Voluble and voracious, he's building own history

[tbeshear]

There's humor in Vollmann's work, but it's very dry wit, and much of the 
humor is at his expense.

He's one of the few prominent living American authors I could see getting a 
Nobel.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "rich" <richard.romeo at gmail.com>
To: "Dave Monroe" <against.the.dave at gmail.com>
Cc: "pynchon -l" <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Sunday, October 18, 2009 11:26 AM
Subject: Re: Voluble and voracious, he's building own history


> 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
>>
>>
>