It’s not that Vollmann ultimately fails to get his point across. A reader can’t spend that much time with him without absorbing the bigger picture — how the failed Imperial idea is the failed American idea: that water will flow anywhere we tell it to; that we can make the desert forever fruitful; that the West will inevitably become an Eden of family homesteads abounding with fruits, vegetables, grains and democratic self-reliance, rather than a corporate nightmare of worker exploitation, environmental havoc and unchecked sprawl.
But “upon Imperial’s blankness,” Vollmann writes, “which might as well be a light table, it becomes all too easy to project myself, which is a way of discovering nothing.”
He said it, not me.
via Book Review – ‘Imperial,’ by William T. Vollmann – Review – NYTimes.com.
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from jeffmacintyre.com: On William T. Vollmann http://bit.ly/42KNWh
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