Poor People

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  I want to mention three things about the author before covering the difficult topic of his newest publication. First, he won the National Book Award in 2005 for Europe Central (I recommend it highly); he admits offhandedly towards the end of Poor People that some people find his writing difficult—it takes a little practice, but it really isn’t all that difficult--; and he mentioned having some minor strokes that are affecting some of his cognitive skills (particularly putting names with faces... (show more)

  I want to mention three things about the author before covering the difficult topic of his newest publication. First, he won the National Book Award in 2005 for Europe Central (I recommend it highly); he admits offhandedly towards the end of Poor People that some people find his writing difficult—it takes a little practice, but it really isn’t all that difficult--; and he mentioned having some minor strokes that are affecting some of his cognitive skills (particularly putting names with faces). This last one saddens me because I enjoy his work tremendously and he still hasn’t finished his promised Seven Dream Songs.

  Poor People is an examination, as you would imagine of poverty. That is as simply put as possible and doesn’t even begin to cover the information in its relatively few pages and 120 some photographs. The book ranges from the US, Cambodia, Thailand, China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Japan and to a few other places like Madagascar that are mentioned but not examined in the way the other places are. The difficult thing about the book is that, like terrorism, poverty’s definition is nearly impossible to pin down. Unfortunately, there are some topics about being human that cannot be defined in a way that anyone can understand, so they fall under the rubric of “I know it when I see it.”

  I have mentioned in other reviews that terrorism is all but impossible to define. One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter. Keep in mind, when Sam Adams and others dressed rather poorly as Native Americans and dumped barrels of tea into Boston Harbor they were committing a capital offence—so you can define their act as one of terrorism in which no one died; it still does not change the fact that the owners of the tea could consider an attack on their goods to be terrorizing and certainly the owner of the ship could have claimed the same thing. Yet we hold them up as heroes. Poverty is similar. Adam Smith says this: “Every man is rich or poor to the degree in which he can afford to enjoy the necessaries, conveniences, and amusements of human life.” This seems practical, but there are two items in the list that wouldn’t make it into any current definition of poverty: convenience and amusement. A necessity is easy enough to define: without this for any prolonged period will result in death. But convenience and amusement are not at all necessary, really, to the notion of poverty. It is easier to get around and have a job if you have a car, but public transportation (even subsidized) is available in most industrialized cities. Is someone who rides a bus poorer than someone with a car? Given only those data, then your gut response would likely be yes. But if you consider larger concerns, the answer is going to become very fuzzy.

  Another definition is provided by the UN: anyone living on less than $4 a day. If you had $4 in Amsterdam, you couldn’t buy a beer. If you had $4 in Prague you could buy right at a gallon of beer. If you have $4 in Burkina Faso, are you better or less off than someone with $4 in Mozambique? In order to render assistance, a definition is required and that seems reasonable enough—if we are only talking third world here. If you consider the poor in the industrialized world, then $4 a day might buy the minimum number of calories per day, but that is stretching it and even then it doesn’t cover habitation.

  William Vollmann isn’t someone to sit surrounded by books in a library taking notes on a topic. He went to Afghanistan during the war they were having with the Soviets. He has been to just about every extreme in climate and (just for this book—but has done so for earlier works also) gone to countries with his wit, a camera, something to take notes with and a brass set of balls. He talked to individual people in all of the places I listed above. He paid for their information as often as not—and is frank about this. He muses on what his small assistance will do and what larger assistance might do to some of his interlocutors (he comes up with no real answers which only points to the depth and breadth of the issue.)

  The last lengthy chapter explains his current situation in Sacramento. He lives in what was one a restaurant. The parking lot for this place is also a haven for the homeless—anyone reading any of Vollmann’s early work would know that, while perhaps strange in general, it isn’t odd that he would live surrounded by them. He takes the view of a property owner, but one who is not truly bothered by those who live in his parking lot. He is honest about his feelings towards his homeless neighbors: some he likes, some he “likes” and others he just respects or feels a bit anxious towards. Most of us would never have chosen to live where he does in the first place, so you can make all the opinions you like, but most of us never face anything like it. What this allows him to do is frame his statements with an authority that most of us would not be able to do.

  Poor People examines the beggars, the working poor, the displaced. A beggar in one place is not much different from another is the general idea; the only appreciable difference is the level of aggression. The working poor are more problematic. The issue is why they remain where they do. A moralist would insist on framing it as a matter of choices, but Mr. Vollmann is very careful to cover that—yes the choices some make keep them in or put them into a situation where necessities are barely being met. For me this is the only failing of the book. He points to hope and hopelessness—in fact he is such a fan of hope that his most artful writing is saved up for that topic. The failing is the lack of attention of anomie. The general atmosphere of the places he visited and the people who were willing to talk with him seemed weighed down by a humongous mass of human apathy and hopelessness. Why work to rise above your station if you don’t see anyone else doing the same? If you live in the middle of a slum and only have vague notions of what is beyond it, how do you know what to do to get it? Americans believe that anyone can be wealthy, the old Horatio Alger stories. This cannot be discounted, but it also cannot be a national mantra. Some do, others try and fail, and a few try and fail many times. Just because Horatio Alger wrote of rags to riches doesn’t mean everyone in rags will go to riches even if they try to exhaustion every day of their lives.

  The book is not a cry for assistance to the poor. If it is anything other than just information artfully delivered, it is a chance for a great mind to ponder a subject that is easy to point at but nearly impossible to define. He spent 3500 pages examining violence (I admit to finishing only a few hundred—this is a book for a serious medical problem if you aren’t a speedreader and if you are shame on you). Violence can be defined (justifiable violence is another story, but violence itself is within the realm of the definition) and he spends 3500 pages going through it. Poverty cannot be and it gets 300 pages. This seems a paucity, but let’s step back to take a broader look. What is poor in my city is wealthy by standards in 95% of Africa and somewhere on the magnitude of 70% of Asia. Poverty cannot be defined perhaps, but it can be examined and what we get is an examination of people in various stages of poverty.

  The working poor are what you expect—they work but they don’t make enough money to get past the bottom rungs. Some drink or take drugs to escape the misery around them, others accept it as their fate either because karma or Allah put them there (the book is without reference to the Christian God condemning anyone to poverty—this is more as a mark of a potential lacuna than saying that karma or Allah are particularly mean forces). Working poor here are not that much different than working poor anywhere—they make enough to get most of the necessities (medication and unexpected expenses can push them from the working poor to the begging poor however), but they either cannot or do not know how to make enough money to move up any rungs on the metaphorical ladder.

  The displaced are the ones we really don’t have here, at least not in the same way—Katrina created massive numbers of the displaced, but the idea was to make it possible for them to move into similar housing elsewhere while the area was rebuilt (for the sake of keeping this a review about a book, please don’t pick this apart, we all know the shortcomings, this is just for the sake of illustration). The displaced elsewhere are different from what we have here. In places like China where they are building new cities where villages once were or flooding entire areas to make power from hydroelectric dams. In many cases, these people have been given what amounts to small land grants that are no longer honored. This means when their home is bulldozed or just sent to the bottom of a new man made lake, they will have no place to live. This doesn’t just make you poor, it un-addresses you and is essentially a way to make you a non person. In Kazakhstan, an oil company conglomerate is making life in some ancient villages impossible due to health concerns. They are being paid for their residences but at prices that reflect the current environmental hazard, which will of course leave them very little to try to find new housing—they run the same gauntlet as their Chinese brethren. (Anyone who has read any of my essays that are not on specific products will know that I am no fan of the current administration; however, the government tried to provide housing for those displaced; this is not something that can be said for the ones I have mentioned.)

  This is not a depressing book, despite the title. I don’t know if he intended to balance the situation, but for everyone who seems totally hopeless in their situation, he shows others who are not. Further, because of the dignity he grants these people by speaking to them as equals as much as that is possible, you get to see what is otherwise to most of us invisible. It isn’t edifying exactly, certainly not at all uplifting, but it is worth the effort.

  Finally I want to say a word about the structure. Mr. Vollmann mentions the depression era book written by James Agee with photographs by Walker Evans: Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. This book was supposed to expose the level of poverty in the rural depression era South. The photographs came first. Before you read anything that Agee wrote about these people, you see them, bent half broken, weathered, sad, vulnerable. Poor People is exactly opposite of this. Mr. Vollmann points out the pictures as he gets to them in his narrative, but only after getting you into their story—that way the dignity level is controlled; this makes a world of difference you would have to read to fully understand. (show less)

   

   

  by Steven Paul Savage on Oct 28, 2009 at 02:59AM

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  Laconic, varied and inquisitive. I love Vollmann's books. This was an interesting digression. I bought it in S.F. in 2007 and the poverty in that city is accentuated by its proximity to extreme wealth, Tenderloin etc... The visit and the book made me even more grateful for the miracle which is the Welfare State, despite it's many failings.

   

  by Jim Bax on Feb 18, 2009 at 07:45PM

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