by Kate Braverman.

William T. Vollmann’s National Book Award for his novel Europe Central is simultaneously a personal triumph and an irrefutable recognition of San Francisco as a distinct region, evolving alternative strategies and dialects through wind throttled rumor and fog. In William T. Vollmann, we coalesce and define ourselves.  Out here on the perimeter, on the edge of that other and somehow implausible ocean, we traditionally give sanctuary to the outlaw and forbidden, the eccentric and inspired. In this city, we’ve dared the officially endorsed versions of behavior and reality for more than 50 years. We are unrepentant renegades, from Ginsberg, Burroughs and Kerouac, through Kesey and Hunter Thompson, the stylistic torch and revolutionary trajectory is now in Vollmann’s hands.

In Europe Central, Vollmann pulls the experimental epiphanies of the Beats through a global millennial nexus. Vollmann is a writer’s writer. He speaks in a multiplicity of frequencies and tones, all of them complicated, disturbing, ambiguous and difficult. This used to be diagnostic of what we once called art. Europe Central is the distillation of decades of ruthlessly aggressive and deliberately provocative insurrectionary fictions rendered with incomparable elegance and fueled by literary genius and an anguish of moral outrage transcending the currently approved anemic American agenda.

What makes Vollmann monumental in this era of stifling political correctness, dispo books, mania for the blatantly recognizably but focus group vetted safe new thing, celebrity memoirs and the atrocious masquerade of TV- sized situations inflicted on the innocent page, is the unrelenting scale of his ambition, his arsenal of audacious artistic weapons and incendiary technical expertise. In this period where the word is degraded, deviation from conventional narrative and subject matter punished, subversion dismissed, authenticity in cultural remission like an embarrassing vestige, Vollmann never flinches. Compromise is not in his repertoire.

Perhaps the core of Vollmann, the single thread of subtext embroidered in each fiction from Whores For Gloria, through The Royal Family and Central Europe, is the refusal to submit to the expected. Call it an anti-authoritarian pulse, a heart beating translated into words and transmuted into electric spasms and waves. In the hands of an adept, metamorphosis occurs, epics are built; there is revelation and shock. Isn’t this why we read?

Central Europe purports to be about the Russians and Nazis in the 30’s. It’s not. Rather, it’s a metaphorical juncture, in the way his savagely glittering Tenderloin fictions about prostitutes, pedophiles and pimps are. In Vollmann World, one enters Central Europe through a hundred forty pages of tedious juvenilia, replete with desperate pleas for unconditional love exacerbated by excessive exclamation points, like a pack of starving dogs offering a chorus of whines. It’s like walking the corridors of an enormous post-Empire state housing project, littered with refuge, walls a palimpsest of graffiti. Then, perhaps by accident, Vollmann finds a vehicle in Shostakovich, a malleable form he infiltrates and inhabits. The resulting collaboration is a musical one, a composition, incantory, Plathian in lyrical intensity, with a Blood Meridian beat and Gibsonesque synthesizer suggesting a fusion beyond the page, as with an AI on a smack or coke run, a further realm. It’s the music loitering above the rubble that haunts.

It’s not really about whores and Nazis, child molesters and Russian composers? No. It’s about the life and death struggle to retain artistic dignity and legitimacy while confronting a hostile global configuration that is already an operational consensual tyrannical apparatus insidious and virulent as Stalin and Hitler. When the reader replaces Random House, say, for Russia, the etiology of the artist versus the marketplace is stunning. It’s the astonishment, the vertigo and constellations, o starry starry, and the architecture of orbits, the chimes of the passage of planets like flocks of birds. It’s what Kafka meant when he cried out for books that make you want to pound your head with a hammer.

Vollmann’s oeuvre is that of an artist demanding the freedom to write precisely what he desires in the manner of his preference. This once went without saying. Now few remain on the barricades, locked and loaded, defiant, prepared to amputate limbs for their integrity. It is the grandeur of the conviction that the page is sacred and there are still stories that can alter the orbits of planets that drive these fictions. Perhaps Vollmann’s Europe Central is witnessing the birth of an act of post-historical literature. This is a thrilling and singular event. As the Shostakovich construct says, “the whole process of composition is one of straining to catch and record something compounded of harmony and sense as it is relayed from an unknown source.”

In other words, Vollmann is an alchemist. He can be sly, camouflaged in allegory, sliding between crevices of shadow, watching his back always, but he never lies. That would be too trivial.

William T. Vollmann’s National Book Award is a celebratory event for San Francisco, a terrain that extends north through Mendocino, south through Santa Cruz and Stanford and east to Sacramento---Vollmann’s official residence-- and the Central Valley. We’re the capital of a certain sensibility that isn’t measured by ordinary geography, is fluid, transient and conceptual. We’re a mythical port where wanderers moor. While readers and critics of intention and magnitude have respected him for years, the mainstream has predictably resisted. For a writer, Vollmann decoded is like receiving the schematics for literary wmd’s. He awed and shocked, stormed, seduced and sacked us long ago. He’s in our air, some stray element of contraband you can’t quite define lingering above the harbor.

Now William T. Vollmann is our official Flagship Novelist. We share his national recognition as the city that embraces him as emblematic of the self-evident truths of what it is to be human and to create. That such truths are no longer viable is temporarily irrelevant. In San Francisco, we experiment, we risk, we talk in tongues, we transgress, chant and confess, wildly impassioned, almost delirious in our wind hewn salty patois. Out here, on the perimeter, perched on the edge of the Pacific, we still believe.

                     Copyright 2005-2006, Kate Braverman.