Who is our author, William T. Vollman? Imagine that Norman Maclean took peyote, climbed to the top of the Y in the Hollywood sign, and spent three days up there hallucinating that he was Hunter S. Thompson. Then on the third night he disappeared and no one heard a thing from him until five months later he stepped off a cargo ship in San Pedro with a tattoo and a slight limp that he didn't have before. That, perhaps, is William T. Vollman. Or else that's only the memory of a William T. Vollman who never was.

William T. Vollman is a slightly mad person, and this is a very mad book. I've been reading it for months and I'm not even a quarter of the way through. Imperial County is a sprawling enigma of a place that's hard to love yet hard not to be transfixed by, and so it's perhaps fitting that Imperial the book is a sprawling work wrought over a decade by an author who cannot bring himself to believe wholeheartedly in anything Imperial has ever stood for, but cannot bring himself to leave it alone either.

I don't know that I could recommend this book, exactly, to anyone. But if the gaze of a confident man is set upon this course, well, there's hardly anything I could say to turn you from it. Nor would I, perhaps. This world needs those seekers who do not doubt themselves.

Imperial the book is a tangled mess of borders, of histories, of loss, of people whose faces are right before you but still unknowable, or maybe familiar but just out of reach of the faded photograph's point of focus; of fragments of dreams that were and stories that never were, lives that are lived only in the records they left or lives that were lived beyond the reach of our records at all. Of course, I think William T. Vollman would agree that Imperial the county, Imperial the land, Imperial that resists all attempts at delineation; Imperial is all of those things, too.

Imperial is sprawling, contradictory, and intense. Parts wildly compelling, others poorly (and idiosyncratically) edited and dull. But in the best parts -- when Vollmann's talking with people otherwise unheard, or with people who are lying and misdirecting -- it's a good read. If you can make it through the other bits (the statistics, tables, oddly-conceived historical reconstructions, tedious font choices, removal of personal boundary, rambling). ( )

He wrote an article in Harper's that made me want more. I had a long think with myself between paper and electronic. Though I prefer anything with a lot of charts and illustrations on paper, I went for the electronic edition to avoid carrying the brick. This made the swim to the other side unencumbered such that I could sprawl as freely as the book. However, had this been an older book with a certain kind of smell, a name scrawled in the front, some underlinings and marginalia, I would have carried the brick. Those are sensual details pertaining to books I find hard to resist. The presence of a previous reader is pleasant company on a long trek.
This trek was worth it. Vollman is a fine writer with the very fine ability of keeping me fascinated by a subject I thought held no interest for me. It is a masterpiece among studies of place. It makes me want to take Prairy Erth (William Least Heat Moon) down from the shelf for a reread. And there's the water. I will never see any body of water quite the same again. ( )

i am currently on page 490, chapter 74 and i cannot put this book down (because it would crush my lap)just j/k! this book is comforting to me as well as informative, i learn more about the histories my own state of california through vollmann's eyes...the agriculture, the relations or lack thereof with the people of mexico, how water matters and where it is these days. he is always present in the book but to me that is heartening because i trust him as a guide. this is not encyclopedia brittanica.....and he knows that...though he does quote from the eb often enough...there is humor often here and often here there is beauty in the way he describes the light falling on palms, mexicans enjoying a quinceanera. he looks for truths in his own ways...rafting down the new river in all of its glorious pollution, searching for chinese tunnels in mexicali no many how many people tell him they do not exist.
he doesn't play sides, though i am certain when the rest of the world eventually reads this they may disagree as is their wont. he also does not hold his opinions back, they are evident as recurrent phrases that form mantras that follow you throughout.
less than halfway through and i am fearing the end..like all good books...

The book is 1,306 long pages, divided into 13 Parts, with a 24-page bibliography, a 17-page chronology, a list of people Vollmann interviewed, and 112 pages of notes. It is longer than 'Infinite Jest' or 'Science and Sanity' (two books I have always associated), but shorter than 'The Anatomy of Melancholy.'

1
These are thoughts about Part One, 'Introductions,' which is itself 182 pages long, and divided into 12 chapters. This Part really is a single long introduction, and it reads as a coherent, if not unified, essay. The question it raised for me, at first intermittently and then insistently, was: What motivation could I have to read the other 12 Parts of the book? Aside, that is, from the motivation I might have if I were treating this like James Mitchener's 'Texas,' which is incidentally exactly 16 pages longer than 'Imperial,' a fact that couldn't possibly have escaped Vollmann. That motivation would be to learn about the history of Imperial County, and its current politics, sociology, linguistics, botany, geology, and other statistics, all arranged in a nicely palatable fictionalized form. That wouldn't be my motivation in reading past Part One of 'Imperial,' partly because I am not that interested in Imperial County (it is, as Vollmann knows so well, not exactly a picturesque or relaxing place), but also because I doubt that in five or seven hundred more pages I might be convinced that Imperial County is a microcosm of the United States -- especially because Vollmann flirts with that idea and nicely rejects it.

Other reasons for reading past Part One? 'Imperial' is not a novel, and in fact chapter 11 of Part One sets out that argument in a very entertaining fashion, imagining how Flaubert or Steinbeck might have written 'Imperial,' and reminding itself (that is, Vollmann reminds himself) that novels always end up being just what the novelist intended, that they are opportunistically assembled from minor travesties against truth. So if you were to read 'Imperial' in hopes of finding the ruined and bleached skeleton of the postmodern 'Moby-Dick' (a comparison Vollmann himself makes, as if just to stave off the inevitable reviewer's remark), you would be reading against the grain. Which is, as Vollmann would say, entirely your business.

A third reason to continue reading past Part One: to find out what new genre he is creating. Vollmann is past master at what is superficially called the postmodern 'game' of authorial awareness, forever talking about the book called 'Imperial' that he hopes, hoped, and still might hope to write, and playing themes and variations with irrelevancies, digressions, apostrophes, and inappropriate but irresistible stories. So people who read Vollmann have to be interested in what kind of books he is producing -- or rather, why they are so stubbornly unclassifiable, and how interesting that stubbornness might become. I saw 'Imperial' filed in a university bookstore under 'US History,' but in those first 182 pages he tells us a lot about the 'love of his life' and how it felt to break up with her, and he gives us plenty of evidence of his interest in interviewing unreliable, uninformed, atypical people, whose 'testimony' would not make the cut in any normative history text. (He also tells us about interviews with bigots and people who have suffered, and then he's making points, but I always find the dull interviews the best: the ones where the 'informant' says he doesn't know, or isn't sure, or doesn't want to talk.) I like his unclassifiable maximalist aesthetic, but it is not a reason to read the entire book: in fact if that is what drew me to Vollmann, I would happily stop after Part One because that Part so clearly frames the genreless category and ambitions of the book, and so clearly samples most or all of its major voices and styles.

But I have a fourth reason to continue reading past Part One, even though it also isn't a reason to continue reading all thirteen Parts. His writing is stupendous. His prose is sharp and parsimonious (note that: the writing continuously refreshes itself, and never, in the first 182 pages, feels like it will need the crutches of statistics or long quotations to make it to the end). He looks and thinks with every line. This is not a reason to read the book in its entirety, because it has nothing to do with criteria of unity or coherence, and it does not justify the book's exact length: but it does justify the book's relative length, and it is enough to prompt me to read one more Part.

2
And these are thoughts about Part Eleven, 'Postscripts,' pp. 827-990. This is the second, and last, section of the book I expect to read. I have been wondering -- page by page, while I'm supposed to be paying attention to what he's telling me -- about what he expected his ideal reader to be thinking. And to the extent that I can understand how he imagined his ideal reader, I realize that I won't ever really understand such a reader.

One thing an ideal reader is clearly not supposed to be thinking is: This is second-rate reporting, so I'll go and read something written by a better investigator. In the chapter on the maquiladores, Vollmann fails, again and again, to get any definitive information. He buys a spy camera, and tells us for pages and pages how it doesn't work; in the end he gets videos, but they are too blurry to be of much use, and he can't transfer them to his computer anyway. Over and over, interviews are inconclusive, and the people he talks to are ill-informed. An ideal reader is not meant to think: This isn't necessarily a bigger picture, or a more balanced picture: it's just an incomplete picture. So an ideal reader must be meant to be sensitive to some gathering larger truth, one that is accumulates in narrative asides, in intrusions of expressive writing, in the often unaccountable divisions into chapters and numbered sections. At one point Vollmann writes: 'Like most human records, this account essentially recounts failure.' (p. 905) Well, an ideal reader apparently would take that as poetry, and as an elegant admission of every writer's limitations. But in order for such a reading to happen, it is important not to also think that things could have been managed better, that some failures are more partial than others: and how is it possible not to think that? What notion of maximalist writing can possibly be that capacious, that forgiving? What kind of reader could come across a tightly written story like 'German's Story' (pp. 901-904) and not wonder, in retrospect, about the hundreds of pages of loose, unaffecting, unpersuasive, but impeccably indulgent maximalist overspill in the pages before it?

In short: I am baffled when I try to picture Vollmann's concept of his ideal reader, but as the book proceeds I can hardly think of anything else. On p. 887, Vollmann writes: 'like many other insane people I long to be considered 'balanced.'' 'Imperial' is balanced, in an obvious and respectable way, because Vollmann always tries to present both sides of every issue. But so do many journalists. If I think Vollmann is 'insane,' I don't think so in the way he apparently intends, which is that he's excessive, obsessive, compulsive, and dedicated without limits. I think he is 'insane' because his enterprise depends on not thinking in any plausible way about any plausibly reflective reader. ( )