Double Agent for Cain

His nonchalance hides a compulsiveness that would be familiar to the addicts populating his work. Of the periods when his wrist troubles prevent him from working, or from even holding a book or a cup of coffee without pain, he says, “Usually I go stir-crazy and then I start working anyway, even though it hurts and it’s bad for me” — the logic of addiction, which brings us back to The Royal Family, in which, in a short foreword, he writes, “. . . let this book, like its characters, be devoted to Addiction, Addicts, Pushers, Prostitutes, and Pimps.”

The addiction of the book’s protagonist, Henry Tyler, a down-at-the-heels private detective, is surely love. He loves his brother’s wife, Irene, and when she kills herself, he enshrines his love like a relic. He falls in love again, this time with the Queen of Whores, a small, middle-aged black woman, matriarch of a clan of prostitutes, addicts and outcasts for whom her very spittle is narcotic, who are united only by their mercurial devotion to their queen, and by their common badge, the mark of Cain. This titular royal family includes the bilious prostitute Domino; a full cast of variously addicted streetwalkers; Justin, the loyal pimp; the saintly, retarded Sapphire; Dan Smooth, a goodhearted if repugnant pedophile; and, eventually, Henry himself.

But Tyler can neither let go of Irene nor surrender himself entirely to the queen. “He tries and tries, and he does end up being stripped down to something more pure and honest, but at the same time he always blows it,” Vollman says. “If Henry were just as obsessively steadfast as some of these other addicts, then maybe he could have achieved some sort of spiritual enlightenment.” He thus introduces the notion, present in nearly all of his works — in which compulsion, even when delusional, becomes an almost spiritual form of striving — “of addiction as enlightenment.” It may not matter what you do in life, Vollmann speculates, whether you’re a soldier or a whore, “maybe the most important thing is faithfulness and concentration, in which case addicts really have it.”

With typically ambiguous open-mindedness, Vollmann extends that thought into unfamiliar territory, seeing addiction as the basic force behind not just the culture of Canaanites, but the aboveground culture of consumerism. He writes of a department store: “By some cheerfully hypocritical caprice, the addictions that it sold were all legal,” and elsewhere, of Henry Tyler, inspecting flatware with Irene, “This way of living sometimes struck him as monstrously evil. And yet Domino and the crazy whore were hardly happier. It was not that he objected to people enjoying their cutlery; it was the knowingness, the connoisseurship without enjoyment, the wastefulness of it all that depressed him.” With greater depth than his other works, The Royal Family — in the spirit of the producers of baggy monsters Vollmann so admires, Melville and the Russian heavies — interfuses social critique with his religious and philosophic ponderings. He does so not only through discoursing on addiction, but on his favorite theme: prostitutes.

“Man, I love San Francisco! It’s a nice dry cool place to pick up whores.”

—13 Stories & 13 Epitaphs

Prostitutes are not just an abstract interest for Vollmann, nor a convenient source of sexily tragic stories. He loves prostitutes, adores them with an almost childish passion. Talking about them, his usually elegant vocabulary devolves into a series of gleeful, inexpressive adjectives like “wonderful” and “special.” He has spent countless hours with countless prostitutes as research for his fiction and an ongoing photography project, befriending many in the process. When he travels abroad as a journalist, the first thing he usually does, he says, is pick up a prostitute, because they always speak English and “they know more about what’s going on than anybody else.”

As the evening draws on, Vollmann suggests we get some dinner. “We’ll go over to Oak Park,” he says mischievously. “That’s where all the street prostitutes are.” Driving through the darkened streets a few minutes later, he points to a woman lingering on the sidewalk. “She’s working tonight,” he observes from the passenger seat of my rented compact. A few blocks later, not having spotted any others, he looks disappointed. But we soon pass two more women in miniskirts, huddled in the shadows. Vollmann smiles. “Good,” he says, like a kid sneaking downstairs to peek at his presents under the Christmas tree. “It always makes me feel good to see them.”

After dinner, he takes me to his favorite bar. The owner and bartender both greet him warmly, and he radiates his boyish, slightly off-center charm, a good-humored oafish vulnerability. There are no prostitutes in the bar tonight, but Vollmann doesn’t seem let down. He sips a tequila and chats with the barmaid about a regular who’s been exiled “to the big house.” On the ride home he tells me that during the holidays they put up a tree and hang it with three stockings — one for the bartender, and two for the prostitutes who are there all the time. “Isn’t that the sweetest thing?”