Self-Love in a Cold Climate

By John Skow

A solipsistic imbalance distorts and threatens to destroy William T. Vollmann's brooding, idiosyncratic novel cycle, Seven Dreams: A Book of North American Landscapes. Corruption of native inhabitants by Europeans is the broad theme of this enormously ambitious project, and the first two volumes, The Ice-Shirt, about Greenland, and Fathers and Crows, about the settling of Quebec, presented the author's bleak argument with stinging force. What he argues for is a vision of absolute evil: civilization, native cultures not excepted, is a pestilence, and mankind is a monstrous curse laid upon nature.

Where the imbalance enters is in an irritating secondary theme, scored for piccolo. That theme is William Vollmann, whom the author finds boundlessly fascinating. He can't stay out of his own novels, and he capers in and out of them, representing himself typically as William the Blind, a very clever, very naughty historical voyeur. The first volumes of the Seven Dreams cycle are successful novels despite Vollmann's frequent first-person kibitzing. His new book, The Rifles (Viking; 411 pages; $22.95), is an exasperating hash of fiction, op-ed attitudinizing, men's magazine heroics, cut-and-paste history and confessional autobiography.

The mixture does not work, partly because the historical and the personal plot lines that Vollmann imagines to be parallel simply are not. One of the former is the death in 1846 of Sir John Franklin and all the members of his British navy Arctic expedition, sent to find the Northwest Passage. Vollmann relates that event to a glum romance in present time between one of the author's fictional alter egos, whom he calls Captain Subzero, and a young, deaf Inuit woman named Reepah. Vollmann insists at length that Subzero, an & Arctic tourist who, as Vollmann himself did, makes a two-week trek to the north magnetic pole, is a modern counterpart of Franklin. Further and sillier, he imagines that Reepah bears some resemblance (or shows some useful contrast) to Franklin's wife Lady Jane.

The juxtaposition is absurd: Franklin and his wife fascinate historians because they embody so perfectly the courage and blind arrogance of 19th century Britain, but Subzero and Reepah are simply dreary. And Subzero, picking moodily at the scab of his 20th century conscience, fretting that the Inuit find him contemptible, giving tips on Arctic trekking (down sleeping bags collect moisture and freeze; masturbation at very low temperatures isn't worth the trouble) is just not as interesting to Vollmann's readers as to the author himself.

Too bad; further volumes may resurrect the promising Seven Dreams cycle (of which this is to be the sixth volume in chronological order), but for now the tiresome self-indulgence of Rifles has stopped it dead.