Whores for Gloria

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From Publishers WeeklyVollmann's brief, coy and ultimately unfulfilling novel portrays a Vietnam veteran in San Francisco's Tenderloin demimonde questing for an elusive, idealized woman named Gloria. Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Library JournalJimmy, a down-and-out Vietnam vet, spends his disability checks drinking in skid row bars and paying streetwalkers to tell him their life stories. Later, alone in his hotel room, he reassigns the memories he has collected to Gloria, his imaginary girlfriend. In his 1989 collection The Rainbow Stories ( LJ 6/15/89), Vollmann himself wandered the streets of San Francisco paying prostitutes for talk. Apart from the heartbreaking frame-story of Jimmy, this new book seems to consist of outtakes from the earlier book--gritty scenes of almost surreal depravity and squalor. Unfortunately, Vollmann the urban anthropologist subverts the efforts of Vollmann the novelist. In the end, one wishes he had devoted less space to the whores and more to Jimmy and his hallucinatory quest for love. A minor work by an important author.- Edward B. St. John, Loyola Law Sch. Lib., Los AngelesCopyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.