With most any Vollman book, there's a good chance that when you've flipped the last page reshelved the book, and slammed back into the real world, the question boiling at the top of your brain might be something like "How the hell did this get published". With his later works you might be able to answer the question through an oral history, or shrug it off with a nod towards the Vollman legend which has built up over the years, but with You Bright And Risen Angels, Vollman's first novel, the question feels genuinely difficult to answer.
Given, the publishing landscape must have been very different in 1987, but even so, there's no world in which I could imagine an editor pitching this for it's mass market appeal, or even as a difficult work of genius heralding a generational talent. Granted, Vollman is a generational talent, and illuminated by the light of his later works, the intimations of future genius in this work shine distinct, but for me, YBARA felt muddled, a throat clearing of themes revisited with a defter hand in later works.
In some ways the muddled nature of the book, even as it had my eyes sliding down the page at parts, is more of a feature than a bug (or, given the book's bugs vs electricity dialectic, should it be vice versa). There's an intentional context collapse here as the politics and intrigue of reaction and revolution play out in the offices, gymnasiums and summer camps of provincial American civilization, which itself is failing to maintain a clear delineation between the structured chaos of technological progress and the chaotic structure of the natural world. At its best this swampiness does something real and relatable. It's easy to say that the dynamics of swim teams and summer camps both shape and are shaped by broader political structures and power dynamics, it's a whole different thing to be able to capture just how fucking weird that feels when you're swept up in that dynamic without the perspective to start piecing together the cause and effect. (In a way, although I think Pynchon/Vollman comparisons are pretty shallow, this brings to mind Crying of Lot 49). At it's best, You Bright and Risen Angels, especially in the first half of the book is captures and enlarges that feeling, before reflecting it back to you, the reader.Finally, as a prose stylist, I get the impression Vollman is pretty divisive, but in my mind, he's one of the all time great sentence writers, and if I took anything from this, it's that he always has been. Still - don't think I'd recommend this as anyone's first Vollman.
I recall he described his writing strategy for this one as “popping kernels”— he’d write a sentence and then expand each of the clauses until they were these massive, complicated things. Which results in some occasionally beautiful sentences but has a really detrimental effect on the novel, I think. If I was to recommend a first Vollmann it would probably be “Afghanistan Picture Show” or “The Rifles,” maybe one of the prostitution ones if the person I’m recommending to has the constitution for it. Afghanistan Picture Show was written before YBRA and is nowhere near as muddy.
The popping kernels metaphor makes a lot of sense - helps explain how the momentum stutters at times, while still having this incredible sentences throughout. I still need to read Afghanistan Picture Show! Just discovered Vollman in the last couple years and still picking my way through his books. The abridged edition of Rising Up and Rising Down was my personal intro to his work, and I don't think there's a reading moment in the last decade that can compare to how excited I felt after reading the three meditations on death that kick it off. Sometimes you discover a few books into an author's work that you have a new favorite author, and very very rarely you find that out in just a few pages. There's an excerpt featuring Catacomb Thoughts online that is my go to to send people who I think I might be able to hook on Vollman.
Afghanistan Picture Show is really fun. Some of my favorite of his gonzo journalism, and some of my favorite of his more emotional, wistful writing in the Alaska section.