The Big Book

Page 16 American Book Review Imperial William T. Vollmann Viking http://www.penguin.com 1,344 pages; cloth, $55.00 William T. Vollmann has been labeled a postmodernist , maximalist, metafictionist, contemporary and historical novelist, pornographer, journalist, cultural /social critic, travel writer, and autobiographer (also an accomplished photographer, engraver, water colorist, printer, bookbinder, poet, and manufacturer of his own bullets for his pistol). His latest tome, Imperial , is the result of ten years of obsessive research, riding on the coattails of success after the National Book Award-winning Europe Central (2005) and the 2008 Strauss Living Award (sharing the honor with Madison Smartt Bell). In 1997, Vollmann discovered the Anza-Borrego desert in California and the neighboring county of Imperial that encompasses thousands of acres of desolate desert, the contaminated Salton Sea, a curious mixture of Mexican, Chinese, and Indian culture, as well as the volatile and controversial issues of the US/Mexican border and the “illegal migrant worker” conditions and human rights. Similar to Vollmann’s career, Imperial cannot be framed into any compact genre: part journalism , part ethnography, part memoir, part cultural study, part political manifesto, part prose poem, it is a logical extension of his previous two books: Poor People (2007), where some of the migrant workers in Imperial County make an appearance, and Riding Toward Everywhere (2008), where Vollmann hops trains in, or rides on trains that pass through, Imperial County. Vollmann searches for what may or may not exist during his decade-long jaunts into a region whose name (much like another county, Inland Empire , not far north of Imperial) ironically conjures up images of majestic colonialism. For migrant workers in Latin America, Imperial represents the American Dream, a path out of poverty, a promised land of blue skies and green hills; crossing over, they find a harsh land with little work, and sometimes return home or are caught by la migra and forced back to Mexico. Vollmann also searches for the Chinese tunnels under the two border towns Calexico (US side) and Mexicali. The Chinese communities on the border and the outskirts of the Salton Sea are descendants of the Chinese railroad workers of nineteenth-century expansion. No one talks about the tunnels, many treat them as urban legends, yet Vollmann uncovers evidence that the Chinese folk on the border did indeed use tunnels to smuggle in goods, drugs, people, and engage in illegal gambling (and possibly still do). Casting himself as a “private investigator,” Vollmann outfits a spy camera in the shape of a shirt button (paid for by Playboy magazine) and infiltrates a “sweat shop” to uncover the true conditions of those seeking theAmerican Dream: Mexican women forced into backbreaking labor for little pay. Vollmann also searches for himself: inevitably, over a decade, the events in Vollmann’s life, and his experiences while in Imperial, change his outlook. He finds the invisible county, state, and country lines of the region “delineations and subdelineations” in the lives of the people he meets, and his own life, so that this book forms itself as it goes. Fields, cemeteries, newspapers and death certificates beguile and delay me; I don’t care that I’ll never finish anything; Imperial will scour them away with its dry winds and the brooms of its fivedollars -an-hour laborers…. Imperial is what I want it to be….. The desert is real…but there is no such place as Imperial; and I, who don’t belong there, was never anything but a word-haunted ghost. Claiming that “books are whatever we want them to be,” and that this book has multiple labels and layers, Vollmann imagines an Imperial in his mind, an ideal place, in contrast to the physical Imperial County. It is a place where Vollmann gets away from his domestic life in Sacramento, his image as a major American writer, his role as the danger-seeking journalist , a place where “I know that I’ll sleep happily and well.” “Imperial is the father and son who sit high and gently swinging in one car of the otherwise unoccupied ferris wheel which reigns over a sandy night carnival,” he muses. Imperial is also a space where he finds and loses...