You Bright and Risen Angels

Great book, much overlooked and underestimated by the reading public. Actually, I like it as much or better than the later work by Vollman and the comparison to Pynchon by the earlier reviewer here is apt.

I loved it. I'm sure I didn't understand all Vollmann wanted me to. The writing style, while difficult, is extraordinary. I do not have the literary background to do justice to any deep analysis, so I'll just give you a reader's appraisal. The closest comparison I can make is to David Foster Wallace's "Infinite Jest". The method of writing and the characters reminded me of "IJ" within a very few pages. I feel safe in saying that if you do not care for DFW, you will not care for this book. We are taken on a journey in an unrecognizable USA (and world). There is a bare bones description of what is happening to people and places other than that necessary for us to follow the characters through their travails. The list of characters at the beginning is of benefit so you can remind yourself of who is on what team. The other reviewers have done an excellent job of describing the story and the other literary devices. I read this at about a third of my regular reading speed, and at times had to go back to reread a page or two because I had lost the thread. To put it in a nutshell - I had fun reading this, which is my goal with any book I read.

The first 50 pages took me almost three hours to read. I was worried I made a big mistake in reading this book. And then Vollmann's world captures you. By the end my opinion had changed: this is the best book I've read.

In the way the best caricatures can tell you the truth in corrective-lens fashion--to distort the view against your own distortion so you see it plain--Vollmann's first book--which he calls not a Novel but a Cartoon--caricatures the outlandish oppression & cruelty of the human being: especially the human male, especially the American. Seeing where Vollmann's career has taken him--on a nightmarish reporter's journey through the 3rd World, into the ragged world of the San Francisco Tenderloin, deep into an ambitious 7-novel project recounting the history of the New World--it's no surprise to see his concerns with power & preterition set up here in his first work. A tale of America's dream of the bullying, Protean, endlessly inventive, heartless power of money, this Cartoon pits the authoritarian powers against the scrappy underdogs: Electricity(Power) vs. Bugs(the little guys). If this reminds you of Thomas Pynchon's fabulist ( & fabulous) Gravity's Rainbow, there's good reason. Vollmann's the next ecstatic drop running up that literary vein. Along with all this, there's the metafictional struggle to tell the story throughout, as 2 narrators (at least 2) wrestle over the helm: 1) a lowly employee with subversive tendencies & sentimentalities whose affection for the characters & obsessions about his ex-girlfriend sneak into the telling, and 2) the being who gives him dictation, the shapeshifting, immortal, amoral Big George, whose exaggerated accounts of his own adventures are a pastiche of every Big Fish tale ever spun in America's history, but who nevertheless is in the service of the kind of truth that only comes with the heartlessness of the fact that everybody (else) dies. Lodged, of course, in the best sort of eyebrow-raising fiction. I, the reviewer, am trying to tell you that I liked this book, and that I am a picky reader. But I, the writer, keep getting mixed up as to how to get you to buy it. For the sake of postpostmodern literature--for the sake of the longevity of the love of literature--read this insane, awkward, gorgeous thing.

The Hellstrom Chronicles vs The Edison-Capones. Great surreal fantasy fiction. My mind filled up so fast that it almost burst with Vollman's images and characters. More than once I read untill my head spun from trying to figure out where I was headed. This guy should have met Andre Breton