In his new book, misery junkie William Vollmann asks people around the globe, Why are you poor?
By Laura Miller Apr. 16, 2007 | St. Catherine of Sienna, the 14-century Italian mystic and ascetic, is reputed to have mortified herself by drinking the pus of one of the hospital patients she cared for as a lay member of the Dominican Order. She also practiced self-flagellation and starved herself to death. It’s easy to be reminded of Catherine while reading William Vollmann’s “Poor People,” an agonized meditation on the question “Why are some people poor and what should the rest of us do about it?” Vollmann isn’t discernibly religious, and he seems to honestly believe that his book is not as “self-lacerating” or “self-loathing” as James Agee’s classic “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,” an earlier (1941) foray into similar territory. Yet there has always been something in Vollmann that revels in abasement and grueling self-scrutiny, and here he has found the ideal occasion for it. Vollmann, who won the National Book Award last year for his novel “Europe Central,” is a writer of extraordi
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