The interesting thing about public opinion of the Tenderloin is the way it resembles the view of an addict who is aware of a problem but can see no real solution. For 50 years newspapers have regularly trumpeted one "renewal" of the Tenderloin after another. But societies, like addicts, need to encounter some radical truth in order to change. For addicts it can be the truth of their own behavior or some kind of tragic vision, but it must be an unadorned and humbling recognition that sears the core of the being. If government and the media were to undergo, by analogy, such a process of recovery from illusion, it would mean including in public policy and media reports the recognition of the human will to failure, of the lust for death, of the hunger for oblivion that haunts our daylight hours, of the violent impulses that lie beneath the surface in even the most placid and competent of us. It would mean that we stop being hypocritical about who the men are who drive around dark urban streets getting blow jobs from anonymous hookers.

Instead, of course, we partition a part of the city for our vices and then every so often bemoan its presence, as if waking up startled to find it there, as it were, in our own bed. Year after year we proclaim ourselves optimistic, still fighting, still hanging in there, inches away from victory! We begin to sound remarkably like chronic drug relapsers. Meanwhile, we manage to skirt the radical truth of our collective nature as humans, that we're violent sons of bitches who steal, lie and abuse each other and hunger for an occasional few minutes of oblivion, and if that means breaking the law to get some dope and a blow job, that's what we're gonna do.

So this obsession with the Tenderloin I understand. But I think it acts as a metaphor for the difficulty of the book. I'm not a literary critic and there's much about the book's apparent allegorical structure and biblical allusiveness that goes over my head. Moreover, the nature of Vollmann's mind is a mystery about which we can only surmise. Nevertheless, I see parallels between the madness symbolized by the Tenderloin in "The Royal Family" and a kind of madness operating in the book itself.

In the back of the book, in the acknowledgements, Vollmann thanks his editor for not insisting that he cut the novel by a third. One wishes Vollmann had relented instead, for the result is a book that taxes the sensibilities with details about the sights, smells and diseases of crack-addicted and abused whores, the mental tricks a pederast plays on himself, a Ku Klux Klan member who creates a Las Vegas bordello staffed by kidnapped retarded slave girls and a main character whose infatuation with his brother's wife drives her to suicide.

While in the abstract I prefer Vollmann's wholehearted embrace of all that is bloody, suppurating, jaundiced, piss-stinking, bloated, infected, impacted, pus-filled, hateful and abused in the Tenderloin to the boosterish, puritanical, cleanup-minded views of the media and the public, I think somewhere along the way the aesthetic tension between the darkness of the Tenderloin and its redeeming light breaks apart. We seem to spiral into a moral wasteland of appetite without discernment and misfortune without redemption.

Vollmann doesn't moralize or flinch from the ugliness. He shows us the festering wounds and the stinking orifices; he shows us the beatings and blood and hopelessness. In principle, I like that. It's preferable to the vague moralizing of our city fathers. But even I could only follow him so far before I began to feel beaten, worn down and abused myself. Am I simply another shocked burgher unable to see into the truth behind the ugliness? Am I like one of those people who, when confronted with a breakthrough in art, miss the revolutionary impulse and see only vulgarity?

Maybe. But I do believe that high literary art can bring the most depraved aspects of our nature to us in a form that even the most delicate of us can apprehend. I believe that the difference between beauty and sensationalism is that in a work of beauty the horrible is transformed and frozen in its essential nature so that we can approach it in a posture of serene contemplation. And in a work experienced serially, such as a piece of music or a novel, change is an aesthetic element. Characters are not tourists driven to consume one sensational thrill after another without being changed; instead they are powerful reagents who metabolize and transform the ugly into the beautiful by ordering it, comprehending it, placing it in the wheel of life.

This may sound like an argument for the kind of pedestrian moral redemption in fiction that, when enforced by large institutions of education and public taste, not to mention governments, impedes artistic innovation. But it's meant to be a plea for the lifesaving formal rigor of great fiction; great fiction, even when it chooses the horrible as its subject matter, brings to it an ordering force of mind, and follows an arc of completion through time.

In "The Royal Family", this kind of transformation does not appear to happen. Tyler plods on. Rather than being changed by his experiences, he seems only to be ground down. The trajectory of the novel seems entropic. The choice of the Tenderloin for a setting hints at an explanation: Eliminating social limits allows the novelist to travel too far outside literate culture, to a place where human behavior no longer has meaning because it occurs outside of what we recognize as civilization.

I understand the impulse to hole up in a room in the Tenderloin or the Mission; I understand the need to fight those who would dumb down our passionate artistic constructions. But what seems to happen in this book is the same thing that happens to residents of a place like the Tenderloin: After a while it wears you down. The ugliness and cruelty accrue in the psyche and impair your ability to apprehend beauty. As a defense against the ugliness you attenuate your moral sensitivity, blunt your hearing, blur your eyesight, dull your alertness to fine distinctions, until only the loudest noises and the most extreme sensations register. In reading this novel, after suffering repeated assaults to the senses in the form of stinking whores' cunts and a creepily sympathetic rendering of a pederast's first seduction, among many others, we're a little wounded and abused ourselves; we whimper through the rest of the brutal narrative like beaten children, hoping for a little kindness and light and finding none; eventually we shut down and become, rather than more human, less so. And that seems to be the opposite of what novels are supposed to do.

Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"