From Publishers Weekly
Vollmann's brief, coy and ultimately unfulfilling novel portrays a Vietnam veteran in San Francisco's Tenderloin demimonde questing for an elusive, idealized woman named Gloria. Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
Jimmy, a down-and-out Vietnam vet, spends his disability checks drinking in skid row bars and paying streetwalkers to tell him their life stories. Later, alone in his hotel room, he reassigns the memories he has collected to Gloria, his imaginary girlfriend. In his 1989 collection The Rainbow Stories ( LJ 6/15/89), Vollmann himself wandered the streets of San Francisco paying prostitutes for talk. Apart from the heartbreaking frame-story of Jimmy, this new book seems to consist of outtakes from the earlier book--gritty scenes of almost surreal depravity and squalor. Unfortunately, Vollmann the urban anthropologist subverts the efforts of Vollmann the novelist. In the end, one wishes he had devoted less space to the whores and more to Jimmy and his hallucinatory quest for love. A minor work by an important author.- Edward B. St. John, Loyola Law Sch. Lib., Los AngelesCopyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Kirkus Reviews
Returning to the inner-city losers and loners of The Rainbow Stories (1989), Vollman takes another very graphic look at the seamy side of San Francisco. In short, self-contained chapters, Vollman tells the story of Jimmy the Vietnam vet, down-and-out and surviving on his disability check in a series of flophouses. Jimmy is searching for Gloria, the whore he loves, but Gloria remains elusive--indeed, she may not exist--so Jimmy, an alcoholic and general all-around troubled soul, decides to re-create Gloria himself. Each night he goes out and finds a local whore who can give him something ``to help Gloria along with a splash of light on the ocean and everything moving and rocking and shining in the sun so God help me now because Gloria is the great sea those whore-fish swim in.'' One, Nicole, may have deliberately given Jimmy AIDS; another, Melissa, gives him her childhood memories; and Dinah, whose pimp spends her money on dope, gives him a lock of hair. As Jimmy continues his search, he meets up with old friends like Phyllis the transvestite, and Code Six, a fellow vet, while, in the Tenderloin district, girls like Candy and Peggy tell him their life stories. But Jimmy, like all losers, is doomed. Gloria, according to Code Six, materializes and ``drills'' Jimmy ``right on Turk Street. That's where he got lit up.'' The terrain's been surveyed before, and Vollman's fierce writing seems often more designed to shock than to elucidate, but poor Jimmy does have some credibility, even if it at times strained. Not for the fainthearted. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

ANNOTATION

From the acclaimed author of The Rainbow Stories comes this fever dream of a novel about an alcoholic Vietnam veteran, who devotes his government check and his waking hours to the search for a beautiful and majestic street whore--a woman who may or may not really exist.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

From the author of The Rainbow Stories, The Ice-Shirt, and Fathers and Crows comes this fever dream of a novel about an alcoholic Vietnam veteran, Jimmy, who devotes his government check and his waking hours to the search for a beautiful and majestic street whore, a woman who may or may not exist save in Jimmy's rambling dreams. Gloria's image seems distilled from memory and fantasy and the fragments of whatever Jimmy can buy from the other whores: their sex, their stories - all the unavailing dreams of love and salvation among the drinkers and addicts who haunt San Francisco's Tenderloin District.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

This brief novel by the gifted Vollmann ( You Bright and Risen Angels ) finds Jimmy, a drifter in San Francisco's Tenderloin demimonde since his discharge from service in Vietnam in the late '60s, struggling with a feminine ideal given the name Gloria. In his mind, she assumes the identities of wife, ex-wife, virgin, whore, representing an abstracted need which Jimmy must fill. And so he vows, ``Starting now and for the rest of his life he was going to work at seeing Gloria and remembering her.'' His main means: engaging prostitutes (including transvestites) for sex and storytelling. Based on their tales of their lives, he cerebrally romances each into a more or less palpable vision of his beloved. Jimmy's possession of Gloria is realized by Chapter 28, yet it is also strongly implied that Gloria never existed. The concluding Chapter 29 (exuberant and vivid, it contains the finest writing in the book), however, blows this hypothesis away, as it does Jimmy. So coy and nondefinitive are the work's main parameters that the heart of the matter--erotic, moral, psychological--remains beyond our grasp; akin to a piano sonata with variations, the novel raises new and different expectations not altogether fulfilled. (Jan.)

Library Journal