The latest book by the prolific American novelist and journalist William T. Vollmann, Poor People, has one plus and two minuses. Because it's a bit negative to open this review with the minuses, let's begin on a positive note with the book's one plus, which has to do with Vollmann's direct approach to the subject matter itself: poor people.
Wherever they are in the world (under a bridge in Japan, fishing on a lake in Yemen, sitting on a park bench in Russia, standing on rubble in China), and whatever they happen to be doing at such and such a time (drinking, eating, lying, crying, worrying, scheming, begging), Vollmann approaches les misérables, those of the lower depths, the wretched who shall inherit the earth, and asks the one question that drives the whole book: "Why are you poor?" Admittedly, he has two other big questions—"Are you poor?" and "What do you think about the rich?"—but these are not as crucial, nor as maddening, as the one that demands an explanation.
Now, this one question is not what gives Poor People its one plus. In fact, the question is related to one of its two minuses. The plus comes from the fact that Vollmann actually talks to poor people. He actually goes to their slums, into their shacks, sits at their tables and listens to what they have to say. And they have lots of things to say besides why they are poor. Furthermore, they are far more interesting when talking about other things besides their poverty. From all of this talk about bad bosses, kind neighbors, lost loves, strong beliefs, fears and dreams, we get a sense of what the Italian thinker Virno calls "the multitude," an imposing galaxy of personalities and languages.
Now for the two minuses. What Poor People totally lacks (an adequate concept and literary style) can be found in abundance in two recent books that also deal with the present situation of the global poor: Empire by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri and Planet of Slums by Mike Davis.
Minus number one: Vollmann's writing is as poor as the people he meets. This poverty of poetry or sophistication has nothing to do with "writing degree zero," in the sense of Alain Robbe-Grillet, the leading French figure for the nouveau roman movement that peaked in the '60s. Nor does it have anything to do with Susan Sontag's notion of a style that is a style because it is not a style ("On Style"). Vollmann, particularly in this book, produces a prose that, like Aristotle's prose, has just one beat (thump, thump, thump), and unlike Plato, knows only one, very simple, barely noticeable dance move (step, step, step).
With Mike Davis, the opposite is the case. In his book, sentence after sentence, page after page is packed with literary explosives. Reading Planet of Slums (2006) is like watching fireworks light up a pitch-black sky (the pitch-blackness of economic misery) with expanding patterns and constellations. You have to reread Planet of Slums; you do not have to reread a single word in Poor People. Its language is straightforward and plain, which is great for moving the pages along, but bad for readers who want at every possible moment to be stopped in their tracks and thrilled by linguistic tricks and twists. Not all of Vollmann's books are as dry, as simple, as transparent as Poor People. For example, the writing in his award-winning novel Europe Central, and in his encyclopedic examination on violence Rising Up and Rising Down, is colorful, rich, and involved.
For the second minus, let's turn to Empire (2000), a work of philosophy that presents a concept that adequately explains why the poor are poor and how the poor can become not poor. This historical and economic concept is called "empire," a networked system of financial and military institutions that accumulate wealth from every surface of the earth. Poor People has no such concept. Granted, the book has lots of data about incomes, currencies, wages, and so on, but it doesn't connect this wild profusion of information and hard experiences into a final understanding. Poor People's ruling question—"Why are you poor?"—can only produce an impoverished (inadequate) form of knowledge, an understanding that is insufficient for praxis, for action. In short, the book is all talk.
