With his first three works of fiction-the novels
You Bright and Risen Angels and
The Ice-Shirt and the collection
The Rainbow Stories-William T. Vollmann announced himself as a writer of rare and ferocious talent
with critics comparing him to William Burroughs
Thomas Pynchon
and T.C. Boyle.
His new novel is the story of Jimmy
who has been deserted by his lover
a prostitute by the name of Gloria. In the despair of his loneliness
and his drunken grief
he reassembles Gloria's presence out of whatever he can buy from the hookers on the street-the fragments of their lives and dreams
and locks of hair they are willing to share for a price. In his search for these snatches of intimacy he meets the hustlers
drunks
and prostitutes of San Francisco's Tenderloin district: Candy
who beats her customers when they ask for it but refuses to let them call her a bitch; Snake
who pimps his wife; Nicole
whose job it is to give men AIDS; Jack
who shoots his woman's earnings into his arm but still likes Chopin even though he doesn't have a record player; and Gloria
who may or may not be a figment of Jimmy's imagination.
Vollmann writes with explosive power of the inner city
unflinching in the way he confronts the solitude of the homeless and unloved
the insulted and the injured of skid-row America. His exhilarating
high-voltage style and lyric language touch the heart and retrieve a jubilant integrity from the harsh struggles of his characters. Here is a world of harrowing truth
beautifully expressed by a writer of prodigious gifts.
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