After being initiated into a coven of island witches, Neva begins to fulfill her fate in a Tenderloin dive bar. Her worshippers include 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.
... a book that sails effortlessly past the 600-page mark ... Vollmann has a penchant for writing about sex, and he holds back little. There are moments when it seems the novel doesn’t have any real destination in mind beyond the next climax...And yet some worthy themes emerge ... Vollmann is harsh on his characters ... Though it is set in recent years, The Lucky Star is really a lament for the old, dirty San Francisco, the city of Kathy Acker and Seth Morgan, and Vollmann’s own earlier work ... With this confounding, intermittently entertaining book, we can consider the author’s nostalgia for the old San Francisco squared. Unless, that is, he has a few thousand more pages in him.
... while it possesses the scope of [Vollmann's] past novels, it also feels driven by an urgent contempt toward current politics. His narrator often refers to an 'uncouth nationalist' who recently won an election, but Vollmann’s aim is broader — to build a sense of fictional community that welcomes anybody who seeks love and fellowship with others ... Like many Vollmann novels, The Lucky Star is too long. But at the same time, it develops a powerful sense of human life and its elemental pleasures set amid countless scenes of sucking, licking, penetrating and more. At times, this tawdry tableau rises like a bright balloon out of the sticky world into a better, more ethereal place ... At times it provides a sense that love is both miraculous and mundane; at others, it feels like the longest possible candidate for a Bad Sex in Fiction Award. Ultimately, though, it adds up to a hypnotic, sad and angry novel about people striving to be more than they’re allowed to be — a 'seance' of rough living and simple community that rejects no one ... Vollmann’s books embrace everything and everybody, and it is hard to read him without feeling both energized and exhausted. It’s also hard not to wonder what kind of person could produce such things in such volume.