BootsnAll Travel Community

Hell yeah

. A reporter in the tradition of Orwell, Stephen Crane, and Hemingway, Vollman travels to war zones, interviews terrorists, sails hazardous rivers teeming with toxins (as told in "The Water of Life," the Reader's excerpt from a work in progress about California's Imperial Valley). He feeds a bottomless appetite for risk by questing after firsthand experience where one's very survival is at stake. He rescued a child from a Thai brothel by kidnapping her; he nearly froze to death in the Arctic; he lived through a mine exploding beneath his jeep in Bosnia (two other passengers, including a friend he'd known for nineteen years, weren't so lucky). He courts danger, but is never ostentatiously reckless. He is no testosterone-fueled "cowboy," addicted to kicks. An attentive observer, he is an even better listener, often writing as a sort of ethnographer of the outcast, an oral historian of despised, abused, or otherwise marginal populations: Greenland and Canadian Inuit, skinheads, yakuza foot soldiers, and above all the girls, transvestites, and women in "the life," the variegated and deeply respected array of prostitutes that inspired the novels Whores for Gloria, Butterfly Stories, and The Royal Family. He craves understanding through contact, seeking out encounters that provide the grounding for his ethics, scorning all judgments that are based on moral abstractions without the corroboration of experience. In "Some Thoughts on the Value of Writing During Wartime," a lecture given in November 2002, he advised writers, "Whatever you write about, let your subjects teach you in their own way, and show them that you have learned it and respect it. Let them be round characters always." He went on to make a disarmingly straightforward suggestion, but one that in the present atmosphere comes across as nearly utopian: "In these times, any one of you who feels inclined to risk a little and learn a lot should travel to an Islamic country to make friends and to learn, not to teach. . . . You should get to know them well enough to understand why what they believe is plausible to them, and you should explain their views to other Americans as sympathetically and as accurately as you can."

For all his audacious travels, Vollmann's feats never come across as exhibitionistic. Acutely aware of human vulnerability, he seems incapable of swagger. He never attempts to hide his physical awkwardness. As a reporter confronting degradation and atrocity, his forthright, unidealized self-presentation is alien to the school of writer-adventurers to which he belongs. We know from his fiction that he can write in any register, delighting in baroque metaphors and elaborate prose fantasias, so the account of his 1992 visit to besieged Sarajevo in The Atlas is all the more powerful for its plainspoken restraint:

I wasn't afraid of being shot there anymore. I feared only getting my stomach blown open. In general, of course, I remained just as afraid. A week later, when I was standing outside one of the apartment buildings near the front, waiting for my friend Sami to buy vodka, I felt a sharp impact on the crown of my head. Reaching up to explore the wound, I felt wetness. I took a deep breath. I brought my hand down in front of my eyes, preparing myself to see blood. But the liquid was transparent. Eventually I realized that the projectile was merely a peach pit dropped from a fifteenth-floor window.

There's a long tradition of writers, Hemingway and Faulkner among them, who have exaggerated war wounds or fabricated them altogether. But in this passage, or even more so when he discusses the mine exploding beneath his jeep in Bosnia, there is no self-aggrandizement on Vollmann's part. Neither is there the suggestion that as war correspondent he's some sort of heroic witness, nor even the subtle egotism of someone who takes pride in surviving a brush with death. He grieves for the friend killed in the explosion but recognizes, as he told one interviewer, "It was just an average sort of war murder." There may be something protective about his detachment, but even so, he is not striking a pose; his treks to the outposts of extremity—not just war zones and remote Arctic islands but also those right in our midst, such as the crack hotels of American cities—only confirm what he already knows, that death and suffering are everywhere, so often meaningless and so rarely redemptive. "Political death, cancer death," he writes in Rising Up and Rising Down, "it's all the same."