One thing you can say assuredly about writer William T. Vollmann is that he’s enjoying a singular career. There’s no one else practicing his brand of gonzo ardor for the sad casualties of modern life, the geographically remote, the politically fraught and the historically arcane–no one else even trying, really. The opening of Alexander Nazaryan’s Newseek article about the writer, who’s just published The Book of Dolores, perhaps his most personal and idiosyncratic work to date:
“If William T. Vollmann ever wins the Nobel Prize in Literature – as many speculate he will – he knows exactly what he will do with the $1.1 million pot the Swedes attach to the award. ‘It will be fun to give some to prostitutes,’ he says, sitting on his futon, chuckling, a half-empty bottle of pretty good bourbon between us.
He is neither flippant nor drunk, though more booze awaits us out there in the temperate Sacramento twilight. Vollmann became famous for fiction that treated the sex worker as muse – especially the street stalker of those days in the Tenderloin of San Francisco when AIDS was just coming to haunt the national psyche and the yuppie invasion was a nightmare not yet hatched. His so-called prostitution trilogy – Whores for Gloria, Butterfly Stories, and The Royal Family – is overflowing with life and empathy, nothing like the backcountry machismo of Raymond Carver or fruitless experimentation of Donald Barthelme, both oh-so-popular with young writers when Vollmann first came on the scene after graduating from Cornell in 1981. He approached the prostitute like an anthropologist, yet did so without condescension, writing in Whores for Gloria, ‘The unpleasantnesses of her profession are largely caused by the criminal ambiance in which the prostitute must conduct it.’
He was a gonzo humanitarian, too: Vollmann once rescued a young Thai girl, Sukanja, from a rural brothel, installing her in a school in Bangkok; he later paid her father for ownership of the girl, essentially making himself the owner of another human being. (‘She loves the school,’ he told The Paris Review in 2000.) So if sex workers reap some of that Nobel money, it will be only be because they have long served as Vollmann’s subjects and companions, objects of his curiosity, his compassion, and, sometimes, his carnal impulses. He insists the last of these is not an occasion for shame. Of paying for sex, he once said, ‘We’re a culture of prostitutes.'”