The Royal Family is Long (RV#1)

In case anyone is keeping track, this is post #1 in the Reading Vollmann project, which is being tracked by Ed here.

The first Vollmann I'm reading for this (in fact the first Vollmann I've read) is The Royal Family, a 780-page behemoth published in 2001. It explores the world of a bunch of San Francisco whores and a private detective named Tyler who befriends their Queen.

Vollmann is an author who is famous for writing a lot. He's the author of the 3,500+-page Rising Up and Rising Down, and he's written several books that are in excess of 600 pages, in addition to several shorter books. Not only that, but he's done all this in a little less than 20 years.

That's productivity.

So when you read Vollmann you can't help but ask: Does he really need to write that much? Does he perhaps have a tendency to write too much? Is it necessary that so many of his books are outright bricks?

It's a fair question, and it's one I've asked myself more than once while reading The Royal Family. In TRF's favor, I will say that it is not a plotless book, or even a book with a slow plot. The truth is that TRF is pretty plotty, even suspenseful at some points. So far (I'm roughly at page 550), Vollmann has done a good job of keeping things more or less on track.

In TRF we've got three main narrative questions that we want answered. #1 is Will Tyler ever get over the death of his sister-in-law (who dies within the book's first 100 pages). #2 is Did Tyler and his sister-in-law ever have an affair behind Tyler's brother's back, or did they resist the urge to consummate their love? #3 is What will happen after the Queen's downfall (heavily prophesized and foreshadowed since the first 100 pages)?

So Vollmann sets up these questions early on and makes it so you want an answer. He also keeps feeding you little bits of the answer to these questions throughout the book, so that you don't ever lose sight of them or feel as though they are unimportant or abandoned. That goes a long way toward allievating any problems induced by Vollmann's rather prodigious prose.

But does it go far enough? I think my main issue with the size of Vollmann's novel is that often it feels like we are seeing the same scene over and over again. I can't tell you how many times a belligerant whore has demanded a shot of rum. I've lost count of how many times The Tall Man (a pimpish character and the only male in the Queen's entourage (other than Tyler)) has pimpslapped a prostitute. There's been lots and lots of witty banter between whores and johns, heaps and heaps of exploration into the minds of Vollmann's whores (and not just lots of forays, but the forays go on at considerable length--sometimes it seems as though Vollmann is incapable of exploring a thought in less than 200 words).

The issue, then, is that we are given so much information regarding the whores' world. Now, I think Vollmann has done this on purpose. There is a strong New Journalistic current to this book (it even includes a 20-page essay on bail) and I think part of why he is going over the same territory so much is because he thinks that we will only understand what these whores' world is like if he repeats the descriptions so many times that we become bored with it.

After all, the whores themselves are terribly bored of their world. Whoring is nothing more than a job for them. It's a daily grind (no pun intended) like any other--turn a trick, get some dope to stave off withdrawal, recoup in your trashy warehouse, repeat.

The first time we read Vollmann's description of a whore whoring it's pretty off-putting. "Hey this is disgusting! How degrading!" we say. The second time a little less so. By the time we're knee-deep in The Royal Family, whoring has become just a little dull. And I think that's Vollmann's point; that we learn what it feels like to find whoring so banal and tiresome that we're just like "enough already." It's at that point that we really understand, really feel, something of these whores' mindstate. It's something that can't be explained, something that has to be experienced.

So is Vollmann's attempt to make us understand his whores' lives in conflict with his responsibility to keep his book engaging? I don't think so. In my reading, TRF is a little long-winded, but I don't feel that it suffers unduly from Vollmann's volume. I think Vollmann approaches the line, but he does not cross it.

Comments

[derikb]

I much like that idea of repetition in writing creating a kind of familiarity with something that is otherwise unfamiliar. In its way it is like the opposite of the Russian Formalist notion of literature as defamiliarizing the world (rather the everyday). By your accounts, Vollman is familiarizing the non-everyday (at least for the majority).

[Y.S.]

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