The Atlas
By William T. Vollmann
Viking, 459 pages, $29.95
In 1989, Tom Wolfe raised a stink when he wrote (in Harper’s) that novelists should stop examining their navels and go out and get some real experience, do research like an ace journalist, so their work would have some socio-historical depth. I doubt that William T. Vollmann’s phantasmagoric novels are what Wolfe had in mind, but he certainly does get around.
In 1982, barely out of college, Vollmann traveled to war-torn Afghanistan to see what he could do to help, a romantically naive experience described in his nonfiction book “An Afghanistan Picture Show.” Later in the ’80s he began exploring Greenland and Canada for the early volumes of his “Seven Dreams” series of historical novels. In recent years he has been sent by magazines such as Esquire and Spin to the world’s hot spots–Somalia, Bosnia, Thailand, Los Angeles after the Rodney King riots–often at considerable risk. (He narrowly missed being hit by snipers in Croatia; his two companions were killed.) All of these travels inform his latest work of fiction, “The Atlas.”
The book is difficult to categorize: It resembles a short-story collection in that there are 55 stories, most of them made up of four or five brief vignettes–the prose equivalents of postcards or vacation slides–linked by a particular image or memory. It is like a gazetteer in that you can focus on particular places to read about, if you wish, for the stories are all self-contained. It is also a mathematically structured fiction like Georges Perec’s “Life: A User’s Manual” or John Barth’s “Letters.” As Vollmann explains in the preface, the book is organized like a palindrome–a sentence that reads the same backwards and forwards. (“Able was I ere I saw Elba,” Napoleon reputedly said.) That is, the first story is linked to the last, the second to the penultimate, and so on. At the center of the novel “The Atlas” is a story called “The Atlas,” which weaves together episodes from the rest of the book.
But the book “The Atlas” also resembles a novel in that it explores the psychic landscape of a single narrator (never named, but pretty clearly Vollmann), a man who is reminded of the world within by the troubled world at large.
The narrator travels the world over to escape from an overwhelming sense of loss and to find some sort of enduring love. By turns holy fool and ugly American, he meets a wide variety of people and has numerous adventures, most of them dismal. Occasionally he experiences moments of beauty and rapture (especially in the chapter-story “Exalted by the Wind”), but mostly what he encounters are reminders of losses (his dead sister, the various women he has loved, former friends). Brooding on the Thames a century ago, Joseph Conrad’s Marlow, another world traveler, announced, “And this also has been one of the dark places of the earth.” Vollmann likewise is concerned with the dark places of the earth, and the heart of darkness within. They say travel expands one’s horizons, but it also brings into sharper focus our limitations, our inability to connect with others in a meaningful way. As in Conrad’s novella, an air of desolation and despair hangs over Vollmann’s “Atlas.”
The geographic range is extensive: Australia, Burma, Egypt, India, Italy, Japan, Madagascar, Mexico, Vatican City–he seems to have been everywhere. (There are even stories set in Limbo and “The Sphere of Stars.”) The stylistic variety is just as wide. Some chapters, like “The Red Song,” are lyrical and surrealistic. “The Hill of Gold” imitates the King James Bible, even to verse numbering. Some stories are rendered in straightforward reportage, others in a stream-of-consciousness style that can be difficult to follow. The book is thus an atlas of narrative styles and rhetorical devices, from allegory to zeugma. If nothing else, “The Atlas” offers further proof that Vollmann is perhaps the most stylistically daring writer working today.
The cross-cutting between several locales within the same story can be disorienting, like being on a whirlwind tour and seeing too many places in too short a period. But at its best, the technique is revelatory: for example, one of the best stories, “Under the Grass,” opens with the narrator brooding on the day in 1968 when his negligence led to his sister’s drowning in a pool. (Sad to say, this tragedy actually occurred when Vollmann was a boy, as he once revealed in an interview.) Buried under the New England grass, his sister becomes a combination of spirit guide and ghost to haunt the boy: “Now you’re my white witch,” he says, like a narrator in one of Poe’s tales (evoked here by the lush, Gothic prose). From there we jump to an airport in Mauritius 25 years later, where the narrator is so fatigued and disoriented that he asks the authorities how to find his sister, a request that leads to comic misunderstandings and ends with a taxi driver assuming the narrator wants a prostitute. Then we jump to Thailand in the same year, at a bar for prostitutes, where the narrator is feeling good for having recently “rescued a child-prostitute from a nightmarish brothel in the south.” (This was the subject of a photo-essay Vollmann contributed to Spin in 1993.) He has sex with a prostitute, then dreams of seeing his sister’s coffin, and wakes up “either screaming or thinking I was screaming,” realizing that his rescuing exploit was a failed attempt to appease the spirit of the sister he failed to rescue 25 years ago. The story concludes in the catacombs of Rome, back in Poe territory (this story is a micro- palindrome mirroring the macro-palindrome of the book), where the narrator envisions a gruesome resurrection for his sister, only to see her metamorphose into the presiding spirit of “the girls from Firenze who drink the sun . . . the girls who sing a-la-la-la! and `Ciao, Maria.’ ” A puzzling but cathartic ending to a moving story.
For those who have followed Vollmann’s career, “The Atlas” will recall his “Rainbow Stories” and “Thirteen Stories” and “Thirteen Epitaphs.” He also revisits some of the people and places of earlier novels of his. Those who don’t know his work might begin with “The Atlas.” It functions as a summation of his characteristic themes and settings, a display of his stylistic range, and an unsettling, unforgettable tour of the world according to Vollmann.
