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A review by bomsen
You Bright and Risen Angels by William T. Vollmann
4.0
Vollmann describes this novel as a cartoon allegory. This certainly seems to be accurate with how the novel read to me personally. Characters are colorful, funny, exaggerated, and weird. The characters also seem to always be resurrected, to live another day, to reappear in the next episode. It is also accurate to describe the novel as an allegory, because it rhymes so seamlessly with the antagonisms that are so present in our history and contemporary world: hate and love, electricity and nature, reaction and revolution.
You Bright and Risen Angels is a highly imaginative and inventive piece of maximalist American fiction. It has two (really three) narrators, that are constantly at each other throats, and who present very different worlds and plot-lines and ideas. The layout of the text is clunky, technical and purposely jumbled; reading the novel feels like navigating an internet blog of interconnected hyperlinks.
Vollmann is a highly intelligent writer, and it shows in this debut novel, but there is not writing genius present here. The writing is sharp and funny and striking, but not breathtaking. Here I am talking purely of sentences and words and passages. Vollmann has not seemed to create the tapestry necessary to blow his reader away with beautiful formulations, in the same way that say the Pynchon’s and DeLillo’s of Vollmann’s generation has.
In addition, Vollmann’s interspersed incel-diaries are somewhat off-putting. I have no idea what he was thinking when he wrote those parts about Clara, but they are kind of weird and creepy, and I’m not sure if it was Vollmann himself venting his love-life frustrations over to the novel, or whether it was purely a novelistic construction.
In essence though, I really enjoyed this novel. It was highly entertaining, challenging, and I think a great teaser to what Vollmann might be capable of in the future. I have Fathers and Crows and The Rifles on my shelf, and I am planning to get through both during the summer.
You Bright and Risen Angels is a highly imaginative and inventive piece of maximalist American fiction. It has two (really three) narrators, that are constantly at each other throats, and who present very different worlds and plot-lines and ideas. The layout of the text is clunky, technical and purposely jumbled; reading the novel feels like navigating an internet blog of interconnected hyperlinks.
Vollmann is a highly intelligent writer, and it shows in this debut novel, but there is not writing genius present here. The writing is sharp and funny and striking, but not breathtaking. Here I am talking purely of sentences and words and passages. Vollmann has not seemed to create the tapestry necessary to blow his reader away with beautiful formulations, in the same way that say the Pynchon’s and DeLillo’s of Vollmann’s generation has.
In addition, Vollmann’s interspersed incel-diaries are somewhat off-putting. I have no idea what he was thinking when he wrote those parts about Clara, but they are kind of weird and creepy, and I’m not sure if it was Vollmann himself venting his love-life frustrations over to the novel, or whether it was purely a novelistic construction.
In essence though, I really enjoyed this novel. It was highly entertaining, challenging, and I think a great teaser to what Vollmann might be capable of in the future. I have Fathers and Crows and The Rifles on my shelf, and I am planning to get through both during the summer.