William T. Vollmann's new book is on sale today. From the jacket: A majestic book that addresses current debates on immigration, agribusiness, and corporate exploitation, issues that will define America’s identity in the twenty-first century.
Here's Sam Anderson: William T. Vollmann's Imperial is like Robert Caro's The Power Broker with the attitude of Mike Davis's City of Quartz, if Robert Caro had been raised in an abandoned grain silo by a band of feral raccoons, and if Mike Davis were the communications director of a heavily armed libertarian survivalist cult, and if the two of them had somehow managed to stitch John McPhee's cortex onto the brain of a Gila monster, which they then sent to the Mexican border to conduct ten years of immersive research, and also if they wrote the entire manuscript on dried banana leaves with a toucan beak dipped in hobo blood, and then the book was line-edited during a 36-hour peyote seance by the ghosts of John Steinbeck, Jack London, and Sinclair Lewis, with 200 pages of endnotes faxed over by Henry David Thoreau's great-great-great-great grandson from a concrete bunker under a toxic pond behind a maquiladora, and if at the last minute Herman Melville threw up all over the manuscript, rendering it illegible, so it had to be re-created from memory by a community-theater actor doing his best impression of Jack Kerouac. With photographs by Dorothea Lange.
As the updated Amazon reviews make clear, this is a book that will sharply divide the critics as well as the reading public. Publishers Weekly calls it "exasperating, maddening, exhausting and inchorent", whereas Booklist gives it a starred review, calling the book "immense, poetically structured, provoking, and surprisingly intimate." From the archive, John Lanchester: If I had to name one high-cultural notion that had died in my adult lifetime, it would be the idea that difficulty is artistically desirable.
Moby-Dick in the Desert |
