what's the point of william t vollmann?

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The thread title is a bit off, actually, I think I like him. However once in a fit of madness I ordered a (relatively cheap) copy of Rising Up And Rising Down and fine it hard to think about him properly in the light of oh-god-did-i-really-click-that.

I read 'Whores for Gloria' recently and was underwhelmed.

Do his journalistic (in the possibly odd sense of getting first hand experience of STUFF and wanting to TELL people about it) habits get in the way of his attempts to be a Novelist? or is it just me?

― tom west (thomp), Wednesday, 11 May 2005 15:45 (twenty years ago)

sterling motherfuckin clover to thread

― Josh (Josh), Wednesday, 11 May 2005 17:19 (twenty years ago)

why are people talking about DF Wallace so much without peep 1 re: William Vollman?

― W i l l (common_person), Wednesday, 11 May 2005 17:50 (twenty years ago)

the point it to fill up my shelves with impressive tomes

― kyle (akmonday), Wednesday, 11 May 2005 22:13 (twenty years ago)

i think his "transitional" works like Ice Shirt were probably a bit dodgy like that, in terms of trying to balance the journo/novelist thing right. But there's really only a few like that. I prefer rilly good journalism to novels these days anyway, so dunno quite how someone reading for character development and dramatic resolution and etc. would take him -- he hasn't had much to offer on that score since butterfly stories, i think.

he's really a short story writer when you get down to it, which is funny because haha he writes really long books.

― Sterling Clover (s_clover), Friday, 13 May 2005 02:42 (twenty years ago)

ha when i say "Novelist" character-development-and-dramatic-resolution isn't what's on my mind, i dunno what is: the foregrounding of form and style? psht, nemmind

Is he still writing the thing The Ice-Shirt is part of? I have been really meaning to read that one, bcz I'm kinda interested in saga vikings.. all I have here tho is 'the rifles' and 'the atlas' and the aforementioned rising-up etc. If he's really a short story writer I guess I should go with The Atlas next.

Did you write the thing on 'Rising Up' in the village voice? I liked that.

― tom west (thomp), Friday, 13 May 2005 14:11 (twenty years ago)

Or 13 Stories and 13 Epigraphs. The first story in that one's a killer.

― Mayor Maynot, Friday, 13 May 2005 18:03 (twenty years ago)

I haven't read any of the big historical series, but I really enjoyed "You Bright and Risen Angels," kind of a creepily surreal coming-of-age story against the backdrop of a war between bugs and electricity.

― n/a (Nick A.), Friday, 13 May 2005 18:05 (twenty years ago)

I also read a really long one about prostitutes, which was also good but grim.

― n/a (Nick A.), Friday, 13 May 2005 18:05 (twenty years ago)

yeah -- the rising up thing in the voice was mine. i vanity googled for responses a couple times and ppl. seemed to think it was a bad review for some reason!

The Atlas is totally great, except that I don't like the big middle "tie it together" story.

― Sterling Clover (s_clover), Friday, 13 May 2005 19:16 (twenty years ago)

The Rainbow Stories was the first one of his I read. It might be one of the better introductions to his work since the journalistic sensibility and the magic-realist prose style feed into each other in interesting ways. The wildly different on the surface, color-themed stories add up to a large scale collage concept of sorts.

― herbert heebert (herbert hebert), Monday, 16 May 2005 01:24 (twenty years ago)

so dunno quite how someone reading for character development and dramatic resolution and etc. would take him

This is very true. I think Vollmann's interest (and talent) lies in the macro-level emotion and development and projected resolution of the subjects he goes after. His thinking is pretty rigorous (for a novelist) and that doesn't really lend itself to super-acute characterizations.

I picked up his new one last week but haven't started it yet. It's fucking huge--how does the man write so fast?

― adam (adam), Monday, 16 May 2005 18:34 (twenty years ago)

three weeks pass...

Vollmann is interesting. His first novel, You Bright and Risen Angels is a bit of Pynchonesque surreal lunacy that is totally great, though very very different than all of his subsequent work. I think he's a remarkable writer, because he excels at the po-mo crazyness but also can write about atrocities from a very powerful, very human voice (The Atlas). Of the Seven Dreams series, I've only read The Rifles and Fathers and Crows but both were remarkable historical novels that were incredible well-researched and beautiful, with their own style of surrealism. I've been trying to get through Rising Up, Rising Down and it's really unlike anything I've ever read, though I've been stuck in the middle of Book 2.

― j fail (cenotaph), Saturday, 11 June 2005 14:10 (twenty years ago)

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