By the standards of the street, Henry Tyler is a good man, kind to hookers and the homeless, skilled at avoiding fights. He'd be the first to admit that his job as a private investigator is unsavory, and he turns away many prospective clients by suggesting that they may not want to hate their spouses any more than they already do. The love of his life, to his regret, is his brother's sweet, conventional wife, Irene. Henry's brother John, in almost black-and-white contrast, is cold and professional, all his yearnings focused on becoming full partner in his law firm. He manages to distance himself emotionally from everything but his mother and the hand-painted Italian silk ties that signify success to him. Although not overly fond of his wife, he resents Henry's longing for her, which seems to typify everything sloppy and extravagant in his brother's nature, everything that marks him as a loser.

On this classic framework William Vollmann has hung a gargantuan novel, by turns satiric, philosophical, lyrical, and baroque. It is a song of San Francisco. Rarely has a city been explored so tenderly and ruthlessly, from the mansions of Pacific Heights to the flophouses of the Tenderloin. In one of his many loving set pieces, Vollmann sends Henry Tyler through the streets surrounding Union Square, where a Peruvian quartet is playing to some weary tourist ladies. Their lives were passing, vacations trickling through the hourglass; moment by moment this warmish blue San Francisco day was being wasted. They sat beneath lush palm-trees, and distantly a trolley-car sounded its bell as he heard the ladies talking about grilled-cheese sandwiches; then he was past them and could not hear anymore. Tyler spots a gray-haired man digging in a garbage can. Near him, "reflected palm-tendrils swerved and curved in the windows of Macy's, and skyscrapers' terraces swelled and bowed there as if in the throes of an immense explosion. The Peruvians' music, gentle and strangely liquid, seemed the appropriate solvent for this image of dissolution."

When Irene--pregnant and neglected--kills herself, John disappears into his work while Henry, in a quest that parallels the course of his grief, devotes himself to the Queen of the Whores, a dark saint who protects the lowest of the low. It makes all the difference that our Virgil for this journey to the underworld is this good-natured and observant man, whose physical appetites never overwhelm his sympathy for the addicted and exploited. Henry remains firmly on the side of good, even when the boundaries blur before his eyes. At times, the author invites identification with his big-hearted hero, as when he veers into an agitated, first-person essay on the judicial evil of bail. Beat-flavored, with touches of Rabelais, Céline, and, oddly, T.S. Eliot, The Royal Family is Vollmann's most ambitious work to date, and a noisy, compelling world in itself. --Regina Marler


From Publishers Weekly
Ambitious in style, in range, and in sheer volume, Vollmann's massive new novel continues the controversial projects of Whores for Gloria and Butterfly Stories, in which the prolific author aims to create a detailed fictional map of a modern-day red-light district and of the people who try to live there. John Tyler is a successful San Francisco lawyer; his brother, Henry, is a dodgy private eye in love with John's Korean wife, Irene. When Irene commits suicide, the siblings' bitterness becomes apparent. A grieving Henry frequents the prostitutes of SF's notorious Tenderloin district; John edges towards marrying his mistress, Celia. A brutal businessman named Brady has hired Henry to track down the "Queen of Whores." Pedophile and police informant Dan Smooth finally leads Henry to the Queen, an African-American woman of indeterminate age and immense psychological insight. Rather than turn her over to Brady, Henry warns her about him. Gradually the Queen helps Henry shed his grief for Irene by leading him down the dark, dank staircase of sexual and social degradation. He learns about masochism, golden showers and other unusual practicesDand about love. But the Queen's command of her realm is imperiled: Brady wants to import her Tenderloin prostitutes for his Las Vegas sex emporium. Vollmann is after large-scale social chronicle; he includes characters from nearly every walk of life, and trains his attentions on processes not often seen by the faint of heart: cash flow, blood flow, phone sex, Biblical apocrypha (the Book of Nirgal) and the body odor of crackheads. But this hypperrealistic novelist also aims to present a metaphysics: the two brothers stand for two kinds of human being, the chosen and the outcast. As in all Vollmann's novels, the author's encylopedic ambition sometimes overwhelms the human scale; some supporting characters, though, do stay vivid. Vollmann avoids simply glamorizing the outcasts but remains, deep down, a Blakean romantic: prostitution is for him not only the universal indictment of the human race but also, paradoxically, the only paradise we can actually visit. 5-city author tour. (Aug.) Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From School Library Journal
Ambitious in style, in range, and in sheer volume, Vollmann's massive new novel continues the controversial projects of Whores for Gloria and Butterfly Stories, in which the prolific author aims to create a detailed fictional map of a modern-day red-light district and of the people who try to live there. John Tyler is a successful San Francisco lawyer; his brother, Henry, is a dodgy private eye in love with John's Korean wife, Irene. When Irene commits suicide, the siblings' bitterness becomes apparent. A grieving Henry frequents the prostitutes of SF's notorious Tenderloin district; John edges towards marrying his mistress, Celia. A brutal businessman named Brady has hired Henry to track down the "Queen of Whores." Pedophile and police informant Dan Smooth finally leads Henry to the Queen, an African-American woman of indeterminate age and immense psychological insight. Rather than turn her over to Brady, Henry warns her about him. Gradually the Queen helps Henry shed his grief for Irene by leading him down the dark, dank staircase of sexual and social degradation. He learns about masochism, golden showers and other unusual practicesAand about love. But the Queen's command of her realm is imperiled: Brady wants to import her Tenderloin prostitutes for his Las Vegas sex emporium. Vollmann is after large-scale social chronicle; he includes characters from nearly every walk of life, and trains his attentions on processes not often seen by the faint of heart: cash flow, blood flow, phone sex, Biblical apocrypha (the Book of Nirgal) and the body odor of crackheads. But this hypperrealistic novelist also aims to present a metaphysics: the two brothers stand for two kinds of human being, the chosen and the outcast. As in all Vollmann's novels, the author's encylopedic ambition sometimes overwhelms the human scale; some supporting characters, though, do stay vivid. Vollmann avoids simply glamorizing the outcasts but remains, deep down, a Blakean romantic: prostitution is for him not only the universal indictment of the human race but also, paradoxically, the only paradise we can actually visit. 5-city author tour. (Aug.) Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
John Tyler is a successful San Francisco attorney with a yuppie lifestyle whose brother Henry is a scruffy private investigator. John is married to a Korean woman named Irene; Henry is in love with his brother!s wife. When Irene commits suicide, Henry embarks on a mission to track down the Queen of the Prostitutes, the legendary protector of the city!s streetwalkers, while John buries himself in legal work for a glitzy Las Vegas nightclub. Very much like Vollmann!s earlier collection The Rainbow Stories (LJ 6/15/89), The Royal Family offers an obsessively detailed tour of the sex trade in San Francisco, yet the new book attempts to link the individual vignettes with a fratricidal Cain-and-Abel frame story. Like most of the author!s work, this behemoth is a genre-defying mix of neo-noir, K-Mart realism, New Age claptrap, and unabashed editorializing. The New Yorker recently named Vollmann one of the best American writers under 40. But unlike his contemporaries, Vollmann shuns postmodern irony and is really much closer in spirit to the great 19th-century muckrakers. Many readers will find this gritty book highly offensive; others will be won over by the author!s passion. Recommended for larger fiction collections.-"Edward B. St. John, Loyola Law Sch. Lib., Los Angeles Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.


The New York Times Book Review, Laura Miller
Vollmann is a writer of considerable talent, with an encyclopedic urge to document overheard conversations, bar-stool autobiographies, lumpen manifestoes and mad soliloquies, and an itch to tell the story of the world and its people in unprecedented ways.


Los Angeles Times, August 4, 2000
William T. Vollmann is a monster, a monster of talent, ambition and accomplishment.


Boston Globe, August 6, 2000
...Royal Family, Vollmann revisits the San Francisco streets and delivers his most harrowing and fully developed work of fiction yet.


From Booklist
This guy has a considerable following, and his latest on-the-edge novel--about two brothers--will certainly engage readers' interest. Brad Hooper
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FROM THE PUBLISHER

Henry Tyler is a failing private detective in San Francisco. When the love of his life, a Korean-American woman named Irene - who happens to be married to his brother John - commits suicide, he clings despairingly to her ghost. Struggling to turn grief and guilt into something precious, he employs his professional skills to track down the supernatural Queen of the Prostitutes, who first gives him a "false Irene" (in reality a heroin-poisoned whore), and then herself. While Henry lives his new life of nightmare beauty and degradation, John defends himself against Irene's memory by means of stoic blindness. John is an ambitious young contract lawyer, and one of his most lucrative projects is to draw up the paperwork for a mysterious establishment in Las Vegas called Feminine Circus, whose proprietor just happens to be hunting for the Queen.

FROM THE CRITICS

Los Angeles Times

William T. Vollmann is a monster, a monster of talent, ambition and accomplishment. With The Royal Family, he has certainly arrived.

San Francisco Chronicle

The Royal Family offers all of the maddening genius his readers have come to expect from the lunatic Vollmann.

Boston Globe

In Royal Family, Vollmann revisits the San Francisco streets and delivers his most harrowing and fully developed work of fiction yet.

San Diego Union Tribune

Vollmann has created a haunting, disturbing and magnificent novel.

New York Newsday