The author says he spent nearly 20 years writing ''Rising Up and Rising Down.'' It is the product of a restless spirit that is driven -- for reasons that never become clear, that the text itself never really reflects upon -- to put the body in harm's way. All the threads ultimately converge on the ''Moral Calculus,'' which consists of a set of numbered propositions. With its intricately layered structure and its internal cross-references, it seems an attempt to find or impose some stability on a world that the rest of the book suggests may be hopelessly insane.

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While his convoluted philosophizing suggests a deep ambivalence about the legitimacy of violence, the prose itself suggests that Vollmann's effort to create a moral system is actually a pretext for exploring his fascination with the aesthetic dimensions of carnage and its instruments. Either form of contemplation (moral or aesthetic) renders weapons and corpses into emblems of ultimate truth. ''The real aim of violence,'' he writes, ''is to conquer, direct, instruct, mark, warn, punish, injure, suppress, reduce, destroy or obliterate the consciousness within the body.'' He describes the uncanny fascination of gazing upon a corpse -- ''something with my form and shape'' but with ''no volition to give it buoyancy.''