Whores' sense but no whores' laughter
Mark Illis
WHORES FOR GLORIA by William T. Vollmann Picador, £4.99, pp.153 William T. Vollmann is a compulsive researcher, a man with a weakness for collecting. Some men collect train numbers or types of bird, but Vollmann has more exotic tastes; in The Ice-Shirt he gave us Norse myths, and now, in Whores For Gloria, he has produced a collection of whores' stories. This book tells us about Nicole, Melissa, Phyllis, Candy and their friends in San Francisco's aptly named Tenderloin District.
Our guide is Jimmy, an alcoholic who
moves from bar to whore and back to bar in a hopeless, but not entirely purposeless, spiral. Jimmy loves Gloria, a woman whom he may have grown up with, whom he may be married to, and who may be pregnant: fact and fantasy are deliberately blurred, so that Gloria becomes an emblem, a vision of Jimmy's ideal companion and lover. She gives shape and meaning to Jimmy's life bY being absent from it; she is his saving grace. Jimmy occasionally 'flatbacks' whores, but mostly he just talks to them. He acquires their stories in order to incorporate their experiences into the larger story of his life with Gloria. He is constructing her out of memory, fantasy and fragments of other people's lives. Towards the end, he starts constructing her out of more physical things as well, making a wig out of whores' hair. He heads steadily towards disintegra- tion.
Jimmy and Gloria, however, are not the most interesting ingredients in this book. They seem to be an excuse, and in fact the character who collects whores' stories is a, device to allow Vollmann to collect whores stories, and to develop a snapshot of life in the 1990s in the Tenderloin. The picture he produces is not a titillating one. When Jimmy meets some of the ageing, ruined, drug-addicted whores the picture Is repellent: That stinking bush of hers really resembled a black spider lurking there and clinging there, and Peggy's legs were covered with dark ovals and boils and there were scabby bumPs on them.
In spite of language like this, Vollman seems to like and respect the people he has met, and he tells their stories without try'ng to romanticise them or judge them. Life in the Tenderloin has a natural fascination, and this short book is easy to read for that reason, but its purpose is unclear. It is a healthy antidote to sugary, dishones.r fantasy like Pretty Woman, but there is nothing surprising in it. The story Is minimal, and there is no exploration of the lives that are described. The author remains distant and uninvolved, comPilIng his mostly superfluous glossary and notes, just watching.
Previous page
