Riding Toward Everywhere by William Vollmann
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This book is William Vollmann's take on train-hopping based on interviews with hobos, as well as a number of attempts to ride the rails (some successful, some less successful). It's notionally non-fiction, but still exhibits Vollmann's hallucinatory, quasi-mystical narrative style, it's just the author who is having the visions rather than Shostakovitch or Oliver Otis Howard.
It was, as usual, a very good book, but also a very sad book. Not because anything very tragic actually happens, but the tone and overall vibe are deeply depressing. Vollmann is obviously struggling both with his own mortality and with what he characterizes as a decline of personal freedom in America. Which is all depressing enough given that I'm grappling with both of those issues too. But the book was written in 2008 before things got really weird (and before I started to get actually old). It's even more distressing to think about how much farther down the hole everything has moved since then.
Vollmann is, as usual, clever and humane and hyperliterary. I can think of few other authors from whom I'd actually enjoy this kind of extended rumination. But at the end of the book, it all seemed sort of hollow and sad (which perhaps is meta-commentary, or perhaps just "is what it is").
All that said, it's hard to know whether that sense of lingering sadness is entirely real, given Vollmann's recent Harper's article, in which he revealed that his life is essentially coming apart at the seams following his daughter's untimely death. He's struggling to remember things, to pay bills, to do basic life essentials. He was even dropped by his publisher for, among other things, "using too many different fonts" which is about the most William Vollmann reason to get fired I can possibly imagine. So maybe I'm just retrojecting some of the sadness from his current life back in time to the Vollmann who wrote this book?
But other than the overwhelming sadness, the book is otherwise very true to form. It ties in to the longstanding themes of his work: the limits of freedom; the simultaneous beauty and hollowness of the American dream; the difficulty of fully coming to grips with human misery; and the evanescence of joy which may be a state that doesn't exist or perhaps only exists in a metaphysical space (or even only exists in retrospect?). Which is to say, there's a lot crammed into this relatively short book about trains.
When I was younger, I had close friends who caught out and rode the rails. Listening to their stories, it all sounded exciting and very romantic. I often idly fantasized about trying it out one day. This book has cured me of that particular fantasy. Vollmann managed to make the whole experience sound so grubby, dangerous, miserable, and impossibly sad that I can't imagine I'd actually ever want to do it.
Recommended to enjoyers of literary fiction, road novels, or trains.