It’s customary at about this point in a review to tell the reader what’s in the book under investigation and how it proceeds. In this case, sadly, I wouldn’t know where to stop. Vollmann describes spending $1,000 an hour and more to watch a geisha and her apprentice dance for him in Kyoto. He spends an additional $700, while invoking Gandhi, to get himself professionally made up in Tokyo and dressed as a woman (an unexpected extravagance for a man who, just three years ago, gave us a book called “Poor People”). He throws in a chapter on Andrew Wyeth; he offers an appendix listing adjectives in Sappho; he thinks of buying women’s clothes from a Guatemalan cowboy turned transvestite he’s met near Sunset Boulevard, trawling for new friends. He gives us sketches of temples, photographs of suggestive grass patterns in eastern California, assessments of Mengloth in the Norse saga “The Lay of Svipdag” and pictures of himself in drag. There are 49 pages of endnotes and compulsive footnotes at every turn (“What is fetish, what is stylization, and what is simple specificity?”).
If the Oxford English Dictionary had a listing for “all over the place,” Vollmann would take up the entire entry. And the next one. Suddenly, apropos of not so much, he starts telling us about a “ghetto prostitute” he met at a bus stop in California. In the next paragraph he’s discussing Heinrich Böll (“whose Nobel Prize was in my opinion otherwise deserved”). Then he’s on to Cicero reporting to Atticus about a man in woman’s clothes who stole into a Vestal Virgin sacrifice at Caesar’s house. The beauty of this procedure — for the admirer — is that you never know what’s coming next, and all the world and its works seem to be part of one huge scroll that could unroll forever. The challenge is that reading for more than 30 minutes at a time can induce headaches, seasickness and worse.
