WHORES FOR GLORIA, by William T. Vollmann

WILLIAM T. VOLLMANN is a poet of the underground. In his novel, "Whores for Gloria," a slim volume that most resembles his collection "The Rainbow Stories," he has trimmed down his focus to reveal the essence of his obsession: the search for love and redemption amid despair and self-destruction.

Readers of Mr. Vollmann's previous books will recognize one of his favorite terrains, San Francisco's Tenderloin district, and its denizens, the street whores who turn tricks for 20 or 40 bucks a pop in back alleys. The story is skeletal. Jimmy, a middle-aged Vietnam veteran on the skids, pays prostitutes to tell him their stories or share their memories and occasionally to have sex with him when he can manage it. He is engaging in a futile attempt to recapture or re-create a whore he has loved and lost, Gloria. Gloria, the gorgeous hooker, the quintessential woman and male fantasy, with "hellishly beautiful breasts," may or may not be imaginary. At the beginning of the book we hear Jimmy talking to Gloria on a pay phone about their baby, but it turns out the phone is broken. At one point Jimmy says that they were childhood friends, at another he claims that he and Gloria were married. But whether Gloria is a figment of Jimmy's imagination or a real whore with whom Jimmy had an affair, she is still a fantasy that he is trying to bring to life.

In a way, Jimmy himself is a symbolic john, a man who sees whores as a flesh-and-blood support to his fantasy. As he "flatbacks" the hookers (as he puts it), he imagines his dream Gloria with their body parts -- the eyes of one, the hair of another, the genitals of yet another -- "each representing some woman's physical character like notes of music." But since this effort fails to create a satisfying Gloria, he now requires the souls of the whores. For the price of a trick, he gets to hear happy stories, sad stories (they are excruciatingly sad), childhood memories, anecdotes of the trade, but still Gloria eludes him. It's only with the help of an older whore, Peggy, that Gloria finally comes alive for a brief, intensely religious moment. A Virgin Mary of purity, Gloria appears "like an annunciation," she looks "brighter," she is surrounded with light, she glows. Soon Jimmy forgets Peggy's presence and fantasizes driving away with Gloria until the wrong "memories" come out of Peggy's mouth, jarring him out of his daydream and back to his sordid reality.

His attempt to re-create Gloria -- on the advice of his friend Code Six, a fellow Vietnam veteran and boozer -- by acquiring the hair of a whore and adorning the head of another one with it backfires. The result is painfully grotesque. Yet Jimmy cannot give up his pathetic obsession.

For a while, these efforts seem to pay off. Jimmy believes he sees a "real and finished" Gloria who "casts a shadow" and has "the firmness of flesh." Predictably, though, one morning he wakes up and the vision is gone.

The strength of Mr. Vollmann's novel, its poetry, its humanity, lies in the portraits of the prostitutes, transvestites and pimps who people the sidewalks of the Tenderloin district. And what a gallery of rogues it is. There is Nicole, "used up like a dirty eraser," who has AIDS. There's Jack, a pimp who shoots dope and loves his one record of Chopin nocturnes, although he doesn't own a record player. There's the old transvestite and whore Phyllis. Jimmy says of her: "Have you ever looked at an old street-whore's hand? Dirty worn creases deep as cuts, fingertips callused and peeling, thumb blackish-grey, but the whole hand so pale under the dirt." And there are Korea, Cynthia and Candy, and all the girls we see lounging on the hoods of cars on a warm summer night, their miniskirts hiked up on their thighs, smiling "like tropical orange juice girls" and giggling "like little girls staying up past their bedtime."

Structured as a collection of fragmentary monologues, "Whores for Gloria" has the unmistakable tone of truth in the speech patterns of the characters and in their stories, which at times sound as though they were directly transcribed from a tape recorder. There's an element of reporting here, and although the monologues are fascinating, they don't truly coalesce into a fully accomplished novel. As characters, Jimmy and the elusive Gloria pale next to the gritty reality and density of the whores' lives. And although the quest for the fantasy woman, both ultimate sex symbol and all-encompassing love, results in a dramatic ending, it doesn't quite have the emotional power to carry the novel. At times, Jimmy's search seems nothing more than the aimless obsession of a terminal drunk, superficially imposed on the hookers' stories.

None of this takes anything away from the harrowing poignancy of Mr. Vollmann's voice. "Whores for Gloria" is in the tradition of both Hubert Selby Jr.'s "Last Exit to Brooklyn" (sharing its theme of redemption through self-hatred, self-destruction and the abyss of sex) and the lyrics of Lou Reed. The power of Mr. Vollmann's writing turns this short novel into a lyrical poem of the street, sad and beautiful.