Rating: 
Summary: An Interesting Waste of Time
Review: I admire Vollman's ambition in this novel. He is a thinker who seems to be attempting to tie together aspects of religion (Buddhism, Christianity, and Paganism . . . ); commentary on the differences / similarities of love, lust, and addiction; Capitalism versus Marxism; racism between all colors of all people; classicism; reality and fantasy; misogyny; unions; child-love or child-molestation depending how you look at it . . . the list goes on. And this is exactly the problem with it. The connections are vague--not subtle. Fragments connected by tiny threads that fray as the book continues leave us suspended in a kind of weird sickness--ready to fall. If I were Vollman, I would have let this book sit for a while and then returned to it in an attempt to clarify and condense . . . maybe map out this Royal Family to make it worth his while and worth our while as readers. His characterizations and insight about human fraily are immaculate. I don't advise giving up on him yet. He has potential. But I don't think spending days reading this will get you anywhere but depressed and tired.
Rating: 
Summary: Queen of The Whores
Review: I met Bill Vollmann in 1990. I had read Rainbow Stories and read a few stories of his in Conjunctions. I lived in San Francisco at the time, and except for a few people and friends, nobody knew who he was. Vollmann had lived in San Francisco off and on since 1981, but I had no idea how to contact him. I found out later that he was living in New York City at this time and was writing Fathers and Crows. I asked a few papers in the Bay Area about doing an article on Vollmann. They weren't interested, because he wasn't part of the PC fads. In 1993 and 1994, I finally got to do some interviews with Vollmann and I saw him a lot during these years. Many of these magazines were apprehensive about doing anything about him, but I soon made them believers. I remember one time when I met Bill in Noe Valley. We walked down to Mission Street and all the way to the 16th Street Bart Station, talking about the hotels and the people who would later show up in The Royal Family. Today you see articles in the Bay Area newspapers and magazines much as you see articles about lesser writers such as Amy Tan and Anne Lamont, who have been over-praised and had too much attention given. I mean if some lesbian built a table, as long as it worked, as was a nice looking table, I wouldn't care who built it. The Royal Family is a novel about two brothers. Henry a detective who is looking for the Queen of the Whores. John a lawyer who is thinking about the loss of his Wife, Irene.
Rating:
Summary: Gone.
Review: I was gone from much of my life for the chunk of time that it took me to read this book. I mean, I did the normal things that I normally do -- managed to get the kids off to school and do my work and feed the family pets and all -- but Vollman's spell over me was such that wherever I went, the San Francisco prostitutes that bleed and ooze and soak their scents into these pages were with me. Spit became holy, the train track that runs by my house shook my window panes with allegory, and I planned a trip to Vegas. This is a stunning, troubling, gorgeous, grime-encrusted book. I loved every word -- and there were a bunch of them. Sometimes, I have to admit, it was too much. Sometimes, I felt to keep reading was to serve as another of Henry Tyler's enablers. But, when I finally put my own issues aside and finished the book, I knew that I'd have to come here and enter the following cliche: "This book changed my life." It really did.
Rating:
Summary: Exhausting and Exhilarating
Review: I welcome a new Vollmann book the way a 13 year old awaits a new Harry Potter novel. I finished The Royal Family last night, after taking my time over several months. For me, the highlight of the book is in the last 100 pages, the extended final act. The "Coffee Camp" sequence moves beyond the Tenderloin territory familiar to Vollmann readers since THE RAINBOW STORIES and encroaches on a realm both utterly familiar and totally new. The closest thing I can compare it to is the "wandering" portions of SUTTREE. If the rest of the novel had been this dense and addictive, I'd probably have read it in a week...but it was good to have something to savor.
Rating: 
Summary: Worthy of a thesis papers...
Review: I've just finished my 1st of reading this book, and I'm still recovering. It is a harrowing journey, but one well worth taking. It is difficult to write a concise review of such a towering work. It is worthy of being examined on many levels: Bibilical Allegory, Economic Manifesto, Psychological Case Study... whatever. It's also an immensely readable book with a fascinating plot. What I gravtitated toward in my first reading is the way the author depicts the razor-thin margin between the working class and society's outcasts: pimps, whores, pushers. The use of a private eye as a vehicle to explore the ways in which repeated contact with the swarming underworld can eventually overwhelm the observer and draw him into its oblivion is quite well done. What makes the book remarkable is the fact that the author is able to keep everything in focus and maintain the humanity of all his characters. Although it is a deeply allegorical novel of ideas, noting is left as purely "symbolic"... each element is also carefull rendered "real" as well... which may explain why he needed nearly 800 pages! To work with the book's photography references, the depth-of-field is enormous! These a just some basic thoughts. This novel will continue to occupy and trouble my mind for years to come. Henry Tyler is a caharcter who will not only become lodged in your brain, but become part of your immagination. Brilliant.
Rating:
Summary: A Task Worth Undertaking
Review: Sometimes I don't know whether to curse or praise Vollman. THE ROYAL FAMILY is a chore - and in the end - one worth accomplishing. In this novel Vollman takes us to the underworld of pimps, prostitutes, private eyes, and wealthy law firms. All the characters are losers; none of the characters are winners. Henry, the PI who falls in love with his rich brother's wife Irene - turns to the "Queen of Hookers" and her horde for comfort and family once the brother's wife offs herself and the brother disowns him. Henry, who much of the novel revolves around, is the biggest loser of all, turns to a "substitute Irene," who is a really a heroine addicted hooker. There are lots of character sketches, and a few asides, but overall interesting, as always.
Rating:
Summary: A GIANT GENIUS WRITER
Review: The best-living American writer without a doubt. Too bad the miniscule reading public in this country has no clue what a treasure he is.
Rating:
Summary: The Royal Family
Review: The Royal Family is Vollmann's sprawling, epic examination of life on the streets and the depths that it can drive people to. It could also be considered a study on addiction, drugs, death, love and family. The book looks at its subject matter with such clear, uncensored eyes that some readers will find it simply too offensive to read, this book is NOT for the faint of heart. Henry Tyler is a private eye hired to find the Queen of the Whores, an almost mythical wanderer of the streets that the more law-abiding portion of San Fransisco consider a legend, if they even know of her existence at all. Through a series of events involving a suicide and many, many trips to various prostitutes, Henry discovers the Queen and is brought into her underground world of drugs and prostitution. The 'Inner Court' of the Queen is the focus of much of the book, we see the world through the eyes of Tyler as he descends further and further into the murky depths of the black underbelly of civilised society. The characters are surprisingly sympathetic. 200 pages into the book, I was in love with all of the 'inner court' prostitutes, if only because they are shown with such an unflinching sense of humanity that it is impossible not too. Sure, these women sell their bodies for money - and, in plumbing the depths of prostitution, we understand just how much the word 'sell' is apt for what they do - but they still have their dreams and fears, hopes for the futures and regrets of the past. Many are hopeless, considering the physical gifts they have to offer as their only positive aspects, while others have wearily resigned themselves to a life they hate because it is all they know. Above them all stands the Queen, she is their protector, their nurturer, their mother. Often, the novel looks at this relationship in a religious light, the characters themselves referring to each other as being united through the 'Mark of Cain'. As events progress and Tyler falls obsessively in love with the Queen, he begins to fall further and further, eventually becoming everything his rich, successful brother John - who, interestingly, is just as unhappy with is life, although the bleak honesty with which Tyler begins to live allows him to see this, but not John - has always feared he would: homeless, diseased, poverty-stricken. I felt that the book did wallow too long in Tyler's disgrace, the last two hundred pages were somewhat of a struggle because, by that stage, I got the fact that falling into black was the only possible hope for him, but it seemed as though the author really needed to hammer this point home. This book is extremely graphic and offensive. It looks unflinchingly at an unhappy way of life, and inside these pages you will find rape, murder, torture, pedophilia, incest, etc. There are very few rays of sunshine to be found, and for me, when I read it, I often felt depressed and unbearably sad for a few hours afterwards. However, I think that that is the books greatest strength. I have never had to even consider that section of the populace before, but because the book forced me to, I was able to come to a better understanding of 'the life', to sympathise with the struggles a person in that situation must face. I am now able to look at them as people rather than whores, as experiences and lives rather than useless shreds of humanity who sell themselves for money. And that is a wonderful thing, in my opinion.
Rating:
Summary: City as Metaphor
Review: This book may well sicken and horrify you -- in fact if it doesn't you might be dangerously stoic, but the unforgivingly visceral assault of Vollmann's juicy chewy prose is inarguably a part of this graphic examination of the seedy Hobbesian underworld of drug addicts and sexual 'deviants.' As Vollmann fans know, he loves San Francisco, but this novel more than any other is his desperate howling lovesong to that city. It will help you a lot if you've been there; if you haven't, you'll have to take his word for all the streets and neighborhoods and stores and coffee shops and hotels and parking garages that his characters visit. San Francisco is a deceptively small city, with its cultures and districts piled cheek-by-jowl one atop the other like a cracked and tiled mosaic: Stand in the financial district and turn around and you're in North Beach, turn around again and you're in Chinatown, turn around again and you're in the Tenderloin. This uncomfortable yet functional forced familiarity is reflected in Vollmann's cast of characters: The ethereally tender and matronly but [drug]-addicted Queen of the [...]; slacker private-eye Henry Tyler who unceasingly hunts her along the liminal edge of poverty and despair; and his brother John Tyler, the crisp professional junior partner at a prestigious law firm in $300 neckties whose girlfriend lives in Pacific Heights, of all places. The fact that John is eternally right around the corner, both literally and figuratively, from the kind of squalor and desperation that most of us can't even imagine -- a squalor into which Henry dives deliberately seeking salvation or penance or simply death -- is the source of this novel's nightmare fascination.
Rating:
Summary: Where are the editors when you need them?
Review: Vollmann is an amazing writer with skills that place him at the forefront of contemporary letters. The Royal Family is a huge accomplishment. I read this book a year ago and am only now coming to terms with what it says and how well it works.
But beyond the courageous scope of the book, and the utter depravity of significant chunks of the content, I think Vollmann's editor was over indulgent and let the writer go on too long and too repetitively. Brevity is indeed the soul of wit but here is not the place to find it. Some of the sentences are Proustian in their complexity. Cutting would have made the work even more effective, but this seemingly did not happen.
Why only four stars? Partly the length (we have lives to lead and need time for those lives), partly some of the linguistic inconsistencies. At times Vollmann writes better than almost any living writer (and many dead ones with immense reputations). But when he falls from these stratospheric heights there is a sense of being let down, as if he just rambled out of control.
But this is an unforgettable book of immense power, telling us about places and lives we should not ignore and now, thanks to Vollmann, can never forget. I am in awe at his accomplishment.
Sadly, as other Amazon reviewers have pointed out, there is not enough space to do justice to the work in a short review.
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