Argall: Volume 3 of Seven Dreams: A Book of North American Landscapes

it would be a mistake to expect a casual read. Argall is part of the Seven Dreams series. it's a dream world. sometimes vivid, vague, hallucinatory and incoherent. a dream is contemplative and sometimes even ponderous. to appreciate Vollmann (even his expository work), try to dream the dream. license rules here. traditional form and structure have no place. if you can allow yourself to dream, then i recommend Argall, The Ice-Shirt (Seven Dreams), and his National Book Award winning Europe Central.

William Vollmann is like the nerdiest person you knew in college or high school. He grew up to become a novelist who gained notoriety by writing in great detail about his experiences with prostitutes and having the audacity to claim that it took some sort of moral heroism for him to smoke crack with them in roach-infested transient hotels. Of course, it wouldn't do to be slumming all the time -- otherwise he'd just be another John Rechy or Bruce Benderson. So he adds Ivy League intellectual patina to these books by positioning them as meditations on the history of North America, or as reflections on how "all loving relationships are really forms of prostitution." He writes long, long books hoping that you'll be very, very impressed with him.Folks, read this book or any other book by William Vollmann and keep in mind that this is an author with a profoundly stunted emotional growth. There's nothing cute about celebrating prostitution as the "most honest form of love" -- it's sickening writing, the babbling of a man still stuck in the fantasies of adolescence who will never understand that real love transcends economic exchange into a pure giving of oneself to another. He pats himself on the back for his "ferocity," when in fact he's never really outgrown being a journal-scribbling teenager who thinks every word he scribbles needs to be published and admired. His writing amounts to one big infantile gesture of lashing out at his Mommy and Daddy -- he admits as much in his interviews -- but at the same time hoping all these books he writes will make his parents love him. It's sad.The fact that Vollmann has a big crowd of admirers says a lot about the sheep-like mentality and the moral vacancy of too many people who like cutting-edge literature. Read the bombastic praise Vollmann receives that is printed on the dustjackets of his books, and reviewers envious of his lifestyle just look like fools with the pumped-up praise that lavish on Vollmann. Go to a Vollmann reading and look around -- the people there are the sort who are hip, cynical, wear funky glasses and hate their parents, and whose main worry is keeping up with the latest slick novels and edgy CD's to hit the shelves. They have no ability to think for themselves and they are bored with life -- so they are profoundly impressed by this guy who writes about his experience with prostitutes. If you recognize yourself in this description, you need to get a life.There's a certain sort of bourgeois person who believes their life can be redeemed by writing a novel in which they'll "show 'em all" -- the 'em being Mommy and Daddy, the cool kids who rejected them in high school, the jocks who called them nerds, etc. Vollmann is the "patron saint" of this sort of misfit. I read an interview in which Vollmann stated confidently that he is as important as Shakespeare or Faulkner. He doesn't seem to understand that the self-absorbed navel-gazing of a well-read prostitute's john doesn't quite

That's the truth, I haven't even read this book. So I'm not going to tell you it's good. I'm giving Vollmann 5 stars, rather than this particular book.His Seven Dreams series has been somewhat of an insane odyssey, as a reader. The Ice-Shirt is mesmerising and terrible. I read it and felt like I'd just tried digest a pick-axe. Sharp and painful, but definitely an original thing to do with my time.Vollmann might be one of the few American authors who deserves (and is) on the Nobel longlist. His books, in this series, and outside it, explore the trenches of civilization with a passion and courage that is unequalled. The places he visits for research (the Arctic circle, Cambodia's Pol Pot regime, Bosnia, San Francisco's Tenderloin) develop into fiction and non-fiction that is both transcendental and wildly crude.He is a writer in a funny place. Somewhere between Steinbeck, Melville, Conrad, and Pynchon. His complex patterns of guilt and his sad heroics are all explored on the page, and are crushingly real and plangent.I don't know if Argall is the place to start reading Vollmann (since I haven't read it myself) but it might as well be. His books are magnificent. The first one I read was Butterfly Stories, and it broke my heart. The Atlas is amazing, and so are both his collections of stories.

Vollman's not for everyone, and that's especially true of the Seven Dreams. His partially-completed, seven volume imagination of the collision between European and Native American cultures is brilliant, ambitious, and at times dizzying. Reading Vollman can be like reading Pynchon or Gaddis; the unconventional dialogue and punctuation can seem difficult, especially if one focuses too much on a line-by-line reading. If you're willing to let yourself go and immerse yourself in the narrative, however, it is spellbinding. Moreover, once you allow yourself to get into the text, you become acclimated and find that reading becomes easier.Anyone who enjoyed the earlier volumes of Seven Dreams certainly will enjoy this one. I would rate it slightly below Fathers & Crows or The Ice-Shirt, however, as there's a repetitiveness to some of the descriptions that detracts from the overall energy. Nonetheless, a brilliant and highly enjoyable achievement.

With "Argall," Vollmann makes a triumphant return to his ambitious "Seven Dreams" series of novels, detailing the invasion of North America by Europeans and the legacy of violence and oppression they left behind. "Argall" deals with the British annexation of what they later called Virginia, and focuses on three colorful characters: Pocahontas, Capt. John Smith, and the sinister Sir Samuel Argall, who eventually kidnaps Pocahontas and introduces slavery into the New World.As the voluminous notes attest, Vollmann has done his homework and gives us what is probably the most historically accurate version of the Pocahontas story. And he does so in an astonishing re-creation of Elizabethan prose. This isn't the elegant Augustan prose adapted by Barth in "The Sot-Weed Factor" and Pynchon in "Mason & Dixon"; this is the earlier, racier prose of the young turks of Shakespeare's day like Robert Greene, Thomas Dekker, and especially Thomas Nashe. As one of Vollmann's sources says of that era, "the whole style of the day was inflated--in writing and in living" (p. 707); hence Vollmann uses a suitably inflated style that captures the age in all its vitality and vulgarity. As both a historical novel and a linguistic tour de force, "Argall" is a magnificent achievement.