Thirteen Stories and Thirteen Epitaphs

Vollmann brings extraordinary investigative and verbal energies to these tasks, as well as a persisting youthfulness. He can wax lyrical, as at the conclusion of "In Omaha," a return to the heartland where prairie grasses and family values are being tentatively re-introduced:

. . . golden grass rose head-high, and so did golden cockleburs like fruits, and the silver down of seed thistles. . . . The grass reached up to the sky. . . . Nothing was being hurt like my grandmother. . . . You could bend a grass-stalk double without hurting it; but when you bent it sharply against itself it snapped in two.

In this disjunctive portrait of the young artist and his fragmented world, many characters are snapped in two: Elaine Suicide of "The Ghost of Magnetism" and "The Handcuff Manual," the erotically obsessed Ken of "The Bad Girl," the lapsed intelligence operative Nicholas of "Tropicana." The narrator remains constant, if not exactly steady, as his friends vanish, reappear, expire. Vollmann, like Toulouse Lautrec, loves the coloration of his urban world of drugs, booze, massage parlors, bondage, imperialism. The reader may occasionally mutter, "I guess you had to have been there," and the Joycean techniques are sometimes more annoying than original, but a prodigy can be forgiven for wanting to preserve even the exercises of his formative years.

"Gun City" is a tad too topical and politically correct, like the later Martin Amis establishing his distance from the nastiness he satirizes. Vollmann is at his strongest, like the early Martin Amis, when we feel that nothing human (or very little) is alien to him. His narrators are least attractive when there is the hint of one more bright literary herd in search of material.

His San Francisco self-congratulation cloys, at least for this Southern Californian, but it is refreshing to encounter an uncynical "Epitaph for JFK" where one might least expect it. And the concluding tour de force, "The Grave of Lost Stories," in which Poe falls victim to his own conceptions, may attain classic status among aficionados of the genre. One wonders, however, if it will not prove the valediction to his origins, as, already a novelist, he accedes to the attractions of that roomier and more lucrative form or the immediacy of the no-longer-new journalism.

GERALD LOCKLIN California State University, Long Beach

COPYRIGHT 1995 Studies in Short Fiction
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning