Review
"Whores for Gloria" by
William Vollman
Note: a version of this
book review appeared in the Los Angeles Times Book Review.
The immediate
temptation is to categorize this powerful novel as the
latest entry in the growing school of literary cruelty
that includes Brett Easton Ellis's American Psycho, Dennis
Cooper's Frisk, and Paul Russell's Boys of Life. It abounds
with scenes of assault and violent sexuality. But Vollmann's
novel quickly separates from the cool, fascinated voyeuristic
slumming of those other writers because of its compassion
for the denizens of the hell he explores, the world of
whores, pimps, derelicts in San Francisco's tenderloin
district.
Whether
or not he inhabited that world, Vollmann writes with authority,
in a tone that is just right to convey a world in which
violence, pain, outrage are commonplace:
"At
the corner of Turk and Jones the pushers were pushing
and Jimmy went and leaned up against a building with them
and watched the whores go by and a pusher said you want
a bag? and Jimmy said no thanks ... and another pusher
came up to him and said what you doin' here and Jimmy
said what's happening pal and the pusher said coldly pal's
not my name and Jimmy said well I'm Jimmy pleased to meet
you Charlie and he stretched out his hand ... and the
pusher took a quart of beer out of a paper sack and smashed
it down on the sidewalk so that it exploded and sprayed
beer and broken glass all over the sidewalk...."
[115]
This
intimate knowledgeability of the world he describes allows
Vollmann a moving empathy: "An old woman stood on
the sidewalk staring at him.... In a moment she would
start screaming.... Clark? she said very weakly.... You
came back? Jimmy understood. His arm was around her.--Yeah,
it's me, he said.... And you're looking good and looking
happy...." [117] He grants lost souls their dignity:
"Jimmy believed that whores were like other actresses
and deserved to have the glamor of their stage names respected."
[83]
Indeed,
the novel might be described as a love story set in a
hell. A Don Quixote in the Tenderloin, Jimmy journeys
through the squalor of his territory in search of his
own Dulcinea, a prostitute named Gloria: "... doing
what I am about to do I do for Gloria out of love for
Gloria out of belief in Gloria ... as she wanted to be
for all these lonely men whose greed of lust was nothing
but an aching prayer for beauty...." [42, 101]
Whether
or not she has ever existed--and Vollmann sustains this
element of suspense--Jimmy is trying to re-create her
out of the tattered memories of street prostitutes--black,
white, "real" or "transformers." He
pays for pieces of their clothing, a hank of hair--and
for their sad memories, which he then purifies into the
memories of a younger Gloria, locating her within his
own youthful memories: "... sugar cookies glittered
like stars and Gloria got a chocolate eclair and when
she was done Jimmy kissed the frosting off her lips."
[91]
Seemingly
a series of loosely connected vignettes--and for all its
disregard of conventional punctuation--Vollmann's is an
expertly constructed novel. The book opens from the point
of view of a female cop and her male partner scouring
the streets for arrests, focusing on a man speaking into
a telephone to someone named Gloria, while "old people
hobbled home to their hotels to double-lock their half-rotten
doors ... and the whores came out and sat on the hoods
of old station wagons." [2] The reader enters as
an outsider, and then Vollmann quickly pulls him into
the point of view of Jimmy, the man on the telephone,
and into the violent events of his story.
Vollmann
startles with his use of lyricism to heighten by contrast
the terror of an experience: When one of the whores realizes
she is in the car of a serial killer, she recognizes the
site of his atrocities: "the poppies and the buttercups
and snapdragons sparkled like night-cities in the hills
above the freeway.... and the trunks of eucalyptus trees
shimmered like skeletons ... and the man stared at her
with inhuman eyes ... and tail-lights of the cars ahead
of her were shining very red and bright like her screams...."
[60]
Images
of war, references to the Holocaust, to Vietnam, the slaughter
of children elevate Vollmann's territory into metaphor:
"... the world seemed filled with sickness like liquid,
churning him around in its acid waves, stinking in his
nose and mouth, and he had to lie down on the sidewalk
to stop it...." [120]
This
is a haunting, oddly beautiful novel.

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