Voluble and voracious, he's building own history

[rich]

but he ain't fun to read which will make him one of those cultish types

hes the most humorless writer on the planet

On Sun, Oct 18, 2009 at 10:18 AM, Dave Monroe
<against.the.dave at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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
>
>