The New York Times-20080127-King of the Road- -Review-
Return to: The_New_York_Times-20080127
King of the Road; [Review]
Full Text (1410 words)[Author Affiliation] J. R. Moehringer is the author of The Tender Bar.RIDING TOWARD EVERYWHERE
By William T. Vollmann.
Illustrated. 271 pp. Ecco/HarperCollins Publishers. $26.95
I'd love to take William T. Vollmann out for a beer. I'd ask him about his adventures in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Iraq and Congo and at the North Pole. I'd buy him a good cigar, tell him that for years I've been a fan of his journalism, novels and essays. Then, when the moment felt right, I'd lean in, look Vollmann square in the eye and say: Pal, what the hell's wrong with you?
The man is miserable. The man is filled with irredeemable gloom about the state of the world. Many of us are filled with irredeemable gloom about the state of the world, but not like Vollmann. So bummed out is he that only one thing gives him relief. Being a bum. A transient. We're talking full-on hobo here. At 47, despite a wife and young daughter, despite a series of strokes and a broken pelvis, despite a staggering talent and a cabinet full of literary prizes, one of our finest writers gets his kicks breaking into rail yards and hopping freight trains. Why Amtrak, or Vollmann's agent, or someone with a butterfly net, hasn't stopped him is one of the great mysteries of our time.
Vollmann doesn't care where the trains go. He rides from Wyoming to Idaho, up and down California, here and there in Utah, giving little forethought to where he'll jump off or how he'll get back. He catches out (hobo talk for train hopping) with only a backpack of meager rations (water, whiskey, chocolate, cowboy jerky) and an orange bucket in which to relieve himself. He has no ticket, no credit card, no cellphone and frankly no real purpose, which is ultimately the fatal flaw of Riding Toward Everywhere, his earnest, diverting and baffling new book about life on the rails.
Vollmann has shown himself in the past to be a beautiful stylist, but the prose here is surprisingly rough. Like one of his train hops, it's jarring, aimless, disrupted by arbitrary stops and starts. Promising passages are marred by clunky transitions and regrettable metaphors: after 10 hours stuck in San Luis Obispo, Vollmann's train moves at last, filling him with a happiness as crystal-clear as a vegetarian girl's urine.
Vollmann sweetly concedes his book's shortcomings. He apologizes for the pallidity of his descriptions, his lack of a point. Then he gets defensive, and suddenly here comes everybody's favorite party guest, the passive-aggressive hobo: If this essay fails, the fault must be in it, in you, me, the orange bucket or some combination of the above; all the same, it was still written 'sincerely.' So are ransom notes and grocery lists.
As a rule Vollmann can make Proust look terse. His majestic study of violence, Rising Up and Rising Down, was well north of 3,000 pages. This volume is a brisk 206 pages of text, with 65 pages of Vollmann's photographs. It's less a book than a rumination, a prose poem, a Guthrie-esque howl of protest. It feels like a letter Vollmann was writing that he impulsively decided to turn into a book. (He should have mailed the letter.)
Notwithstanding its brevity, Riding Toward Everywhere bears all the watermarks of Vollmannism. The absence of quotation marks. The fondness for footnotes and endnotes. The preoccupation with squalor. Vollmann is an avid student of squalor, a Rhodes scholar of squalor, and thus this book also features an ensemble of demented waysiders, ceaseless transcriptions of loathsome graffiti -- and the requisite references to prostitution. Whores are to Vollmann as bears are to John Irving. Early on, Vollmann mentions a Cambodian whore he nearly married. Why? No reason. He also complains about having to borrow cars to cruise his local red-light district, because men caught soliciting have their cars impounded. This has nothing to do with trains. It mainly serves to remind us we've entered Vollmann's world. Love for sale, 24-7.
I don't know if it's a prostitute, per se, with whom Vollmann makes out near the end of this book. I'm not sure it matters, except maybe to Mrs. Vollmann. He encounters his anonymous inamorata near some tracks, very high ... dancing alone by her campfire, an umbrella poking out of her grocery cart -- what guy wouldn't be turned on? He kisses her, and kisses her some more. The episode is so freaky, so out there, you later wonder if you actually read it or nodded off and dreamed it.
Fortunately, Vollmann leavens his boxcar odyssey with pleasant asides about what he's reading. His knowledge of books, as always, is varied and impressive, and he's at his best when he talks about Twain, Kerouac, Hemingway or Cold Mountain, a Tang Dynasty poet named after the wild place he inhabited. Then, strangely, Cold Mountain (the place, not the poet) crowds all writers out of the book -- including, sometimes, Vollmann.
Cold Mountain represents for Vollmann an idyllic destination, an American nirvana, a vanished paradise of manly freedom and personal liberty. Whenever Vollmann thinks, I've got to get out of here, he hops a train for Cold Mountain, a k a Everywhere, which hides itself somewhere in America. Again and again, and then again, Vollmann mentions Cold Mountain, until the words lose all meaning, until you assume that somewhere there's a Cold Mountain Chamber of Commerce that has promised to pay him a fee for every mention.
Sensing that the search for a nonexistent mountain isn't reason enough to risk dismemberment, arrest and death, Vollmann suggests as many other reasons as he can and leaves us to infer others. He hops trains because he enjoys the view from an open boxcar; because he needs to conquer his fear; because, like Thoreau, he wants to escape a life of quiet desperation. He hops trains because he loves spending time with his buddy Steve. (Vollmann calls Steve the hero of this book, then gives curiously little information about him, except that he does not have an orange bucket. Maybe Steve is the hero because he holds it in.)
Eventually, one reason does stand out from the rest. Vollmann hops trains as a tiny act of civil disobedience, a metaphorical middle finger raised at authority and security men, those government and corporate functionaries who unduly restrain, harass and monitor him. Many readers, sick of Big Brother, will initially sympathize. But wait. Vollmann's not talking hidden cameras, wiretaps, habeas corpus. Though he does take a jab or two at our torturer president, what really vexes Vollmann is all that extra security at the airport. Some might argue that there should be more security, that the screener with the $3 haircut and the thousand-yard stare isn't paying enough attention to the passengers and bags he's waving through. Vollmann, however, seemingly regards any delay, any search of his pockets and personal effects, as a step toward establishment of a police state.
My critique of American society remains fundamentally incoherent, he admits. Would I really have preferred my grandfather's time, when Pinkertons were cracking Wobblies over the head, or my father's, when Joe McCarthy could ruin anyone by calling him Red? Having thus discredited his own nostalgia, he goes right on indulging it. His logic at times is so contradictory, so twisted, his sentences can't handle the torque. They fly apart. Bright speed I refuse to forgo experiencing until the end, but both of its parameters are too great in comparison to myself for me to apprehend it while I feel it. Is the man train hopping or train spotting?
Clearly Vollmann is writing from his heart. He longs in earnest to get away from, or back to, America, and such longing lies at the core of our national literature. But unlike the literary road warriors he reveres, Vollmann never manages to make his getaway sound urgent or fun. Maybe if something dramatic had happened to him, something that provoked him to hop trains -- something besides walking through a metal detector at LAX. Maybe if something had happened to him while hopping trains. Barring that, his material never rises to the level of his bravery or his genius. With no purpose, no destination, no story, his epic journey to Everywhere becomes a round trip to nowhere, and the reader, no matter how much he may admire Vollmann, can't help feeling relieved when it's time to hop off.
[Illustration]PHOTO (PHOTOGRAPH FROM IMAGE100/CORBIS)