VOLLMANN, William T. The Royal Family.

(New York, NY): Viking, 2000. First edition. Hardcover. 24.3 by 17.6cm. 780 pages. Vollmann’s sprawling and hallucinatory novel of San Francisco’s Tenderloin follows Henry Tyler, a failing private detective haunted by the suicide of Irene, the wife of his brother John. In an attempt to transform his grief into something tangible, Henry sets out in search of the legendary “Queen of the Prostitutes,” a mysterious figure said to preside over the city’s nocturnal underworld. His investigation draws him into a shifting world of prostitutes, addicts, hustlers, drunks and other inhabitants of the city’s margins, while his brother pursues an altogether different course through the respectable world of contract law and corporate ambition. Part detective story, part urban underworld chronicle and part darkly distorted allegory, The Royal Family juxtaposes the dispossessed with the anxious middle class, exploring desire, grief, possession and the uneasy boundaries between love and exploitation. The novel is the concluding volume of Vollmann’s loosely connected “Prostitution Trilogy,” following Whores for Gloria and The Butterfly Stories. A substantial and ambitious novel from one of the most unconventional American writers of his generation, notable for its sustained evocation of San Francisco’s Tenderloin and its polyphonic portrait of lives lived on the margins of the city. A very good copy in the original dust jacket.