I don't have a grand point I want to make about The Rainbow Stories, other than what point my rant about his sentences arrived at. I don't think Vollmann's necessarily a pusher of grand points, anyway, so if I had one, it would probably mean I'd entirely missed the point. Still, I've got stuff to briefly discuss. There's lots of interesting stuff going on in Vollmann's books, and The Rainbow Stories is no exception.
1. Where do you start reading Vollmann?
The first Vollmann book I read was Europe Central, and I read it because it won the National Book Award for 2005. Seemed as logical a place to start as any other. I later read The Ice-Shirt, the first book of the Seven Dreams series, about violent conflicts in the colonization of the Americas. Jeff then suggested trying the non-historical stuff, starting with The Rainbow Stories, followed by The Royal Family, which I do plan on reading next, sometime after I track down a copy for myself.
Moving from the historical books to the non-historical is interesting. There's similar strategies and styles at work in either mode; the mixing and manipulation of fiction and fact, for one. And it's also interesting to see the common threads between those subject fields. Vollmann's known for writing about moral decisions and violence and aggression. There's been plenty of all that in everything I've read so far.
I think, from my limited experience, were I to hand one Vollmann book to someone who had independently decided they were interested in reading the guy's stuff (I say independently because I still couldn't comfortably suggest someone put themselves through one of his books, despite the enjoyment and enlightenment I've taken from them myself), I think I'd go with Europe Central. Maybe it's just a fondness for my own starting point, or maybe retrospect has shaded out the book's lows (such as the first thirty or so pages, yech), but the highs of that book really seemed the most consistently high of the three books I've tackled this year.
As I said back in February (which, looking through this blog's archives, I now remember as being my own personal Long Dark Vollmann Night of the Soul), and yes I feel weird quoting myself, but whatever: "The loose trilogy of chapters sort of in the middle, about Vlasov ("Breakout") and Paulus ("The Last Field-Marshal") and Gerstein ("Clean Hands"), those are just incredible chunks of imaginative historical fiction, technically and aesthetically astonishing, but they're not going to make you happy." I can't point to huge chunks of either Ice or Rainbow that had me feeling that strongly (though, as will be discussed below, there are parts of Rainbow that I really do super admire). Nor are there such portions of either of those last two books that I feel any particular need to re-read or re-visit. More of an "I got what I got" feeling (even when "what I got" was "a lot").
Is this familiarity breeding contempt and/or dullness? Or does Vollmann's writing move towards a far more emotionally engaging place over the years? Something to consider whenever I hit up The Royal Family. (Or something for other Vollmann people to respond to.)
Here's an old Conversational Reading post about picking a starting point. Also, something I have heard (despite what this review says) is that the one place you really shouldn't start is Argall. ("[I]nflated prose style," indeed.)
2. Vollmann and autobiography and metafiction
The Rainbow Stories, like The Ice-Shirt, mixes pure fiction or authorial re-creation of unseen and unseeable stories with journalistic observation and the appearance of the author himself within the text.
Fascinating, right? Except, it's not. Despite the fact that the book appears to beg for discussion of meta-fiction and authorial intrusion, I'd say this is about the least interesting path along which one can discuss the book. I say this because I don't get the real sense that Vollmann is consciously choosing to do something interesting, metafictionally, or in a mixed-mode sense. I don't think he's questioning the form of the book or challenging us to perceive the concept of story in a new way. I feel like he's just doing things because they're there to be done. When he needs to have something be seen by the narrator, something Vollmann himself has seen, he shows it to us through his eyes. When he needs to make stuff up to get to some point or truth, he'll make stuff up. When the two intersect, it's because he's driving them toward something else.
I liken the autobiographical elements of Vollmann's work to those of Stephen Dixon's books. Dixon, as best I can tell, never names himself a character in any of his work, but he does (from what I've picked up, from interviews and articles and the like) directly inject aspects of himself and his life and his observation into his fiction. He manipulates these things freely, or he'll make things up. But I don't feel like he himself sees these techniques as being in themselves interesting. What he does is what he does to get the story on the page. And the story is what most matters.
What I'm trying to say is that the "question of autobiography" in the work of these writers isn't exactly not worth asking, but that it's ultimately far less interesting than it might seem. Yet it's certainly interesting in the case of other authors--such as David Foster Wallace, who put himself into one of the stories collected in Oblivion. From him, yes, that's fascinating stuff, in part because he's never done that before, and to see it happen in a story now, at this point in his career, is distracting and slightly shocking; in part because I suspect Wallace is far more interested in the form of the art on the page and the reader's interaction with it and the author behind the text in a specific cultural setting than Dixon or Vollmann are.
But this is all hunch and guesswork on my part. You could mount an argument against my take on Dixon--he did name a book I., after all.
Which, I just now remembered, I read this year.
Meaning I've read I. & V. in the span of a year.
Guess I'm sort of obligated to re-read Steve Erickson's Arc d'X now, huh?
3. What the book is about
When I've seen this book mentioned or discussed, the conversation tends to revolve around the urban journalism stories, those about skinheads and hookers and druggies, to the point where I've seen the book described as being entirely about those things. Let me suggest that to describe the book that way is both limiting and misleading.
Here's what I see the book being about: things that happen in hospitals; skinheads and modern-day Nazis; a terrorist and a scientist; hookers and hooker culture and strippers; three brothers in an ancient time captured by Egyptians and facing threat of death for not converting religiously; a Korean girl involved with a Caucasian boy (Vollmann?); a murderous thief in ancient Multan; a guy who steals and marries his neighbor's green dress; what happens when you put your female skinhead friend and your Korean girlfriend in the same room together at a party; a schizophrenic guy who murders homeless people; a group of people who create combat robots, and a young boy's experiences during World War II; something about a purple haired girl who reads philosophy; and, finally, some super screwed up X-rays.
Or, as Vollmann puts it in the opening line of the book, "These stories are about skinheads, X-ray patients, whores, lovers, fetishists and other lost souls."
I think it's those last two words you can use if you need a compact description of the book. It's about lost souls. It's about broken people, breaking people, a society violent with and against itself. To focus too heavily on the skinheads or the prostitutes is to ignore the connectedness the book begs us to seek. The "rainbow" motif of the book is made up of many colors in a continuum.
It's too bad, though, that for all that, there's big parts of the book (the purple haired girl story, the recreated myths) that are sort of annoying and dull. Makes it hard to hold up the various parts with equal emphasis and weight. This is an imperfect, uneven book, definitely.
4. Making connections
It was worth clarifying the contents of the book and bringing up the idea of making connections because I think two of the most successful "stories" in the book deal precisely with making connections, and are both stories that have (almost) nothing whatsoever to do with skinheads or prostitutes.
As usual, when discussing Vollmann, I'm not sure "enjoy" is the best word to use. But for lack of a better word--I highly enjoyed "Red Hands," which describes an Irish terrorist and his escape to America, alongside a description of a researcher killing mice for science; and "The Indigo Engineers," which describes Survival Research Laboratories (Google it--they still exist) and its members' fascinations with creating violent death-robots, while relating the stories of a man who, as a boy, was present in Warsaw during World War II, and who repeatedly escaped death during that time.
It's all damned fascinating and difficult stuff, the second story far more so than the first. Here's where Vollmann really shines, in this book, is in his ability to find things that might not seem immediately related on the surface, and by letting the stories essentially tell themselves, together but separate, allows us to find the relationship between them.
He's best when he doesn't weigh down the tale in his own meandering, heavy-weighted prose. And it's when Vollmann's doing things like this that it's most obvious to me that he's doing more than writing to see himself write. (Kids, when your writing teacher says you should never use two words when you can use one? They're talking about this sort of thing.)
5. Vollmann gets personal
And yet, despite what I just said, and despite what I said before about the autobiographical question being uninteresting, where I found myself most engaged with the book was in those chapters that dealt with Vollmann's relationship with a Korean girlfriend. Factual? Not factual? Not sure, don't care. I call the narrator Vollmann because it feels like Vollmann talking about things that happened to him. Maybe it's all made up. I don't know.
Really: whatever. It's in the Jenny chapters that the voice of the book most easily connects with the reader, in which the prose most breathes easy, and in which the story is most simply story, as in something one person tells another. That the disparate threads of both the first Jenny story and the story about skinheads are brought together in the second Jenny story, and that those threads are ultimately connected in the sudden and sharp tug of a knot at the end of that story makes for one of the most intriguing, compelling, and fascinating literary moments I've come across. It's sharp, because he knows precisely where to stop putting words down. The white space following the last line of the story is a depth into which those last words drop the reader. It's startling stuff.
It's the sort of thing that doesn't exactly forgive or justify some of the crap Vollmann spills onto other pages. But it does make them at least that much easier to overlook, in time.
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