Double Agent for Cain

Vollmann’s passion is not simply rooted in lust. He’s constructed a whole theology of whoredom: “What the prostitute offers is something very spiritual,” he says. “She offers, at the minimum, release and, surprisingly often, comfort and affection, even love.” He points to the many old men who “can’t even get it up anymore,” who pay women just for the comfort of their company. “That’s such a wonderful thing, that a prostitute can do that. She can take some of the loneliness and the pain away. And so then the next question becomes, where does that loneliness and pain go? . . . Why not suppose that a prostitute can take all this suffering upon herself and that especially when customers are mean to her and degrade her, that somehow her soldiering on through that degradation makes her a more special person. She puts up with it and maybe therefore it stops there. Maybe it disappears from the world.” He goes on, “We don’t have to think that these women want to be degraded or that being degraded is in and of itself good for them. It’s a pretty patronizing thing to think — they don’t choose it. But the fact that they can live through it and somehow rise above it makes them really, really special.”

In The Royal Family, the Queen of Whores acts as high priestess in the cult of whoredom, a Tenderloin anti-Christ ultimately betrayed by her apostles to the Pharisees of today, moralists and puritans with blood beneath their nails. To the cheers of the public, she is hunted by vigilantes sent by Brady, a shadowy entrepreneur and owner of the Feminine Circus, a Vegas casino and virtual-sex emporium that functions in the novel as a stand-in for all the shiny hypocrisy and brutality of American culture. Brady’s dirty secret is that the sex at Feminine Circus (“Illegal, immoral, unhealthy, unsafe! Don’t do it America!” barks Brady’s PR rep. “Come to Feminine Circus and indulge your fantasies in a safe, healthy and tastefulmanner”) is not virtual at all. Brady buys retarded girls, literally by the pound, and, in a sanitized environment, rents them out to dentists and senators, who, believing them virtual, unleash their most sadistic fantasies. “I’m amazed no one ever thought of it before,” a cabdriver tells Henry Tyler. “It sums up the national mood, you could almost say.”

“The prettiest thing is the darkest darkness.”

—The Rainbow Stories

It should not be surprising that Vollmann’s preoccupations have kept him outside the literary mainstream. Despite a dedicated cult following, his books still sell modestly. His reviews tend to extremes — either wildly enthusiastic and blind to his failures (for all his brilliance, his work is often messy, at times dully so) or blithely dismissive. Few deny his enormous talent as a writer, but many turn their noses up — better put, pinch them shut — at his choice of subject matter. A New York Times critic, reviewing The Royal Family, charged him with logorrhea, with pandering to hip transgressive fashions, with producing a novel that was “less a fully realized work of literature than the protracted reverie of an especially precocious adolescent.” Vollmann, for his part, is obviously more comfortable in the company of Canaanites than among the literati. Until this last year, he never had an agent, and he admits to loathing what limited experience he’s had of the New York literary world. “I’m a real loner,” he explains. “They probably don’t like me that much either. And that’s okay.”

For the most part, Vollmann shields himself from what he once called “the quick, shrill hollowness of our America.” He doesn’t read contemporary fiction, doesn’t watch television, doesn’t even drive a car. If no one buys him a plane ticket, he takes the bus. “It’s always nice for my work to travel by Greyhound and talk to people,” he says. “I mind the smell of disinfectant a little, but other than that it’s not too bad.”

If Vollmann looked perfectly at home slumped over a barstool in Oak Park, he looks almost out of place back among the comforts of domesticity. His wife, a Korean-American doctor, has returned from a day spent in the Bay Area with their daughter, who sits beside her on the TV-room couch, entranced by a cartoon about vegetables. (Asked about how his wife feels about his relations with whores, Vollmann says only that “she doesn’t care” and that she doesn’t read his books.) He hunches beside them on a chair, not even glancing at the screen, as his wife enthuses about the quality of the colors and the cleverness of the plot — an ordinary houseplant gets electrocuted and becomes a noxious “rumor weed.” She goes on to tell a story about all the chaos their little girl caused in Berkeley, running wild through a crowded supermarket.

Vollmann interrupts to say with a sly grin, gesturing to his daughter, “We’re training her to be a prostitute. We’ll turn her out as soon as she’s ready.”

The joke doesn’t even register on his wife’s face; she ignores him, and goes on with her story.

Vollmann winks his double-agent wink, and smiles broadly.