest writing one finds in such authors as Dennis Cooper or Matthew Stokoe; what Vollmann has penned here is a surprisingly subtle mystery novel disguised as a slice-of-life drama so embraced by the other authors mentioned above. The best comparison I can make to this book is to the better novels of Joyce Carol Oates; it seems to me that those who enjoy Oates' take on the disintegration of the psyche will also get a kick out of Vollmann. This one deserves the hype. *** ½