Book Review: Conversations with William T. Vollmann

By Marco Malvestio, University of Toronto

Although he is one of the most preeminent American writers, scholarly studies on William T. Vollmann are famously scarce. As recently as 2015, in his preface to William T. Vollmann: A Critical Companion, edited by Christopher Coffman and Daniel Lukes, Larry McCaffery argued that, despite Vollmann’s cult status and favorable reviews, “no extended treatment at all, no book–length scholarly studies” had so far been produced (xiv). While things have changed in more recent years (I am thinking of Palleau–Papin 2011, Qian 2012, Costa 2016, Ozcan 2019), this is still generally true. Specifically, it remains true because Vollmann’s vast and ever–evolving production is almost impossible for a single scholar to control, not to mention to map, to summarize, and to analyze. It is precisely the wide variety of modes and topics in Vollmann’s productions that makes him extremely complex to study and, at the same time, a most interesting subject for an interdisciplinary approach. Indeed, his oeuvre is one that draws on so many different fields, from astronomy to Japanese literary studies to environmental science, that a scholar working within one discipline cannot hope to grapple with the whole of his achievement. Too, Vollmann continuously merges different these genres, moving from science fiction to historical (meta)fiction to reportage to philosophical speculation to scientific compendium. Moreover, he is one of the few authors who successfully adopt different media, as his books are often crowded with his own drawings and photographs (or Ken Miller’s, with whom he collaborated often in his early career).

In this context, Daniel Lukes provides an essential service to Vollmann readers and scholars. Conversations with William T. Vollmann, in fact, collects twenty–nine interviews with its subject, published in a period of time spanning from 1989 to 2019. Lukes inherited the project from writer and critic Michael Hemmingson, who was one of the first to publish extensively (although not academically strictu sensu) on Vollmann (Expelled from, Eden: A William T. Vollmann Reader, 2004; William T. Vollmann: A Critical Study and Seven Interviews, 2009; William T. Vollmann: An Annotated Bibliography, 2012) and who died in January 2014. Lukes’s criterion for the choice of the interviews was, wisely, “to privilege hard–to– find, rare, or best yet new and unpublished material” (xi). This means that readers are unlikely to encounter pieces they have already read online, and that even the most die–hard among Vollmann fans will be able to find something new in the volume. The volume also contains an updated chronology of Vollmann’s life and works.

Most interestingly, the chronological span of the interviews allows readers to confront Vollmann’s opinions on almost every one of his books (even the most esoteric ones, such as Kissing the Mask: Beauty, Understatement, and Femininity in Japanese Noh Theater), and to trace the evolution of his public image. Vollmann has always been extremely self– conscious about his public appearance, and has used interviews, especially early in his career, to establish the image of a young writer, prodigiously cultivated and prolific, yet also fond of extreme life experiences. As Lukes highlights, “early and tabloidish portraits of Vollmann have about them a doomed–young–man vibe, as if he were a mythical creature soon to be snuffed out” or as if he possessed a “radical vulnerability,” to quote Vollmann himself, as interviewed by Jonathan Coe, in a piece that is itself a crucial example of his practice of self–fashioning (Lukes, xii; Coe, 3). In other words, not only does the book provide a valuable source for the knowledge of Vollmann the author, it is also extremely useful (and in this aspect, quite unprecedented) for understanding Vollmann the character.

This considerations leads to another aspect of the relationship between Vollmann and his interviewers, which often borders that between the author and his fans, which is that the interviews are sometimes tinted with a safari–like tone, an exploration in the life of the eccentric writer William T. Vollmann:

Some of the best interviews here are when the interviewer spends some quality time with Vollmann, get- ting a more rounded portrait of the writer in his element, in the daily life of Sacramento. A fan-like quality, or awe, permeates some of the pieces, pointing to Vollmann’s cult following. Alexander Laurence[’s] and Michael Hemmingson’s contributions give valuable glimpses into Vollmann negotiating private/public boundaries and a picture of the writer in public; David Boratav[’s] and Stephen Heyman’s show what it’s like to be invited into Vollmann’s spaces and hang out with “Bill.” (xiii)