Voluble and voracious, he's building own history

[Dave Monroe]

Voluble and voracious, he's building own history
By Allen Pierleoni
apierleoni at sacbee.com
Published: Sunday, Oct. 18, 2009 - 12:00 am | Page 18


The literary community is fractured in its views of author William T. Vollman.

Consider these three sound bites from qualified observers:

• Peter Grandbois, author and professor of creative writing and
contemporary literature at California State University, Sacramento:

"Vollmann is the conscience of our generation. In many ways, he is a
throwback to an older generation of writers like Hemingway and
Steinbeck. ...

"What's amazing about his body of work is that he never dumbs it down,
never simplifies the issues in order to form a neat plot line or
support an agenda. ... His empathy for others and his ability to make
the reader have empathy for those others is his greatest gift."

• Matthew Stratton, assistant professor of English, University of
California, Davis:

"Ironically, it's due to just how prolific Vollmann is that it's too
early to tell where in American literary history he will arrive.

"His work hasn't received as much serious scholarly attention as it
deserves, which is partially a function of its unruly brilliance, and
partially a function of how long it takes literary scholarship to
catch up.

"Is he primarily a high-post-modern novelist to be read and taught
with Thomas Pynchon and Salman Rushdie? Does he belong with Joan
Didion and Hunter S. Thompson, who render personal experience into
unusually compelling analysis while erasing conventional borders
between fact and fiction?

"The answers are 'yes.' The question is 'when?' "

• Michael Coffey, executive managing editor of Publishers Weekly magazine:

"Vollmann is a kind of natural resource, a vivid
historian-documentarian with a voracious appetite for conveying a
diversity of lived experience. ... He writes with his feet and is
literally out there ... but he writes with his head as well.

"The amount of research evident in his longer projects is astounding.
There's no one like Vollmann working now. He is an anomaly, being so
wide-ranging in his interests. ...

"And for all his production, he never writes a bad sentence."

http://www.sacbee.com/books/story/2257063.html