THE ATLAS
by William T. Vollmann
Viking Press

William T. Vollmann writes about displaced people at the outer margins of society. But to describe his work that way is to ignore the incredible range of his material. In his ten published books, the California author has written about Afghan rebels and San Francisco skinheads, French missionaries in Canada and Viking explorers of Iceland, prostitutes from New York to Vietnam, and about himself: the journalist, the lonely admirer of whores, the man who travels and watches.

In his latest collection of stories, THE ATLAS, Vollmann displays more diversity and intricacy than ever before, in part because he is revisiting themes and locations from all of his previous work and arranging them into a complex palindromic structure. There are fifty-three stories in THE ATLAS, with the last twenty-six being thematic mirrors of the first twenty-six. Hence, the first and last stories, "Opening the Book" and "Closing the Book," both deal with train stations and a narrator who observes the people around him. In the twenty-sixth story, the narrator observes a boxing match in Sacramento; in story twenty-eight, he describes a kickboxing tournament in Bangkok. At the center of the book is the long story "The Atlas," which takes place on a trans-Canadian train ride, but relates memories and experiences from around the world, echoing the other fifty-two stories.

Far from being repetitive, however, the stories constantly uncover new treasures, even as they return again and again to locations like the war-torn streets of Bosnia or the red-light districts of San Francisco. With a relentless eye for detail, Vollmann takes us through these settings, and presents rich, provocative portraits of the people who live in them. But even as he sharply etches each character into prose, he blurs the status of the protagonist/narrator, playing on the reader's fascination with Vollmann as world traveller and adventurer. Writing sometimes in the first person voice and sometimes in the third, there are many instances when it is no longer clear if Vollmann is writing fiction or non-fiction. But the author's portraits; a heroin-addicted prostitute, a the dead sister who haunts his dreams, are empowered with an emotional honesty that is unrelenting.

THE ATLAS will make an excellent introduction to Vollmann's work for new readers, but it is also self-contained. It offers a view of a world torn apart, but where some rough optimism grimly manages to sprout.