It is glorious in its 1100 pp. plus of text, analytical diatribes, love stories, monomaniacal rants, ecological analyses, and unevenly eloquent prose. I'm on p.206 and so far it's a first-rate book on the Mexican-American border (Imperial is a county in California), low lifes, the desperation of America's empty spaces, and this is from an author who issues books like others do blog posts.
Suddenly I turn the page and see a heading: Warning of Impending Aridity. Some text follows:
This book represents my attempt to become a better-informed citizen of North America. Our "American dream" is founded on the notion of the self-sufficient homestead. The "Mexican dream" may be a trifle different, but requires its kindred material basis. Understanding how these two hopes played out over time required me to cultivate statistical parables about farm size, waterscapes, lettuce prices, etcetera. I have harvested them (doubtless bruising overripe numbers on the way), and now present them to you. Some of them may be too desiccated for your taste. If you skip the chapters devoted to them, you will finish the book sooner, and never suspect the existence of my arithmetical errors. As for you devotees of Dismal Science, I hope you will be awestruck by my sincerity about Mexicali Valley cotton prices.
Jason Kottke has an excellent post on Vollmann's book, with links and excerpts. One description is: "Just write that it's like Robert Caro's The Power Broker," she said, "but with the attitude of Mike Davis's City of Quartz"…but even that turns out to be inadequate:
Imperial is like Robert Caro’s The Power Broker with the attitude of Mike Davis’s City of Quartz, if Robert Caro had been raised in an abandoned grain silo by a band of feral raccoons, and if Mike Davis were the communications director of a heavily armed libertarian survivalist cult, and if the two of them had somehow managed to stitch John McPhee’s cortex onto the brain of a Gila monster, which they then sent to the Mexican border to conduct ten years of immersive research, and also if they wrote the entire manuscript on dried banana leaves with a toucan beak dipped in hobo blood, and then the book was line-edited during a 36-hour peyote séance by the ghosts of John Steinbeck, Jack London, and Sinclair Lewis, with 200 pages of endnotes faxed over by Henry David Thoreau’s great-great-great-great grandson from a concrete bunker under a toxic pond behind a maquiladora, and if at the last minute Herman Melville threw up all over the manuscript, rendering it illegible, so it had to be re-created from memory by a community-theater actor doing his best impression of Jack Kerouac. With photographs by Dorothea Lange.
How's that for the best sentence I read last night (it's from Sam Anderson)? As Vollmann himself once said: 'I used to think the Imperial Valley was hot, flat and boring,'
You can buy it here. Here is an Imperial slide show.
Hmmmm, doesn’t sound like a beach read.
Vollman is very uneven, maybe the result of his compulsive writing style. Which makes me think: do we apply social welfare functions to judging books? Do consider a book based on the quality of its *worst* passage, or of if best passage? Or are we utilitarians, and take the average?
If the only way to judge Vollmann is by comparison to other Vollmann, who can weigh in? How does this new monster compare to _Europe Central_ or _Fathers and Crows_?
Professor Cowen, I’m curious.
Your implied reading speed from the evidence available on MR is something extraordinary – I would say “off the scale” if I had gathered the data to create a scale. The only data I have gathered is my own, for the year 2006-7 when I was a Masters student studying Global History (all the world, for all of time) at the LSE. Then I found that 150 pages of academic literature, in a day, was possible before losing performance. I recorded everything. And from cross comparison with other students, friends etc, I am fairly sure that no-one was a factor ahead of me.
I tended to blame having 2/3 kids. But no job at the time.
Now you tend to post 5 books every fortnight or so that you have read, as well as clearly blogging to a high degree, with all the online material that this involves, and I understand there is a day job as well? How is this done? Of the many factors to disaggregate
pages per hour or
pages per book skipped
or detail/page absorbed or
hours per day not sleeping
which one am I missing?
Personally, I find that 20 pages per hour of academic stuff, or 50/hour of a novel is possible. I would love to know if you have collected any data on this.
Best wishes and thanks for the brilliant blog (and I cannot even CONTEMPLATE reading this Vollman fellow, not while Friedman/Schwartz and Popper lie unread by my desk).
+ 1, ostap. Maybe one day they’ll invent the literary equivalent of the technology that allows profitable mining of low-grade ores. Until then, I’m staying away.
I am up to page 746 of your book “IMPERIAL”. My question is– why have you thusfar not mentioned the name of Mario Saikhon? He was the king of the lettuce growers as I understand. Do you have any information on this giant? I surely would like to hear from you. I was present at your book reveiw in La Jolla. Respectfully, Fred
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