Some thoughts:
1. This is the quickest read WTV has out there (I read it in a few hours), but it is NOT the place to start for newcomers to his work, in my opinion. I think I appreciate it more two reasons: (1) I know the story behind the book; and (2) I am situating it within his whole repertoire and not on its own.
2. It blows my mind that this is the same guy who gave us Fathers and Crows, You Bright and Risen Angels, The Ice-Shirt, Poor People, and Carbon Ideologies (among many others, of course). What can't this guy do?!
3. This one is gritty, grimy, raw--basically I wanted to wash my hands and shower constantly (and not just because of the current COVID-19 pandemic).
4. Beautiful, sprawling sentences bordering on a sort of oxymoronic Baroque minimalism bring a maximalist aesthetic to the hard-boiled mystery form.
5. The simple plot of a poor young man, Jimmy, obsessed with and trying to find a prostitute, Gloria, is the perfect catalyst for the real story behind the book: WTV and photographer friend Ken Miller spent much, much time in the Tenderloin of SF paying prostitutes to tell them stories. As the opening of the book tells us, the stories the ladies tell are all real.
6. WTV's dark humor and sardonic wit are on display here. ( )

"For we all must build our worlds around us, bravely or dreamily, as long as we can we shelter ourselves from the rain, walling ourselves in gorgeously." (53)

The true cleverness and weight of this novel comes after the main story has ended and the book lists a sociological glossary of terms used in the book, then proceeds to outline generalized descriptions pulled from Vollmann's presumed field work in SF's tenderloin among the pimps and prostitutes in the area. The moment you read this last part is the moment you understand how Vollmann's stolen stories worked to create the narrative you just read. His own abstractions, like Jimmy's desperate attempts at forming Gloria, are how he wrote the novel and are, of course, also a construction.

The insight forced by the end bring the novel around to many interesting ideas mainly plotted around constructions formed from abstractions: gender identity, heroism, love, even adulthood.

"That’s what being a kid is about, pretending. You’ve got to pretend you’re this, pretend you’re that, pretend you’re a grownup, pretend you’re not, pretend you’re somebody else. –That’s right Melissa, sighed Jimmy to himself sitting on his bed, and when you’re a grownup you’ve got to pretend you’re with somebody else. What a lot of work and trouble everything is." (91)

...and how could I possibly read a work like this without thinking of Marx's dialectic of abstract and concrete labor? By slicing down a cross-section of San Francisco's tenderloin and showing us its layers, Vollmann can't help but reveal the origin of the discarded in the exchange of bodies for cash, bodies which can transform and distort.

"…and then the light dawned on Candy: to get money she only had to threaten to leave, to become unavailable and therefore perfect like Gloria, and then she glowed with the light of a good thing coming to an end and easily achieved that perfection and they paid her and paid her." (152)

The prose here is poetic, and rises above the murk of its gritty subjects. Take lines like the following: "In the windowpanes of bars all around the blue neon Budweiser signs, reflections made cool jungles in which blurs pursued blurs."(58) Has there ever been a more perfect description of a dive bar late at night. The poetry of this novel is that it takes descriptions of the area and turns them in on the characters so that you aren't reading about a Budweiser sign, but Jimmy's state during a night of habitual drinking.

I discovered this author through a trustworthy reviewer on this site and I am so grateful. Vollmann has already begun to influence my own work and I intend to read a lot more of his generous oeuvre. ( )

"For we all must build our worlds around us, bravely or dreamily, as long as we can we shelter ourselves from the rain, walling ourselves in gorgeously." (53)

The true cleverness and weight of this novel comes after the main story has ended and the book lists a sociological glossary of terms used in the book, then proceeds to outline generalized descriptions pulled from Vollmann's presumed field work in SF's tenderloin among the pimps and prostitutes in the area. The moment you read this last part is the moment you understand how Vollmann's stolen stories worked to create the narrative you just read. His own abstractions, like Jimmy's desperate attempts at forming Gloria, are how he wrote the novel and are, of course, also a construction.

The insight forced by the end bring the novel around to many interesting ideas mainly plotted around constructions formed from abstractions: gender identity, heroism, love, even adulthood.

"That’s what being a kid is about, pretending. You’ve got to pretend you’re this, pretend you’re that, pretend you’re a grownup, pretend you’re not, pretend you’re somebody else. –That’s right Melissa, sighed Jimmy to himself sitting on his bed, and when you’re a grownup you’ve got to pretend you’re with somebody else. What a lot of work and trouble everything is." (91)

...and how could I possibly read a work like this without thinking of Marx's dialectic of abstract and concrete labor? By slicing down a cross-section of San Francisco's tenderloin and showing us its layers, Vollmann can't help but reveal the origin of the discarded in the exchange of bodies for cash, bodies which can transform and distort.

"…and then the light dawned on Candy: to get money she only had to threaten to leave, to become unavailable and therefore perfect like Gloria, and then she glowed with the light of a good thing coming to an end and easily achieved that perfection and they paid her and paid her." (152)

The prose here is poetic, and rises above the murk of its gritty subjects. Take lines like the following: "In the windowpanes of bars all around the blue neon Budweiser signs, reflections made cool jungles in which blurs pursued blurs."(58) Has there ever been a more perfect description of a dive bar late at night. The poetry of this novel is that it takes descriptions of the area and turns them in on the characters so that you aren't reading about a Budweiser sign, but Jimmy's state during a night of habitual drinking.

I discovered this author through a trustworthy reviewer on this site and I am so grateful. Vollmann has already begun to influence my own work and I intend to read a lot more of his generous oeuvre. ( )

https://msarki.tumblr.com/post/161848367868/whores-for-gloria-by-william-t-vollm...

…I haven’t told the truth for so long now that I’ve given up lying.

William T. Vollmann’s name has come up often and been noticed on lists of books deserving to be remarked upon. For some reason I have resisted reading him, but my being recently compared to him by another writer I am intimate with, I decided to examine a bit of the fuss behind the legend of Vollmann. Whores for Gloria signals my starting point. And what a point it is.

…Virgin Mary candy full of sunlight and ocean fruit…

The narrator’s voice is natural and through the use of no punctuation the dialogue between all the players is easy to discern, understand, and know at all times just who is talking. But the subject matter perhaps excludes too many of us on purpose. And I like it that Vollman’s work is exclusionary. Becomes a sort of fraternity I have been temporarily made member of. In this particular case a membership in what might be referred to as a gutter club. Flying dirt balls of emotion and most certainly a fated dead end. It is obvious to me that Vollmann has studied his whoring subjects well. His disturbed protagonist is named Jimmy.

It isn’t easy for me being this close-up to Vollmann. Too few pages of pure joy, reading pleasures somehow massaging the pain and loss that permeates everything everywhere. Jimmy’s absent love conjured up in real time, futile attempts at recovering some sense of belonging in the world, even in light of his daily encounters with a confounding nature called time. And sadly, time being something apparently needing to end for him.

…alley by alley I will search and destroy…he could not believe that he was actually remembering anything because he had not done that since before he started drinking, and he felt uneasy…

In light of Jimmy’s incessant delusion in his remembrance of his long-lost Gloria the story is as much about forgetting. Fueled by alcohol his escape from the horrors of the Vietnam War seemed to morph into a parallel fantasy regarding the woman of his dreams brought to life through the seedy culture of San Francisco’s Tenderloin district.

One night Riley hopped a freight into town, and because he had been living the life of himself he was in bad shape.

For me, my first exposure to William T. Vollmann was portend, portend, portend. And for more of that I will be back. [b:Butterfly Stories|45683|Butterfly Stories|William T. Vollmann|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1348089356s/45683.jpg|44857] is calling. ( )

A Vollmann novel that's less than 600 pages? Say it ain't so!

A focused look at the beauty and ugliness of a deluded man looking for a woman he invented. Sad and disgusting and compelling all at once. Don't read while eating.

Recommended for the kind of people who want to know the 'spirituality of whores' to use Vollmann's own phrase, or the kind of people who collect insects. ( )