Brain Pain discussion

This discussion covers Book I – III, Chapter 1 – 82, p. 1 – 115


Tyler and Brady slither and sleuth with sane and insane whores.



This novel appears to have an unfolding plot, so to avoid spoilers, please restrict your comments to page 1 – 115.

I think it's important to have some perspective on who Vollmann is and what he believes. He has an attraction to things that are illegal, and people who are looked down on or swept under the rug. In Riding Toward Everywhere, he says "I have proudly committed every victimless crime that I can think of".

On prostitutes, in particular:

Of course they're out to get what they can, and take advantages of the johns occasionally. They rob them, they give them disease, well, that's life, that's how people are. And at the same time, they make their customers very happy, they keep marriages together, they console lonely people. I think they're very, very spiritual in what they do.

Vollmann's descriptions of prostitutes, pimps, and drug use don't come from speculation. The character of Henry Tyler is definitely modeled after his own experiences with prostitutes - especially in the way he treats them: gently, humanly; paying them for their time but rarely doing anything sexual with them.

Unfortunately, perhaps because much of his earlier work was about prostitutes, I've seen a lot of critics / reviewers who reduce Vollmann to "that guy who has sex with prostitutes and writes about them." Not untrue, but geez, take like two freakin' seconds to research the guy and see how diverse he is.

Whether or not this is relevant to The Royal Family (or any of his writing), I'm not sure, but when Vollmann was very young, his sister drowned accidentally. He was traumatized by this event, and largely blames himself for it. I've heard the (rather harsh) theory that his entire career is an attempt to punish himself. I'm still not sure how I feel about that.

Anyway: the characters in this book are very distinct; but because the chapters are so short, Vollmann manages to pack in quite a few details and events about these people. I would recommend carefully reading anything that has to do with past events in the lives of the whores. Chocolate and Domino, especially. Chapter 70 is huge for Chocolate; I think more on Domino comes later on.

Tyler certainly has a unique relationship with Irene. At the same time that Tyler idealizes Irene, Vollmann deliberately gives us reasons not to like her. Tyler somehow doesn't notice these things, or else blocks them out of his mind. Tyler focuses on her victimization: growing up in a harsh family, and having a husband and mother-in-law who are cold and callous.

It's much the same with the prostitutes. The quote I posted idealizes them, but the whores that Tyler associates with seem to cheat the johns far more often than not. This is Vollmann daring us to sympathize with these prostitutes. It's too easy to sympathize with somebody who's basically getting raped all day.

Read 1st chapter and half of chapter 2:

Language used by the narrator is interesting, often poetic. Some of the character dialogue reads like a black exploitation film, kinda like Elmore Leonard novel or Quentin Tarantino film.

Anybody know what era this novel is suppose to take place in? I'm assuming the 70s..based on the language used.

I gotta re-read the cain and abel story, that section needs a slow read, i think.

Book 1:
The book seems to be told in a flashback–with the hero (?) Tyler at the nadir of existence,at least we know that he survived but this kind of death-in-life where a person would not only happily have a drink with a fly floating in it but also indulge in impressive metaphysical musings!– Eros and Thanatos– they usually come in pair. In Mann's Magic Mountain,a character called Dr.Krokowski declared love as the root of illness. Is that what Tyler is suffering from? He does have a thing for his sis-in-law,whose image he keeps projecting on other women.
There's this telling description:
"His narrowed eyes guarded his soul by occluding and devaluing it. Tonight he was vulgarizing himself still further to play some conception of an appropriate part."– Tyler is 'playing' at how a private eye is supposed to present himself to the world & the whores too ,are at role playing.One wonders,when this Tenderloin world comes real,what will Tyler do!
There is so much anticipation & mystery created around the "Queen of whores"–"She’s full of compassion and envy. She’ll notice when you have something she doesn’t remember. ’Cause everything comes from her." The Queen "has living rotting eyes." She "is The Big Spider", "The Empress of Darkness."– we wonder what her entry will be like!

This segment is totally noirish & in a few sharp,snappy chapters,Vollmann deftly creates this world of flesh,decay, & bad smells. The crazy whore has quite a vocabulary: "patheticism"(sic),"Golden Age", "Byzantine" but her talk was mostly gibberish,well,she's crazy or is she?
So many whores keep coming & going that I was losing track! The imagery stood out for its physicality:
-shouts floated up like seagulls.
-Tyler smiled gently at the square buttocks of a van just ahead.
-Above an awning like the roof of a mouth.
-boobs bigger than the wheels of a Greyhound bus.

For a supposedly 'graphic' narrative,so far it's nowhere vulgar or titillating which is a great relief for this reader!

Book 2:
How the narrative changes gear & tone! Para after para of beautiful prose flows that I could just go on quoting! This is the Vollmann I know: sad,reflective,& devilishly persuasive–masterfully aligning the Biblical references in the service of a contemporary tale,Vollmann is playing the devil's advocate here:
"It just wasn’t Christian for Him to go on holding a grudge like that. After all, they’d only eaten one apple—they hadn’t even finished it, if you consider the core, which had borne a worm or serpent or something (and wasn’t that God’s fault, to provide them with rotten fruit?); no, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, that apple had scarcely been worth saving.(...)Remembering Eden’s swanky landmarks—the silvery river of vodka, the meadows of opium poppies springing white and orange in a nutmeg breeze, the Chinese-style zen rock garden whose sparkling pebbles were all refined crack cocaine—Adam and Eve could scarcely believe that their happy pre-Lapserian eternities had become dust. Anyhow, they weren’t damned; they were on parole.(...)But Adam and Eve’s boys, sullen, lice-infested, and pallid from too many seasons of hunting blind-fish in the familial cave, never owned that solace. Imperfection had not originated with them, nor had responsibility. They were cursed without meaning or recourse."

So Tyler identifies with the 'marked'Cain– "Mr. Henry Tyler, that newly ageing lump of flesh with the same stale problem of an irremediable spiritual impotence—nay, rottenness—of which he had not been the cause and for which there could be no solution."
He is not his brother's keeper,rather he covets his wife- the Korean sister-in-law,Irene :"for she was truly unique, not in her character but in her soul. And she was wounded; her soul cried like a wounded bird’s, and he heard the cry. John did not hear, at least not anymore. Isn’t that the natural outcome of marriage?"

Here I'm reminded of the SS officer Kurt Gerstein's track from Europe Central,who was also obsessed with his sis-in-law. I remember reading that Vollmann was the only boy amongst his siblings or I would've taken it for an autobiographical element but there were perhaps other forbidden relationships,who knows! He writes abt love with such longing,his lovers are such romantic losers that it's hard not to see them as alter-egos of the writer.
Am I being facile? No,there are similarities:
- Loves Asian woman.
-Loves Asian food.
- Loves 'wounded' woman whom he can protect.
-"all moral uncleanliness"
Ok,I'll grant,one dissimilarity: (view spoiler)[ Tyler didn't like blow jobs! (hide spoiler)]
Talk abt suggestive prose:
"Her hand was fiery with hot sweat. Her fingers were squeezing his with all their strength. He could not stop himself anymore. He brought her fingertips to his lips and begin to lick the hot, delicious sweat."

Through Tyler's brother John's life we enter the financial district- I guess that's the other plot thread of this novel. I'm curious abt the six-million-dollar Peterson case,perhaps it has some bearing on the search for the Queen in the Tenderloin area.
Tyler had provided us a perspective on John's marriage to Irene,a lover's viewpoint; & now we get the husband's–& how surprising it is! Irene is no angel! It would be interesting to get her pov as well.

James wrote: "I think it's important to have some perspective on who Vollmann is and what he believes. He has an attraction to things that are illegal, and people who are looked down on or swept under the rug. I..."

Thanks for starting the thread,James. Yes,in order to have an understanding of this material,it's important to know where Vollmann is coming from cause a lot of material is coming from his own life. I'm not far into the book & already I detected sly references to his own "gun nut" nature. I'll quote those lines some other time.

The traumatic death of his sister has shaped his attitude towards females in the sense that he wants to protect them & will take a lenient view of them but it's wrong to assume that his whole life is an attempt to punish himself. I recall reading in one of his interviews that he doesn't have a death wish vis-a-vis that incident.

Great post. Keep them coming!

Mekki wrote: "Read 1st chapter and half of chapter 2:

Language used by the narrator is interesting, often poetic. Some of the character dialogue reads like a black exploitation film, kinda like Elmore Leonard n..."

Hey Mekki,glad you are reading this with us! Yes,the opening chapters took me completely by surprise! It was like entering the world of Elmore L & Chandler– a world-weary private eye,his seedy paymaster,a world of intrigue & decay,drugs & whores– such a different world from Europe Central & Thirteen Stories and Thirteen Epitaphs that I had read earlier,that I couldn't help but marvel at Vollmann's ability to render his fictional world with such complete authenticity!
This shows his range & diversity & is a fitting reply to the carping critics who refuse to look beyond the whores.
That Cain & Abel legend is the bedrock of this book ( or so it seems to me) & not surprisingly the title for Expelled from Eden: A William T Vollmann Reader,comes from this very analogy.

Thanks! At first I was worried this might be one of Jim's solo reads. I'm glad there's other people so interested in Vollmann. :)

The book takes place in 1997, by the way.

Time frame of this book: So far,Vollmann has alluded to the time setting of this book in two places:

1) When John keeps on pestering him abt his past relationships:"Seven years ago, Tyler said. No, eight years ago. We broke up just before Christmas 1985. She, uh . . . I guess she still hates me . ."

2) while going through Chocolate's medical files,Tyler comes across this info:
DOB: 11/12/1959
AGE: 37

I'm finding it kind of amusing that Tyler has to pay for the searches he conducts on the computer- Google was created in 1996 itself,I think. But he mentions unfamiliar ( to me) search engines.

Mr.Brady turns out to be the Evil Guy! Hard to believe he's the same person we met in the opening chapter,maybe cause his "swollen, florid face" wasn't mentioned & he kept his mouth shut. So 'Feminine Circus', a "virtual reality. Electronic sex shows. Just masturbation with a few photons" – is this what the Corporation is abt or is this just the tip of the iceberg?!
That's why poor Henry is not getting any more calls from Brady, & financially,he is now in dire straits.
The search for the Queen was "Hunting up some talent for the big act." Boy,there's trouble ahead!
P.S.
I hate this man. The brutal abuse of the Queen impersonator was horrific– it shows you just how vulnerable sex workers are. I hope the real Queen gives it back to him,ten times over.

Some random stuff:

The same incident occured in Thirteen Stories..., where Vollmann described his then Chinese live-in girlfriend's car accident: I guess,details from one's life get repeated references:
"Irene had an accident with John’s car and asked Tyler to take the blame, because she was scared. It was not a bad accident, just a paint-scraper, a mirror-breaker. Tyler called John at work, told him that Irene had let him borrow the car while his was in the shop, and that he had scraped a power pole. "

If he writes stuff like this,why wouldn't the FBI come after him:

"Tyler himself would accordingly be free to relocate. His needs were low; perhaps he couldn’t live on three hundred a year, like the Unabomber, but ten grand per annum might well see him through."
( Emphasis are mine.)

Book 3:
Wisdom through books or wisdom through life? But does it really matter cause:"No matter whether you sought the world out or hid from it, something would get you."& Ken Miller gets a mention:"His friend Ken the wedding photographer used to jocularly shout at the cronies of some bridegroom: He’s been married so many times he’s got rice scars! and that was funny, but when he thought about it, it actually became not so funny because all the living had scars and then they got wounds, and more scars, and more wounds, until they died. That was a given, but didn’t anything lie beyond that? "
Tyler is grappling with moral questions:"It seemed to him that if he only found the right book to suckle from, he would be saved."

There are repeated ref.to a book store called 'City Lights' in SF & Tyler mentions books that seem to have come straight from Bill's 33 ( check out NR's Completist Club thread.)

Chapter 61 is pivotal in terms of recurring Vollmann themes: politics,poverty,inequality,rail-roads:

"Sacramento is (...) city of hellish replications of arcades, gas stations, convenience stores, city without a heart, a strangely empty place whose downtown, once sunk down to river level, has turned its nineteenth-century boardwalks and Chinese doss houses into underground passageways invaded mainly by homeless sojourners and addicts of antique bottles (Peet’s Crystal White, The Perfect Family Soap); here, if anywhere, one might think, there’d be “meaning” or “history,” but instead one finds only rat-droppings. Aboveground they don’t care. The big developers try to keep the homeless out of their vacant lots; the city bureaucrats fine the developers whenever the homeless do get in and damage the public’s chain-link fences; (...)Sacramento only became the capitol thanks to sleazy railroad politics, whose expedient calculus of charging for freight poundage times distance required that this so-called destination city be erected in the middle of nowhere, to maximize that distance. As the city grew, so would demand; so would poundage.(...) But now in the oldest grimiest honeycombs of this commercial hive I find dead hollow boxcars; I see bleached ties between rusty tracks. The dank muffled deadness inside empty boxcars swallows history’s echoes. Who cares about history anyway? This is America. Moreover, this is California.(...) dangerously obsolete, like the wide spaces between buildings and tracks in the old days. How much more so Plato and Kepler, or the near-exterminated California Indians! Everything movable, liquid, alive like long singing trains must someday become immovable like the yellow, frozen wrinkled toes in the Sacramento morgue(...)Sacramento leaves its rusty railroads, inanely captioned by those who write for themselves alone. Here’s a message on a boxcar wall: CAIN WAS HERE."

Talk abt spoilers! Bill doesn't care abt that!
"Tyler himself, who was destined, as we shall see, for spectacular railroad wanderings, remained yet ignorant of his susceptibility to trains, although afterward, when the disaster of the Queen of the Whores fastened on him, in league with certain other financial and emotional disasters, he lost the use of his car and began riding the N Judah and the J Church streetcar lines through San Francisco, becoming fascinated by the shiny, almost blue double tracks, which twisted down through hilly parks and then vanished under the ground. He never asked himself why those tracks lured him. But after a while they were wiggling through his dreams."

Death-in-life: so that secret business in LA is visiting Irene's grave. Hmmm

"He needed to know precisely this: Why was death so terrible? He could not even comprehend what he feared. Some people are afraid of nonexistence, and others of the actual process of dying. Perhaps what he most dreaded was the prospect of a marriage between life and death.(...) the realization that Irene’s death would attaint the remainder of his life. If he could somehow love, not only her, but also her putrefaction, then perhaps he’d win the victory. For now he could not. And so he squeezed the dregs of Irene from his mind, with the same degree of temporary success as if he had squeezed dry a sponge held underwater."

Mala wrote: "There are repeated ref.to a book store called 'City Lights' in SF & Tyler mentions books that seem to have come straight from Bill's 33 .."

Sidebar comment: (view spoiler)[ City Lights is a world-famous bookstore created by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. They published Ginsburg's "Howl" and have been a player in free speech movements since the 1950's

http://www.citylights.com/
(hide spoiler)]


I left a short description of my own experiences in San Francisco over in the "Questions, Resources..." thread. This book has been a kind of road trip - or maybe street trip - of my memories of S.F., since Vollmann very accurately captures the city and its people. I don't quite know what to make of the story yet, since we're only in the opening Books, but I'm much captivated by the writing. So many personal echoes...

You're lucky to have that background! I've only been to S.F. once, a few months ago, and I spent less than 48 hours there. (Inexcusable, since I've been living a day's drive away for the last 25 years!) This book is very heavy on San Francisco geography.

However, I had the impression that today's San Francisco is a little different from Vollmann's in the mid-90's. I was probably wrong. All I saw were the extremities like Land's End and the Fisherman's Wharf, and the Mission District. (We only had a day and a half, so we just went for scenery and bookstores.) This book doesn't spend much time in those places. I might've driven through the Tenderloin and the Financial District. I don't really know the city at all, sadly.

James wrote: "You're lucky to have that background! I've only been to S.F. once, a few months ago, and I spent less than 48 hours there. (Inexcusable, since I've been living a day's drive away for the last 25 ye..."

Land's End is where Brady did a number on the fake Queen.

True, city's change, but sex and drugs are eternal - only the names change...

Jim wrote: "Mala wrote: "There are repeated ref.to a book store called 'City Lights' in SF & Tyler mentions books that seem to have come straight from Bill's 33 .."

Sidebar comment: City Lights is a world-fa..."

Thanks for the background. Howl does get a shout out:""...a crowd of bus-attenders stood outside City Lights, ignoring the delicious books in the window, indifferent even to the black and white paperbacks of Howl stacked up in pyramidal altars to the 1960s)." (P.78, in ebook pagination)

Yes,it feels like a drunken road trip to me & bereft of facts,I've to count on my imagination to visualise those never-ending,inter-connected streets.
Tyler ( Vollmann) does a fair bit of driving here & I was remembering how Vollmann,in personal life,hates cars & driving!
If I ever happen to be in S.F.,I'll make it a point to buy a copy of Howl & of course lots & lots of Vollmann books from City Lights.