Vollmann's 'moral calculus'

Rising Up and Rising Down

By William T. Vollmann

McSweeney's, 7 vols., illustrated, $120

For the past decade, it seemed Sacramento-based novelist William T. Vollmann was neck and neck in a war of prolificacy with Richard Powers, David Foster Wallace, and anyone else who would take him on. With "Rising Up and Rising Down," he has put the issue to rest.

No other American writer alive today is as crazy and as productive and as willing to risk his life as Vollmann.

Drawing from nearly two decades of reporting (which Vollmann began as a recent Cornell graduate fighting with the mujahideen in Afghanistan), "Rising Up and Rising Down" is best described as a moral calculus for violence. Using the conflicts of the past tumultuous decade, during which America shifted from the Cold War to the war on terror, it examines when violence is justifiable, and when it is not.

In many ways, Vollmann seems the perfect writer to tackle such a large subject. In his novels and nonfiction reporting, he has fired linguistic buckshot at the strange muchness of our global society, from the march of white settlers onto the North American continent (the "Seven Dreams" series) to the underbelly of prostitution in Southeast Asia ("The Atlas"). "Rising Up and Rising Down" employs that same literary strategy of "flooding the zone" to extrapolate a theory of human behavior as it relates to violence.

Like many of Vollmann's novels, "Rising Up and Rising Down," nominated this week for a National Book Critics Circle Award, has a byzantine structure that works thematically as opposed to chronologically. The book begins in the Paris catacombs, where Vollmann immerses himself in the slimy, inescapable fact of death. It concludes with an extended riff about discrimination against the Buraku people in Japan. The project's penultimate volume includes an actual moral calculus, a tool Vollmann offers to readers contemplating an actual act of violence. Ironically, as in the 1983 film "WarGames," each exercise with the calculus reveals the pointlessness of violence in the first place.

In addition to Vollmann's writing, which is precise and grittily poetic, one of the tertiary pleasures of "Rising Up and Rising Down" is that the project provides a meandering tour of hot spots across the globe, from Cambodia to Burma, Iraq to Afghanistan, Somalia, Yemen, Yugoslavia, and Colombia, many of which Vollmann visited on journalistic assignment. The list of sources he cites in depth is simply dazzling -- from Cicero to the king of Sparta.

Although he was no doubt paid well to make some of these trips, the cost for Vollmann was high. Crossing with Vollmann from Muslim to Serb-held territory in Croatia, one of his closest friends (who was acting as a translator) was shot and killed by a sniper. Vollmann had to wait beside him in their jeep while he died. After a tense standoff, he then had to charm his friend's killers into letting him go free.

There are so many anecdotes in this book that one wonders, well, were they all necessary? Why not 350 pages, a book most people can read, rather than 3,500, a hunk of tree so large it took this reader five months in front of his keyboard (the book was sent out in advance as a CD-ROM) to complete? My eyeballs are still watering.

The answer to that falls smack into the demilitarized zone of a reader's patience. There are ways to depict excess without excess, but the sheer girth of "Rising Up and Rising Down" demands the kind of commitment, fabulous commitment, only size can give. Wading through the conflicts and violence and torture that Vollmann analyzes in this book forces a reader to give him- or herself over to their awful reality. There is no quick in-and-out; Vollmann rubs our noses in it.

This would be a cruel, almost mean experiment were Vollmann not giving himself over so freely to what he sees as well. He has had that naked feeling of having a target painted on the back of his head by a sniper in the Balkans, but he's willing to risk it to experience what in America we only read about. His openness and curiosity inspire ours; his pain becomes ours, too.

Still, the greatest anguish in "Rising Up and Rising Down" comes not from Vollmann, but from the people he interviews. They are crushed and scoured by the weight of war. In one section, he talks to a woman whose boyfriend was cut into pieces by Croats: "No one has a chance to open my heart again," she says.

"This is what violence does," Vollmann writes in response. "This is what violence is. It is not enough that death reeks and stinks in the world, but now it takes on inimical human forms, prompting the self-defending survivors to strike and to hate, rightly or wrongly." In spite of its great intentions, "Rising Up and Rising Down" can never end that cycle. It does help us understand it, though, and that glimmer of empathy is a start.

John Freeman is a writer in New York. His reviews have appeared in The Independent on Sunday, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal.