If you had to choose between such a neighborhood and a sterile suburb where Christianity has been edited to fit your screen and bloody history has been preempted by Disney's "Snow White and the Seven Dwarves," where sleepwalkers mow their lawns and hang their clothes in a breeze redolent of Tide, where lives are lived outside of history in a glass jar filled with Glade, where the highest good seems to be a kind of banal tranquility -- my God, who would not flee that death-in-life that America seems to offer up at every turn? And go where? Anywhere. To a place by a river. To a loft in an industrial area. To a downtrodden section of a great city to live a secret life of painted glamour in bars where longshoremen used to fight with knives.

In William T. Vollmann's latest novel, "The Royal Family," the main character describes his fascination with San Francisco's Tenderloin. The Tenderloin is a 50-plus-block area of downtown San Francisco, a dense place of residential and tourist hotels and cheap apartments, high crime and rampant drug-dealing, and it's been San Francisco's de facto red-light district for more than 50 years (the word "Tenderloin" comes from the choice cut of beef a police officer could afford once transferred into such a graft-rich area):

When Tyler was small, his parents had brought him to some vast city which must have been Los Angeles ... and he recollected walking with them at night through a crowd of happy people gazing into lighted shopwindows of everything -- and it seemed that the lights and happiness would go on forever but suddenly Tyler's family arrived at a dark desolate place where a man glared at them and they were all alone. Later he understood that all light, everywhere, must burn out, but the reason that the Tenderloin fascinated him was that it combined the dark desolation with the shiny rouged and glowing-skirted merchandise.

The duality in that passage seems to promise that Vollmann will explore the aesthetic tension between the dark dangers of the Tenderloin and the powerful, libidinous energy it symbolizes. But any such gritty, life-affirming energy the Tenderloin might possess disappears under an unrelenting onslaught of dark desolation. The action of the novel largely concerns down-and-out detective Henry Tyler's search for the Queen of the Whores and, when he finds her, his relationship with her and the coterie of crack-addicted and abused prostitutes to whom she provides a mystical protection. It takes place mainly in San Francisco's two hot spots for prostitution, the 17th Street and Capp area of the Mission district, and the Tenderloin.

The Tenderloin is both an area and an idea. Longtime housing activist and executive director of the Tenderloin Housing Clinic Randy Shaw notes that the Tenderloin expands and contracts to accommodate behavior that fits its profile and to exclude whatever doesn't. If a murder occurs there, says Shaw, it occurs in "the Tenderloin," but if a condo is sold, it's sold in "lower Nob Hill." He jokingly says that the Tenderloin can never "improve" because once an area "improves" it ceases to be part of the Tenderloin. Its features change regularly, too, as the faces of those who need cheap housing have changed from longshoremen working San Francisco's now-moribund maritime shipping industry to immigrant families needing a place to start out in America.

The Tenderloin's radical permissiveness seems to infect the shape of Vollmann's novel itself with a tendency toward compulsive and formless inclusion. It's as if in defying limits by describing the depravity of crack-addicted whores and the men who use them, Vollmann has also defied the limits of form and elegance in the novel itself.

In the Tenderloin, the fact that anything goes has drawn artists, transsexuals and rebels of all shapes. I share their affection, and seeing the neighborhood lit up in Vollmann's prose was one of the few vivifying pleasures in the book. In the 1970s and early 1980s, both as a resident and as a musician practicing in the dank, tomb-like rooms of the basement Turk Street Studios, across the street from the infamous punk dive the Sound of Music, I found the Tenderloin a richly evocative setting for creative work.

There, I could imagine myself in the bowels of any of the world's great cities, working in obscurity -- downtrodden, outcast and one day to emerge as a great and tortured visionary. In the vacuum of any coherent critical community, in the company of heroin addicts and drunks, it was not hard to imagine oneself as an overlooked genius. No one in the Tenderloin would scold you for drinking a tall Budweiser at 10 a.m.; they'd happily join in if you would buy a few more.

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"