POOR PEOPLE
William T. Vollmann
Ecco
Sociology
ISBN-10: 0060878827
ISBN-13: 9780060878825

The author of this book, William T. Vollmann, has won the National Book Award, the Pen Center USA West Award for Fiction, a Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize and a Whiting Writer's Award. He describes his own life in the kind of degraded neighborhood he so assiduously explores in POOR PEOPLE, an area of Sacramento where people have tunneled under the modern city into the beehive of the 19th-century sub-city. They break holes in the walls of the pawnshops to re-steal stolen articles and resell them to buy drugs. Vollman's apartment windows have "mesh over the bars," and before the mesh he was unable to take tinfoil off the window panes without being encroached on by his ever-watchful neighbors.

This experience, which of course he takes on by choice, has not sullied his view of the poor, with whom, throughout this long, lyrical and often tortured look at what makes people poor, he is always sympathetic. Vollman describes an encounter with an "armless man who knelt beside the topmost step of a pedestrian overpass in Bangkok…using his teeth for his hands, begging submissively." When he discovers that the man has cleverly folded his arms behind him, Vollman could feel cheated of the coins he'd been dropping in his cup; but he realizes that the man needs the money more than he does. "I continued to pay the tithe, and with a cheerful heart."

Vollman uncovers every sort of poverty as he ranges through the urban and rural byways of the world. Some, it seems, is systemic, generational; other poverty has come by the bad luck of political upheaval or through personal misjudgments. Many poor people have a belief system that allows them to accept being poor; others lash out in anger at their fate. Consider "the old man in Tokyo who sat on the sidewalk reading a comic book and stinking of urine." The author asked him his perennial question: Why are you poor? The old man "threw his comic book on the ground and shouted: It's my fault! Nobody else's responsibility!"

A prostitute guide led him through the backstreets of Nan Ning, China, and introduced him to a group of dispossessed farmers who had been given property deeds by Mao and now, under the new regime, have to buy new ones at a price they can't afford. There is a picture of one such man (the book is enhanced by black-and-white photographs) holding his old deed, and on his face is an expression that hides, to the Western eye, the fury he expressed. The prostitute's wise advice to the poor: "Everything you should do by yourself."

But how can that advice help the California squatter who had to go to court to answer to the charge of cracking a windshield and came home to find his dog choked to death on its leash? Vollmann opines, "A mansion, a new Mercedes and a professional dogwalker would have almost infallibly prevented these particular ills."

POOR PEOPLE is a slow, subtle travelogue through the world of poverty that lies just beyond the parts of our planet that surround our airports, car rental agencies, safe houses and decent eateries. Vollman has included a list of probable wages of the people he encountered, ranging from $1.00 a day (or less) to his own salary of approximately $100.30 per day. He considers himself rich, defining poverty as "lacking and desirous of what I have; unhappy in his or her own normality." He writes without an agenda but not without feeling. His book is courageously conceived and deftly executed, and deserves, for its author, another prize.

   --- Reviewed by Barbara Bamberger Scott

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