Author William Vollman Shares Vision

William Vollmann gave me a bullet. It was hand-made, with a black pattern etched beautifully on it through some kind of oxidation process. That he'd have spare ammunition lying about didn't surprise me, but that he'd give a sweet little present to a visiting reporter did. One expects Vollmann, swashbuckling whoredog, war correspondent, quixotic freedom fighter, gun aficionado and fiction prodigy, to be gruff and imperious. After all, this is the man who, at 22, journeyed to Afghanistan in an attempt to join the fight against the Soviet occupation, who trekked into the Burmese jungle to meet one of the world's largest heroin producers and who, on a magazine assignment, kidnapped a child prostitute from Thailand and enrolled her in boarding school. His novels and short stories tend to dwell unflinchingly on the subterranean -- he writes of whores, skinheads, junkies, terrorists, fetishists. Especially whores.

Yet in person, the man who makes Hunter S. Thompson look like Adam Gopnick comes off, at first, like any other suburban dad. Now 40, he lives with his wife, a radiation oncologist, in a big brick house light-filled house in Sacramento with hardwood floors covered in Middle Eastern carpets. Framed dust jackets from his dozen or so books line one wall, and there's a small jungle gym in the backyard for his young daughter. Bearded and dressed in a faded jeans, a milk chocolate brown shirt and white sneakers, he's welcoming and genial. Out of all the many writers I've interviewed, he's probably the only one who, after giving long, considered answers, looks at me and asks "what do you think?"

None of this is to say that Vollmann's settled into middle-class complacency. He continues to report from the most brutal corners of the world, and his obsession with what the culture calls sin hasn't diminished at all. While he's also working on a series of books about the European conquest of the Americas and has recently finished a 4000 page manuscript about the ethics and justifications of violence, his art still gets much of its ballast from the intersection of sex and commerce. In his paintings -- he's an enormously talented visual artist -- lurid, hungry images of working girls recur incessantly. He has stacks of gorgeously done platinum printed photographs of the weathered women who work in Sacramento's Oak Park. He also makes block-printed, elaborately designed art books in editions of ten or twenty. One of them, a faux-children's story called "Convict Bird" has a steel, padlocked cover that needs to be opened with a key. Dedicated to Veronica Compton #276077, it begins, "Because so many children go about their play in ignorance of the true nature of the world, I have designed this little book for them, in sincere hopes that it will remedy this deficiency." An attached bookmark is made of a lock of black whore's hair affixed to a chain.

Finally, there's his new novel, a searing epic of almost 800 pages called The Royal Family. It's the kind of book that leaves reviewers grasping for adjectives, since words like stunning have been bled dry from overuse. The Royal Family follows down and out San Francisco private eye Henry Tyler on his search for the queen of the prostitutes, a search driven, in part, by his anguish following the suicide of his sister in law, who he was in love with. Fevered, obscene and surreal, The Royal Family envelops you, sucking you into its strange moral universe. Party, it's the tale of a failed utopia, as the whores briefly find succor in solidarity with their queen. But its also a parable about consumption -- through John, Tyler's arrogant yuppie brother, Vollmann connects the voracious appetites of the underworld and those of the boardroom. The book resonates with questions about whether one loves people or what they symbolize. Most of all, its an engrossing story with a profundity that slyly creeps up on you while you're being blithely entertained.