Poor People

If you imagine poverty as the planet's oceans, William Vollman is like a world-traveling fisherman who drops a line in wherever he happens to be and writes a chapter about whatever he pulls out. A quiet gem, Poor People is not, and does not attempt to be, a definitive authority on poverty. Vollman is discursive -- teleporting from one cultural vacuum to another, leaving nothing behind. Vollman's savage questions pound half-full and hapless and interview subjects alike, often proving nothing but the details of their own, even more savage poverty. There is no white-coat research, no Oxfam validation, no meticulously nuanced position to be debated in letters to The Nation. So far as positions, indeed whether Vollman ever takes much of a position on anything in Poor People in the end is itself difficult to discern, and what any such position might be a bona fide head-scratcher. So it is that Vollman makes a refreshingly raw break from the prosaic formulae of most contemporary sociological non-fiction. You know it: (i) settle upon a hypothesis to explain some social phenomenon; (ii) gather demonstrative anecdotal evidence; (iii) amass plausible statistics and quotes from credentialed sources to portray the anecdotal evidence as representative of larger patterns; then (iv) explain what the world ought to do with the alarming information you've presented. Voila! NY Times bestseller list. Takes a genuine talent like Vollman to smash that paradigm, and smash it he does: the language is hard, the evidence is harder, and somehow the point gets across. Help is most definitely NOT on the way.

You may assume that this book is meant to be a cultural or social study of poor people, with an economic analysis of their hardships, and that seems to be the approach taken by most of the reviewers. But the book could be considered a work of modern philosophy, and if you look at it in this fashion, Vollmann's writing is strangely compelling and surprisingly effective. It's true that his style is difficult to penetrate, as he frequently goes off on dubious rhetorical tangents, obsesses over obscure and rambling literary references, and talks about himself way too much. Many readers will be reasonably turned off by Vollmann's very personality, but I propose that he has positioned himself as the comfortable "everyhuman" who knows that poverty is a problem but does not know how or whether to do anything about it. Thus he is a philosophical stand-in for the typical western reader of his book. And while his questions toward his subjects are presumptive and occasionally condescending, Vollmann also deftly avoids the scientist's trap of self-defined observation and lets the humanity of his subjects shine through. Vollmann also pulls off some fairly impressive journalism here as he strolls through fearsome world locations where anthropologists fear to tread, including the mobster-infested alleys of Tokyo and an array of bars and brothels. Another treasure of this book are the 128 photographs of Vollmann's subjects, which are often unflattering, but also unassuming and brutally realistic. I am particularly haunted by many of the photos of children. If this book were a strict cultural study of poor people that attempted to propose idealistic solutions to endemic economic inequalities, I would side with many of the other reviewers here and give it the thumbs-down for its rambling and immodesty. But as a work of philosophy, in which Vollmann explores why we don't have the answers and probably never will, the book is oddly powerful and incredibly thought-provoking. [~doomsdayer520~]

As I sat down to write this review my cat interrupted me, asking for her dinner. The reading of Vollmann's book heightened my awareness of the seemingly innocuous choice of keeping pets at a time when the world's impoverished population increases. [Business Week magazine estimates that Americans spend $41 billion a year on pets; that's higher than the GDPs of all but 64 nations] Vollmann's book affords a look at what most of us who live in at least a modicum of comfort don't like to see: those who live without. Even though this book-mediated confrontation spares us the difficulties of actual contact -- the smell, the begging, the guilt of rejecting a demand for help -- it is still an arduous encounter. At the back of the book are 128 photos taken by the author as he pursued his worldwide quest to meet and understand the poor. It's hard to look at them. Vollmann concedes that some readers find his writing difficult, and some reviewers on this page agree. I didn't find the narrative hard to read in that sense. The pace is frenetic, going back and forth to different areas of the globe, establishing commonalities among the poor; but therein is one of the book's strengths, reflecting the frenetic historical attempts to understand and solve world poverty, picked up and put down. And the poor themselves have varied notions of their circumstances: some say it's their own fault, others blame the government, others think it's karma, and on it goes. Vollmann often allows the language of his interviewees to seep into his own, which is another potential source of confusion. Since most of the book is an account of his close contact with the poor, there is little of an academic nature apart from Vollmann's citing of a UN report that -- briefly stated -- calls for more aid, better directed. Twas ever thus, even before Jonathan Swift satirized attempts to solve the problem with his Modest Proposal. Vollmann similarly has little faith in existing remedies and doesn't offer his own; after all, he admits near the end, "I don't believe that most of us know what anything means." Thus, no simple answers like one of Mother Teresa's: people just don't want to share. But Vollmann gets off some sharp insights and, scholar that he is or was, includes many pertinent references from Thoreau, Montaigne, and others who've studied the problem in the past. The poor that Vollmann meets have moments of gladness amid their sadness, and some of the rich he knows are sad because they want more than they already have.

The author of this book, William T. Vollmann, has won the National Book Award, the Pen Center USA West Award for Fiction, a Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize and a Whiting Writer's Award. He describes his own life in the kind of degraded neighborhood he so assiduously explores in POOR PEOPLE, an area of Sacramento where people have tunneled under the modern city into the beehive of the 19th-century sub-city. They break holes in the walls of the pawnshops to re-steal stolen articles and resell them to buy drugs. Vollman's apartment windows have "mesh over the bars," and before the mesh he was unable to take tinfoil off the window panes without being encroached on by his ever-watchful neighbors. This experience, which of course he takes on by choice, has not sullied his view of the poor, with whom, throughout this long, lyrical and often tortured look at what makes people poor, he is always sympathetic. Vollman describes an encounter with an "armless man who knelt beside the topmost step of a pedestrian overpass in Bangkok...using his teeth for his hands, begging submissively." When he discovers that the man has cleverly folded his arms behind him, Vollman could feel cheated of the coins he'd been dropping in his cup; but he realizes that the man needs the money more than he does. "I continued to pay the tithe, and with a cheerful heart." Vollman uncovers every sort of poverty as he ranges through the urban and rural byways of the world. Some, it seems, is systemic, generational; other poverty has come by the bad luck of political upheaval or through personal misjudgments. Many poor people have a belief system that allows them to accept being poor; others lash out in anger at their fate. Consider "the old man in Tokyo who sat on the sidewalk reading a comic book and stinking of urine." The author asked him his perennial question: Why are you poor? The old man "threw his comic book on the ground and shouted: It's my fault! Nobody else's responsibility!" A prostitute guide led him through the backstreets of Nan Ning, China, and introduced him to a group of dispossessed farmers who had been given property deeds by Mao and now, under the new regime, have to buy new ones at a price they can't afford. There is a picture of one such man (the book is enhanced by black-and-white photographs) holding his old deed, and on his face is an expression that hides, to the Western eye, the fury he expressed. The prostitute's wise advice to the poor: "Everything you should do by yourself." But how can that advice help the California squatter who had to go to court to answer to the charge of cracking a windshield and came home to find his dog choked to death on its leash? Vollmann opines, "A mansion, a new Mercedes and a professional dogwalker would have almost infallibly prevented these particular ills." POOR PEOPLE is a slow, subtle travelogue through the world of poverty that lies just beyond the parts of our planet that surround our airports, car rental agencies

There are a lot of people that don't like to read Vollman, insisting that his focus on the seedier sides of life color his observations in a way that makes them unaccessible to average readers. His tendency to write long books keeps another group on the bench. For those that are willing to work a little and not expect to be entertained Vollman is something completely different, we see him as this generations Joyce, Dickens or Melville. Poor People shines a harsh light on another area that makes regular folks uncomfortable, and let's the people tell their story. Not in straight prose as we wish they could, but in the mutterings and actions that is all that their deprived lives provided them to work with, depriving the critics in tunr of the plots and meanings that are usually spelled out for them by the mainstream authors. Once again as in Whores for Gloria, Rising Up and Rising Down, Europe Central and Royal Family that preceded Poor People, I find myself thinking of the nuances and implications of this book and the hard answers that Vollman refused to supply like another Chopra or Thomas L. Friedman sermon on how we should feel and what a great future we have if we don't look into the rough spots that aren't so clean and orderly. Vollman's writing is like a bad accident in some ways, you feel guilty if you look and as if your missing something if you don't. In this case you are missing something if you don't look, one of the most important writers and thinkers of our times.