Alex’s Reviews > The Royal Family > Status Update

Ladies of the Queen and An Essay on Bail are both 5 Star chapters. This is my frustration with Vollmann. He keeps coming within a hair’s breadth of being one of my favorite writers before suddenly receding into awkward bloat again (well, who am I anyway?). He’s a tease. He’s a whore.

If the entire book could maintain the quality of Ladies of the Queen, it would be a five-star for sure.

This seems to be the most personal Vollmann I’ve read thus far, the others being You Bright and Risen Angels and Europe Central. Those novels had very personal moments, but they were either in the context of a cartoon (YBARA), or too fragmentary to do their gooey work on me (EC).

Reading any fiction immediately after Infinite Jest is likely a mistake, but I'm not hating this so far. It's already clear that it looks at addiction from a different angle, I'm just worried it will turn out to be a romantic one. And the bits where Tyler tells strippers and prostitutes they're good people are kinda cringe-y. Couldn't we do that with character development?