Those of you who are McSweeney’s readers are well aware of William Vollmann and his quirky writing style. He’s the type of guy that you meet at a rundown coffee house and is blabbering away about the conspiracy theory of the month while you try to hide behind your magazine or text book. He’s probably got some kinda invented disorder whether it be obsessive compulsive disorder, pre-paranoid schizophrenia, or straight up wacko. He writes with an authoritative voice about everything. Everything. He’s ugly. He’s always got some beautiful girl from some foreign country helping him out as an assistant and he won’t let on whether or not she’s giving him any. He’s obviously smart; but is he wacky smart or is he really going somewhere with it? He’ll write about the history of just about everything with at times flowery description, tie it up with a bow of philosophical meditation, and then throw in a child-like sketch of a terrorist camp in Africa that he asked some guy he met in Southern Thailand to draw out for him. Scott McLemee says of Vollmann’s new 3,299-page, seven-volume book, Rising Up, Rising Down:

“It is not a work of history or of journalism. [Vollmann's] method owes little to sociology or philosophy — or, indeed, to any discipline but that of obsession.” Taken from the New York Times Book Review.

The New York Times wasn’t exactly kind in its review. They say:

“Vollmann’s announced intention is to work out a set of formulas [a 'moral calculus'] for determining whether or not violence is a legitimate response to any given situation.” Violence, for Vollmann, “is an almost metaphysical reality,” says McLemee. “History is the result of people ‘rising up’ against oppression — thereby intensifying violence, which, even when justified, causes the human condition to ‘rise down.’”

“Occasionally the strands of narrative and of theoretical reflection connect, and the author seems on the verge of really synthesizing his material. … But such passages are soon swept away by the flood of logorrhea. He is fond of the overwrought and the overwritten.” “A strange book, then. It is rigorous, like Euclidean geometry, yet twisty, like a pretzel,” says McLemee.

Despite the accusal of “logorrhea,” I have read enough Vollmann and am intrigued enough by the thesis (is violence ever justified?), that I think I will slowly peck away at the 3,299 pages. It’s a daunting task and will surely put me out of running for Reality Fuel’s “50 books in a year” forum, but finding, disproving, or simply contemplating a justification for violence could be reason enough for the endeavour. (besides, I think Faulkner has already knocked me out of the 50 book challenge).