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.
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