Double Agent for Cain

Photo by Noel Neuburger

Though his base of operations would never give him away, tucked as it is in territory manifestly occupied by the God-fearing chosen — a house of red brick fronted with white columns, on an oak-lined suburban Sacramento street, like something out of a Jimmy Stewart film — William T. Vollmann is a secret agent, a propagandist for the outcast heirs of Cain, idolaters and whores, addicts, pimps and pederasts. He has scoured the Earth, visiting Canaanite cells in the brothels of Bangkok, in war-torn Afghanistan and the Balkans, among the poppy fields of Burma and the narco-thugs of Bogotá’s barrios, and, most intimately, in the crack hotels, bars and massage parlors of San Francisco’s Tenderloin. He’s networked with all those who bear Cain’s indelible mark, partaking in their rituals, sharing their most sacred sacraments, be it fleshly communion or a wafer of cocaine, reporting back to tell their stories in the unforgiving world of daylight, to an audience largely uninterested and generally unimpressed.

And now, reclining in his tidy living room, his feet resting on a glass coffee table unmarred by even a speck of dust, Vollmann outlines the case against God. He starts with Cain: “Why should God have rejected Cain’s offering back at the beginning? Cain gave God what he had,” Vollman says, staring at the ceiling through small, cloudy blue eyes, nearly invisible behind thick lenses. “But God, for whatever reason, didn’t like Cain’s sacrifice, and Cain felt terrible and jealous and killed his brother, and after that he was cast out. It doesn’t seem fair.”

The novelist, tall and oddly shaped — almost elliptical, large at the waist but not quite fat, the broad lines of his torso converging into narrow shoulders and a deceptively small head — goes on to decry God’s treatment of the Canaanites. “When the chosen people go to the land of Canaan, God tells them, ‘All right, here’s what you’ll do: You tell the cities that if they surrender to you right away, you’re going to enslave everybody, and if they don’t, then you can go in there and kill everybody except the virgins, and you can just take them and rape them and use them as your concubines.’ It’s disgusting, you know?” He shakes his head and takes a long swallow from the Sierra Nevada Pale Ale balanced on his belly. Even in the Gospels, Jesus rebuffs the Canaanite woman who asks him to heal her daughter, consenting to help her only after she’s groveled a bit. “I think he was kind of mean to that poor woman, even though he helped her. I think if I were a Canaanite woman, I would feel like I had to be a prostitute, swallowing Jesus’ cum or something like that to get his money, or in this case have him fix my daughter for me. It would just be some degrading thing that I had to do to get what I needed. Christianity is supposed to be the religion of the oppressed, it’s supposed to comfort the outcast, and in a way it does, but there are so many outcasts in the Bible that I feel sorry for.”

“Theme of the Work: Steadfastness, or the Addict”

—The Royal Family

Vollmann’s mission was first made public in 1987. A few years out of college — Deep Springs and then Cornell, summa cum laude in comparative literature — he published You Bright and Risen Angels, the novel he had cobbled together during off-hours from his computer-programming job in Silicon Valley. A wild, hallucinatory account of the global battle between insects and the inventors of electricity, it nonetheless devotes a few pages to skinheads and junkies. Vollmann followed that two years later with The Rainbow Stories, a collection of often barely fictionalized reportage about skinheads, prostitutes, a terrorist, a serial killer and his girlfriend. In the next two years he produced another collection, 13 Stories & 13 Epitaphs, and The Ice-Shirt, the first installment of his “Seven Dreams” project, a planned septet of novels, or “symbolic histories,” focusing, in a style completely at odds with the stodginess of most historical fiction, on the encounters between Native Americans and Europeans. Since then he has produced two more of the “Seven Dreams” volumes, two novels about prostitutes, a nonfiction book about his experiences in Afghanistan, another collection of stories and essays, and countless journalistic articles. In a mere 13 years, he has published, by my count, 5,278 pages, not including magazine work.

That number includes his bulky new novel, The Royal Family, his most complex work. It does not include the soon-to-be-published Argall, the next of the “Seven Dreams,” or Rising Up and Rising Down, the 4,000-page treatise on violence for which he has just found a publisher (“The guy is probably going to lose a huge amount of money on it,” Vollmann sighs. “I feel kind of sorry for him”) and which he has the chutzpah to refer to as a “long essay.”

He generally works on four or five books at any given moment, currently on a nonfiction book about the Imperial Valley, a collection of interrelated stories set during World War II, and the three remaining “Seven Dreams” volumes. He had hoped to finish the septet before he turned 40 — Vollmann is 41 — but was slowed by wrist damage sustained by typing 16 hours a day. Now, with a 2-year-old daughter to care for, he limits himself to a mere nine or 10 hours at the computer. He has the pasty, almost lumpily pale skin of a man who rarely sees the sun. “Mainly I’m just working when I’m not doing anything else, and to me it’s a pleasure,” he says, shrugging. “It’s what I would rather be doing.”