3.0
The Lucky Star
ByPublisher Description
The National Book Award winning author returns to his original fictional territory--the lives of the dispossessed in San Francisco--with a parable about the limitations of desire and life at the margins of society
In such earlier works of fiction as The Rainbow Stories and The Royal Family, William T. Vollmann wrote of pimps, prostitutes, addicts and homeless dreamers in San Francisco's Tenderloin district. In this new novel, Vollmann returns there with a story that centers around a woman with magical powers whom everyone loves, and who has to love them all back.
After being initiated into a coven of island witches, Neva begins to fulfill her fate in a Tenderloin dive bar. Her worshippers include Richard, the introverted, alcoholic, occasionally omniscient narrator; a profane, aggressive transgender sex worker named Shantelle; the brisk but motherly barmaid Francine; and the former Frank, who has renamed herself after her idol Judy Garland. When Judy starts to love Neva too much, Judy's retired policeman boyfriend embarks on a mission of exposure and destruction.
Crafted out of language by turns spiritual and sexually graphic, The Lucky Star aches with compassion as it explores celebrity culture, gender identity, incest, Christian sacrifice and, most of all, the quotidian and sometimes faltering heroism of marginalized people who in the face of humiliation and outright violence seek to love in their own way, and stand up for who they are.
In such earlier works of fiction as The Rainbow Stories and The Royal Family, William T. Vollmann wrote of pimps, prostitutes, addicts and homeless dreamers in San Francisco's Tenderloin district. In this new novel, Vollmann returns there with a story that centers around a woman with magical powers whom everyone loves, and who has to love them all back.
After being initiated into a coven of island witches, Neva begins to fulfill her fate in a Tenderloin dive bar. Her worshippers include Richard, the introverted, alcoholic, occasionally omniscient narrator; a profane, aggressive transgender sex worker named Shantelle; the brisk but motherly barmaid Francine; and the former Frank, who has renamed herself after her idol Judy Garland. When Judy starts to love Neva too much, Judy's retired policeman boyfriend embarks on a mission of exposure and destruction.
Crafted out of language by turns spiritual and sexually graphic, The Lucky Star aches with compassion as it explores celebrity culture, gender identity, incest, Christian sacrifice and, most of all, the quotidian and sometimes faltering heroism of marginalized people who in the face of humiliation and outright violence seek to love in their own way, and stand up for who they are.
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesThe Lucky Star Reviews
3.0
“Writing a book should be self-indulgent, but not too much. Or, maybe, it depends on which direction your indulgence of self might lean. (That's where reasonable editors come in.) I gave a copy of a WTV book to a friend twenty odd years ago and he returned it, half-read, saying, the guy's just a perv. Well, my friend's a bit of a perv, too. Might have been Whores For Gloria? Anyhow, I sure have loved me some Vollmann books in the interim. Fathers and Crows? That whole Seven Dreams series. Burning intelligence, and rage, and exhaustive research... Devastating. The Royal Family? So good. This big book, however- which is actually like a pale ghost of The Royal Family- kind of skims along the surface, a story of several regulars in a San Francisco tenderloin bar, with lots of repetition- mostly of the sexual sort; a treatise on happiness, personal sacrifice for the benefit of others, sketches of the marginalized. Some memorable characters and poignancy but overall could have been reduced by two thirds.”
About William T. Vollmann
William T. Vollmann is the author of ten novels, including Whores for Gloria, The Royal Family,and Europe Central, which won the National Book Award. He has also written four collections of stories (including The Rainbow Stories and The Atlas, which won the PEN Center USA West Award for Fiction), a memoir, and eight works of nonfiction, including Rising Up and Rising Down and Imperial, both of which were finalists for the National Book Critics Circle Award. He is the recipient of a Whiting Award and the Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He lives in California.
Other books by William T. Vollmann
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