Another damned thick, square book

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.