'Imperial' loss

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SAN FRANCISCO — William T. Vollmann hardly looks like one of the most ambitious authors of his generation. Walking on Haight Street in his rumpled jeans, ball cap and black T-shirt, shoulders bowed beneath a heavy backpack, he seems an older version of the street kids who still congregate in the tawdry heart of Haight-Ashbury — young men mostly, carrying bedrolls, panhandling for change. In a lot of ways, these are Vollmann's people: outsiders whom society tends to disregard.

Outsiders have motivated his writing, from his 1987 debut novel, "You Bright and Risen Angels," which posits a war between insects and human beings, through his most recent effort, the monumental "Imperial" (Viking: 1,306 pp., $55), which tracks another kind of conflict: the battles, real and metaphorical, that define Imperial County — battles over immigration and water, identity, and the reach and limitations of political power. The book, which came out in August, is perhaps the clearest expression of Vollmann's career-long commitment to immerse himself in complexities.

To write it, he spent 10 years visiting Imperial County, interviewing hundreds of people, reading history and public records, soaking up folklore. The result is a hybrid — curious only if you're unfamiliar with Vollmann's work — a massive, multilayered look at the border region of southeastern California, from the Colorado River to the Coachella Valley, Mexicali to the Salton Sea. Merging journalism and narrative, sociology and myth, the book is less about Imperial County than the place Vollmann calls Imperial, which exists most firmly in his mind.

"It may be," he writes, "that since this southeast corner of California is so peculiar, enigmatic, sad, beautiful and perfect as it stands, delineation of any sort should be foregone in favor of the recording of 'pure' perceptions, for instance by means of a camera alone; or failing that, by reliance on word-pictures: a cityscape of withered palms, white tiles, glaring parking lots, and portico-shaded loungers who watch the boxcars groan by; a crop scape of a rich green basil field, whose fragrance rises up as massively resonant as an organ-chord."

At 50, Vollmann is the author of 19 books, including "Rising Up and Rising Down," a seven-volume, 3,352-page investigation of violence, nominated for a 2003 National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism, and "Europe Central," a historical novel about mid-20th century Europe, which won a 2005 National Book Award. In such works he walks a line between extreme engagement and extreme detachment, determined to approach the world on its own terms.

Although he has lived in Sacramento for nearly 20 years, much of his early writing deals with San Francisco, especially the Tenderloin, which he explored in novels such as "The Royal Family" and "Whores for Gloria" or the story collection "The Rainbow Stories." These books take on the urban demimonde of prostitutes and crack heads with an unsettling mix of distance and empathy.

This too is the aesthetic of "Imperial," in which Vollmann is less an interpreter than in William S. Burroughs' words, "a recording entity." (He has also published a companion volume of photographs, more than 200 portraits of the people who inhabit the border zone.) "My intention," he says, over an energy drink at a Haight Street coffee shop, "was to understand the place and bring it alive. Of course, absolute understanding is impossible, and therefore the book is a failure. That's OK."

Vollmann's abilities tend to be overshadowed by the sensational aspects of his career, his fixation on prostitutes and street life, and his tendency to put himself in the line of fire.

In 1982, fresh out of college, he went to Afghanistan to help the mujahedeen against the Soviets; his account, "An Afghanistan Picture Show," was published in 1992. In Bosnia-Herzegovina, in the early 1990s, he survived a sniper attack that left his translator dead. While researching his 1994 novel "The Rifles" — part of a seven-volume "Symbolic History" of America called "Seven Dreams" — he spent two weeks at the Arctic Circle and nearly died of hypothermia.

These were death-defying stunts even for a young man; a decade and a half later, the father of a young daughter, his balance impaired, the hair at his temples graying, he seems heavier, slower, if not exactly the worse for wear.

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"There's no epiphany here," says Larry McCaffery, professor of English emeritus at California State University, San Diego of "Imperial," "although about halfway through, it's pretty obvious that there's a thesis: California and the demise of the American dream. Bill uses a phrase, 'the disease of capitalism,' to describe what happened to that remarkable place, rich farmland that became the poorest county in the state." It was McCaffery, a Vollmann friend, who introduced the author to Imperial in 1997.

To get at his subject, Vollmann interweaves first-person accounts with interviews and textual research, playing with both fact and legend: statistics on immigration juxtaposed against the Chinese tunnels of Mexicali, underground spaces where "many many Chinese as they kept saying, used to hide."

So, how to reconcile these contradictions? For Vollmann, it means recognizing their futility on the most existential terms.

"It does feel like a very durable entity," Vollmann says, "this place called Imperial, which existed before us and will outlast us. The history is really fascinating ... but I do feel that, in spite of its immense relevance to humans, humans aren't necessarily so important to Imperial."

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