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The Lucky Star
- A Novel
- Narrated by: Abby Craden
- Length: 25 hrs and 21 mins
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The Lucky Star
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Publisher's Summary
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.
What the critics say
“Vollmann takes us back to the San Francisco of his early fiction, to the haunts of those who will live and die on the city’s margins .... For all the contemporaneity in the telling, there is (as always) a certain moral quality to Vollmann’s work. In this one: there is no one on earth, no one, who would not benefit from a little more love and a lot less contempt.” (The Millions, “Most Anticipated 2020”)
“[A] provocatively playful novel .... As Neva evolves from an innocent to an icon on par with Marlene Dietrich, at least in the eyes of the Y Bar circle, she guides and mentors their sexual self-discovery, helping define their boundaries and gain confidence ... Vollmann’s challenging novel is full of memorable moments.” (Publishers Weekly)
"Vollmann pours his signature fascination with outcasts, women's sexuality, violence, and injustice into this gargantuan, omnivorously explicit, ravening orgy of trauma and resilience. Rooted in interviews with women survivors, this is a molten amalgam of cynicism and compassion, horror and beauty.” (Booklist)