William T. Vollmann ruined my Christmas. But he also made my year. Like a fisherman scared by reports of mysterious beasts and monsters — Here be dragons! Gryphon! Basilisk! Unicorn! Serpent! — I’d been put off for a long time by Vollmann’s reputation as the great white whale of American fiction, the New Maximalists’ Maximalist, a kind of vaster, stodgier, blubberier David Foster Wallace. And Vollmann’s much discussed obsessions with prostitution, destitution, degradation — exhaustingly detailed in his many and often mega-books, from You Bright and Risen Angels (1987) right through to the seven-volume Rising Up and Rising Down: Some Thoughts on Violence, Freedom, and Urgent Means (2003) — are not my own. Frankly, I like nice. And at Christmas, traditionally, I like to read P. G. Wodehouse.
But, just when you think you know what you like, along comes a 1,300 page history of the US-Mexican border in Imperial County, California, that challenges your preconceptions and makes you lay aside The Code of the Woosters and postpone the turkey. Imperial consists of a couple of hundred rambling — some might say incoherent — chapters, mostly about the low lives of illegal immigrants, and the high politics of water supply, plus maps, a chronology, and a proper old-fashioned bibliography. There is also, apparently, an accompanying book of photographs, but this was not sent for review, and anyway Christmas pudding could not wait; there is a limit for even the doughtiest of reviewers.
Vollmann is lauded in America: over here, he’s almost unknown, for all of the usual reasons. There’s often a hyper-active, rosy-cheeked, super-tanned, long-limbed spoilt-childishness to much American writing, whether it’s Walt Whitman, or John Ashbery, or Thomas Pynchon, which can make us mannered, teensy Europeans just a little bit uncomfortable and suspicious. What is their problem? Why do they go on so? It should be admitted that the worst American writing can indeed resemble the nattering and smudges of a child savant, but the best is, well, it’s imperial. It’s not scrawl, it’s Big Writing.
