Embarrassment of riches

In his new book, misery junkie William Vollmann asks people around the globe, Why are you poor?

By Laura Miller

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Photos: AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli

Photo composite of William Vollmann (foreground) and a man begging.

April 16, 2007 | St. Catherine of Sienna, the 14-century Italian mystic and ascetic, is reputed to have mortified herself by drinking the pus of one of the hospital patients she cared for as a lay member of the Dominican Order. She also practiced self-flagellation and starved herself to death. It's easy to be reminded of Catherine while reading William Vollmann's "Poor People," an agonized meditation on the question "Why are some people poor and what should the rest of us do about it?" Vollmann isn't discernibly religious, and he seems to honestly believe that his book is not as "self-lacerating" or "self-loathing" as James Agee's classic "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men," an earlier (1941) foray into similar territory. Yet there has always been something in Vollmann that revels in abasement and grueling self-scrutiny, and here he has found the ideal occasion for it.

Vollmann, who won the National Book Award last year for his novel "Europe Central," is a writer of extraordinary talent and no discipline, a combination that leaves many of his books falling, frustratingly, just short of the masterpiece of which he seems to be capable. (While having something significant to say is essential to great writing, knowing what to leave out is, alas, just as indispensable.) You can always find something brilliant in his books, fiction or nonfiction, but the ratio of brilliance to flotsam can be a bitch. "Poor People," although a little rambling, offers a more favorable balance than most, as if even Vollmann couldn't bring himself to linger overlong on this harrowing subject.

The book is a fragmented rumination on the answers Vollmann got when he asked a few dozen people from all over the globe, "Why are you poor?" (There's also a somewhat extraneous chapter on "snakeheads," Japanese gangsters who traffic in illegal immigrants, that originated as one of the pieces of danger journalism Vollmann writes for national men's magazines.) This isn't an easy question to answer even when you have the luxury to think about such matters, and as the author points out, "communication being, like other skills, a skill of the rich, the poor people in this book sometimes failed to tell me what I longed to know. Dates did not add up, and their memories, like mine, were inconsistent -- one reason why this book cannot be simply a collection of oral histories."

Even the rich (meaning people like you and me, with the luxury of time to consider such issues) when asked about the brutal poverty in which (according to the U.N.) one-quarter of the world's people exist, tend to settle on one formulaic response or another. Whether we blame the poor themselves, blame capitalism, blame fate or find some other appropriate villain, we can deliver up our answer whenever it's needed and avoid having to spend any more time meditating on the topic. The great strength of "Poor People" lies in Vollmann's willingness to sit with his subject, to interrogate himself, and then to interrogate himself again, until he finally reveals what appears to be an infinite maze of pain. His writerly gifts allow him make that misery felt. "Poor People" isn't a work of masterly reporting, like David K. Shipler's "The Working Poor: Invisible in America," but then again you'll never find a description of "snow like congealed saliva" in that sort of book.

Complicating Vollmann's mission is his ferocious desire not to come off as a patronizing, middle-class do-gooder, the sort of person no two-fisted, close-to-the-bone fellow with an extensive gun collection and a thing for Asian bar girls would want to be associated with. This presents difficulties, because when it comes to poverty, do-gooders have proven themselves to be remarkably resourceful over the years, and it's hard to find a position -- political, personal or moral -- that they haven't at some point occupied and contaminated with their awful uncoolness. Presumably that's why, in the 310 pages of "Poor People," we never see an aid worker or a charity provider, even though some of these people (especially the religious ones) live among the people Vollmann writes about.

Vollmann holds special contempt for the Marxist notion of "false consciousness," the theory that the oppressed proletariat have been deceived into not recognizing their own best interests. "Because I wish to respect poor people's perceptions and experiences," he explains, "I refuse to say that I know their good better than they; accordingly, I further refuse to condescend to them with the pity that either pretends they have no choices at all, or else, worse yet, to gild their every choice with my benevolent approval." Accordingly, the keystone figure in "Poor People" is Sunee, a Thai cleaning woman with a chronic drinking problem and a 10-year-old daughter she is raising with the help of her long-suffering mother. She gives him the opportunity to demonstrate his refusal to judge his subjects: "As for Sunee's drunkenness, wasn't that likewise both adaptive and maladaptive? Who could grudge it to her? What else did she have to look forward to?"

But before Vollmann can even get into the reasons why people -- as individuals and as classes -- are poor, he must first figure out who is poor, and this turns out to be trickier than you'd think. He has carefully compiled a chart showing the incomes of every person he interviewed and their U.S. dollar equivalent, but real poverty is more slippery and subjective. Although everyone can agree that people without enough to eat, or clothes to wear, or a roof over their heads are poor, Sunee -- to name only one example from Vollmann's book -- has all of those things, if not of very high quality. U.S. citizens without healthcare insurance or meaningful educational and employment opportunities might look poor to their fellow Americans, but to Sunee, they'd seem relatively rich. Hmong subsistence farmers who were average 500 years ago, are impoverished today. Some of the people Vollmann meets strike him as poor, but insist that they aren't and claim to be happy, and some of those people he's more inclined to believe than others.

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