fiction files redux discussion

I'm a big fan of William Vollman, beginning with his first book You Bright and Risen Angels. I read this the same year I finally read Gravity's Rainbow and it held its own. The only other long, sometimes inscrutable post-70s novel in its league to me is Dhalgren and compared to both YBARA is the most accessible. GR was comparable to Ulysses for me: parts are exquisite, the highest of expression of (in Pynchon's case) american art, and part I was simply glad I had finished. YBARA accessibility is odd because it trades in a different, Steinian narrative strategy of repetition with difference. I believe this make sense because otherwise redescription of the rise of industrialism in America as a war between bugs and electricity would be a cartoon if the narrative wasn't being disrupted, both circling back to the beginning and putting of concluding. I also like the diary like asides, which may strike some as self-pitying or exhibitionistic. The general impression: here is a writer who means to mean what he says, and willing to go to extraordinary lengths to do it. Vollman also (in his favor) indulges in rhetoric that verges on the bombastic or purely musical much more than his contemporary lit fiction writers. This aligns him (for me) with the origins of american lit in Emerson-Thoreau-Melville-Whitman.

There are patches of course that don't work. There are even whole books that haven't worked for me (yet), particularly his rewriting of the Nordic Sagas and the encounter with what would become America. And I have much more to read, the amount of which makes me look kindly on British social comedy (Julian Barnes). But the ambition and achievement that Vollman has already accomplished puts him in his own category, with perhaps the exception of Mailer. Not everyone's cup of tea, but a writer to be reckoned with.