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Rating: 
Summary: Vollmann's Career = Revenge of the Nerd
Review:
Vollmann's books are a shotgun wedding of Kerouac keyboard improv and finicky, ultra-thorough research that would shame the most hardcore library mole. His unique voice is the result of the collision between his modern sensibility -- which he's endlessly amused by instead of, like too many contemporary authors, uncritically in love with -- and his passion for exhausted and outmoded forms of thinking and of writing. For Vollmann, "modernity" is sometimes a sort of limbo, the temporal version of the Greenland in his book The Ice-Shirt, where everything that can happen has already happened and the former sites of great battles, couplings, and doomed utopian experiments are now bare swatches of anonymous turf -- witness the last few pages of Argall, where "William the Blind," as Vollmann calls himself, drives through Pocahontas' former haunts and finds an endless cortege of theme parks and strip bars -- and sometimes an ongoing process to be participated in. As is well known, Vollmann is something of an adventurer, doing his Geraldo Rivera guerilla-journalist bit with the Northern Alliance forces in Afghanistan long before they were the flavor of the month. What fascination his books have comes from this contradiction. Are we living history, or is everything over?
Sadly, I must report, his books are not yet as fascinating on their own merits. Argall is admirable in almost every way -- Vollmann is obviously stoked with the passion to rescue marginalized figures from the rubble of history, and he even works up genuine anger about wrongs committed centuries ago, whereas most people these days conform more to William Hazlitt's dictum: "The least pain in our little finger gives us more concern and uneasiness than the destruction of millions of our fellow beings." On top of this, his prose is impossibly energetic and rich, like that of a postmodern Fielding. But as industrious as he is in terms of researching and writing, that's how lazy he is in terms of his conceptions and grand designs. His graphomania works against him, in short -- he fills seven hundred pages here without stopping to think, as most people will before half the book is over, that Blood Meridian has already been written and was done quite well already. There is literally zero distance between Vollmann's title character and McCarthy's The Judge -- both are seen as omnipotent spectres representing the depredations of America's colonial thrust, and both even talk in the same Shakespearean-Melvillean patois. And though the unquestioned verbal virtuosity of Argall ( the book ) is more than enough to carry you through to the end, it ultimately turns out to have very little staying power, being essentially a linear, straightforward account of the events contained in John Smith's autobiography, leavened with a peculiar brand of political correctness also swiped from McCarthy ( he admits the Indians are savage and unknowable, but still treats them as sacred for that very reason. )
Vollmann makes me think of what DeSade's doctor says to him in the movie Quills: "You produce more pages than you consume -- the mark of a true amateur." Let's face it, no one who writes as much as Vollmann has a well-honed sense of self-criticism. Part of me thinks that he would be better off laying aside the latest 900-page opus, reupholstering his crude if touching Weltanschauung, and then returning a decade later with a compressed and fully mature work of genius... But then he wouldn't be William Vollmann, he'd be Russell Hoban. For that reason, I doubt he'll ever write anything that attains a status above "James Clavell for eggheads," but nevertheless, there's a place in the cosmos for his brand of blunt, belated justice. Just don't call him The Judge.
Rating: 
Summary: Postmodern Pocahontas (or Pockahuntiss)
Review: It helps if you're a little bit compulsive about reading Vollmann. Oh, he doesn't need the help, but as a reader, you do.
It's easy to compare him with Pynchon, since they both attempt a similar feat of matching subject with style in an expansive format that contains much humor peppered within the story. But Vollmann isn't a humorist at heart, he's part historian and part seer. He brings you the characters that you'd love to believe really are; he worms his insistent way into their hopes and imaginings so that he can present you with their characters. You learn a lot of history reading the Seven Dreams series, of which "Argall" is a part. You learn more about how Vollmann regards history. But what makes the author so necessary and integral to my reading is that way of making me see how his characters regard themselves. So throw your reading schedule out the window. Pick up "The Ice Shirt" and start in on this yet-to-be completed chronicle of how the Europeans came to the Americas and what that meant for both the Europeans and the people who were already here. Catch up soon, because you'll want to starting wishing for the next book in the series to appear... compulsively so.
Rating: 
Summary: Like Trying to Find the Northwest Passage
Review: Ok, Vollmann is brilliant, a genius. One has to give it to him with this and his other huge tomes in which he goes full-tilt in an attempt at literary greatness, and his passages are often riveting. The book tries to out-do ULYSSES. It does. But finally, around the 400th page, who cares?
Rating:
Summary: Actually, I haven't even read it.
Review: That's the truth, I haven't even read this book. So I'm not going to tell you it's good. I'm giving Vollmann 5 stars, rather than this particular book.
His Seven Dreams series has been somewhat of an insane odyssey, as a reader. The Ice-Shirt is mesmerising and terrible. I read it and felt like I'd just tried digest a pick-axe. Sharp and painful, but definitely an original thing to do with my time.
Vollmann might be one of the few American authors who deserves (and is) on the Nobel longlist. His books, in this series, and outside it, explore the trenches of civilization with a passion and courage that is unequalled. The places he visits for research (the Arctic circle, Cambodia's Pol Pot regime, Bosnia, San Francisco's Tenderloin) develop into fiction and non-fiction that is both transcendental and wildly crude.
He is a writer in a funny place. Somewhere between Steinbeck, Melville, Conrad, and Pynchon. His complex patterns of guilt and his sad heroics are all explored on the page, and are crushingly real and plangent.
I don't know if Argall is the place to start reading Vollmann (since I haven't read it myself) but it might as well be. His books are magnificent. The first one I read was Butterfly Stories, and it broke my heart. The Atlas is amazing, and so are both his collections of stories.
Rating:
Summary: More of a good thing
Review: Vollman's not for everyone, and that's especially true of the Seven Dreams. His partially-completed, seven volume imagination of the collision between European and Native American cultures is brilliant, ambitious, and at times dizzying. Reading Vollman can be like reading Pynchon or Gaddis; the unconventional dialogue and punctuation can seem difficult, especially if one focuses too much on a line-by-line reading. If you're willing to let yourself go and immerse yourself in the narrative, however, it is spellbinding. Moreover, once you allow yourself to get into the text, you become acclimated and find that reading becomes easier.
Anyone who enjoyed the earlier volumes of Seven Dreams certainly will enjoy this one. I would rate it slightly below Fathers & Crows or The Ice-Shirt, however, as there's a repetitiveness to some of the descriptions that detracts from the overall energy. Nonetheless, a brilliant and highly enjoyable achievement.
Rating:
Summary: Vollmann's Career = Revenge of the Nerd
Review: William Vollmann is like the nerdiest person you knew in college or high school. He grew up to become a novelist who gained notoriety by writing in great detail about his experiences with prostitutes and having the audacity to claim that it took some sort of moral heroism for him to smoke crack with them in roach-infested transient hotels. Of course, it wouldn't do to be slumming all the time -- otherwise he'd just be another John Rechy or Bruce Benderson. So he adds Ivy League intellectual patina to these books by positioning them as meditations on the history of North America, or as reflections on how "all loving relationships are really forms of prostitution." He writes long, long books hoping that you'll be very, very impressed with him. Folks, read this book or any other book by William Vollmann and keep in mind that this is an author with a profoundly stunted emotional growth. There's nothing cute about celebrating prostitution as the "most honest form of love" -- it's sickening writing, the babbling of a man still stuck in the fantasies of adolescence who will never understand that real love transcends economic exchange into a pure giving of oneself to another. He pats himself on the back for his "ferocity," when in fact he's never really outgrown being a journal-scribbling teenager who thinks every word he scribbles needs to be published and admired. His writing amounts to one big infantile gesture of lashing out at his Mommy and Daddy -- he admits as much in his interviews -- but at the same time hoping all these books he writes will make his parents love him. It's sad. The fact that Vollmann has a big crowd of admirers says a lot about the sheep-like mentality and the moral vacancy of too many people who like cutting-edge literature. Read the bombastic praise Vollmann receives that is printed on the dustjackets of his books, and reviewers envious of his lifestyle just look like fools with the pumped-up praise that lavish on Vollmann. Go to a Vollmann reading and look around -- the people there are the sort who are hip, cynical, wear funky glasses and hate their parents, and whose main worry is keeping up with the latest slick novels and edgy CD's to hit the shelves. They have no ability to think for themselves and they are bored with life -- so they are profoundly impressed by this guy who writes about his experience with prostitutes. If you recognize yourself in this description, you need to get a life. There's a certain sort of bourgeois person who believes their life can be redeemed by writing a novel in which they'll "show 'em all" -- the 'em being Mommy and Daddy, the cool kids who rejected them in high school, the jocks who called them nerds, etc. Vollmann is the "patron saint" of this sort of misfit. I read an interview in which Vollmann stated confidently that he is as important as Shakespeare or Faulkner. He doesn't seem to understand that the self-absorbed navel-gazing of a well-read prostitute's john doesn't quite cut it as great literature, no matter how many big words and descriptive phrases he tries to pack into his sentences. Vollmann's delusions are as bloated as his books, and his vision lacks even a hint of the universality or breadth or understanding that literary importance requires. Nobody but a few misfit loners and antiquarians will be reading Vollmann fifty years from now. Vollmann is a Montherlant in the making -- that is, an irrelevant curiosity that even most highly educated people will not have heard of. Please think for yourself and don't buy this book just because you think it's kind of neat and edgy that this guy writes about his experiences with prostitutes. Don't engage in the sad spectacle of living vicariously through William Vollmann's sad, warped world. You'll just put yourself one step closer to moral oblivion.
Rating:
Summary: Dreaming the American Nightmare
Review: With "Argall," Vollmann makes a triumphant return to his ambitious "Seven Dreams" series of novels, detailing the invasion of North America by Europeans and the legacy of violence and oppression they left behind. "Argall" deals with the British annexation of what they later called Virginia, and focuses on three colorful characters: Pocahontas, Capt. John Smith, and the sinister Sir Samuel Argall, who eventually kidnaps Pocahontas and introduces slavery into the New World. As the voluminous notes attest, Vollmann has done his homework and gives us what is probably the most historically accurate version of the Pocahontas story. And he does so in an astonishing re-creation of Elizabethan prose. This isn't the elegant Augustan prose adapted by Barth in "The Sot-Weed Factor" and Pynchon in "Mason & Dixon"; this is the earlier, racier prose of the young turks of Shakespeare's day like Robert Greene, Thomas Dekker, and especially Thomas Nashe. As one of Vollmann's sources says of that era, "the whole style of the day was inflated--in writing and in living" (p. 707); hence Vollmann uses a suitably inflated style that captures the age in all its vitality and vulgarity. As both a historical novel and a linguistic tour de force, "Argall" is a magnificent achievement.
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