You Bright and Risen Angels

I'm a massive William T. Vollmann fan. I also respect what he was trying to do here with his debut novel. It takes ambition to write a work this dense and challenging but some of the ideas did not fully land for me, even though they helped lay the foundation at least from a thematic perspective of his future and more historical driven works, which I find to be masterpieces of historical fiction.

I enjoyed the digressions more than the story. In fact, I enjoyed them a lot. The history of the rise of electricity in the first part of the book was a merciless synopsis of the westward ho! of frontier history. Things fall apart near the end. Or maybe the piss was knocked out of me by the shift from 10% action, 90% digression to 90% action, 10% digression. Vollmann is a wonderful digresser. So unlike 'War and Peace', I tended to skim the battle scenes in this book.
I will now NOT get raptured for reading this book.

Outrageous, difficult, head-scratching, odd, hilarious, unpleasant, disgusting. All of those things in pretty equal measure. And probably the funniest and brightest of Vollmann's work, to which my exposure is admittedly yet somewhat limited. Smacks a bit of a first author trying too hard to reach for everything and just slightly missing the mark, but You Bright and Risen Angels is fiery, if a little unfocused, genius.

20th century history filtered through high school jocks and nerds (and sentient insects). Too long and too bitter.

Video review: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cjQ1VMLeVbQ.