[Crossposted from a four-star review on Goodreads.]

Weighing only a little less than last year’s book Imperial, Argall is Vollmann’s 746-page retelling of the “true story of Pocahontas and Captain John Smith — though by “true” Vollmann refers to what he calls a “Symbolic History”, and that the facts contained within are “often untrue based on the literal facts as we know them, but whose untruths further a deeper sense of truth.” I can’t claim to be any good arbiter of the ethics behind this, only to note that it’s fiction, after all, and that Smith, as meticulous a chronicler as he was, was guided by ideological and commercial considerations just like anyone.

And indeed, Argall is perhaps closer to that “deeper sense of truth” in the sense that it’s stubbornly, refreshingly, anti-Romantic. (Smith himself barely mentions that famous incident — enshrined in elementary schools all across America, at least in the pre-Howard Zinn days — when Pocahontas supposedly saves Smith from execution, and so Vollmann similarly glosses over it.) One can imagine Argall almost as the dark twin of Terrence Malick’s film The New World (my favorite film of the last decade, but hey, go see the others). Where Malick’s vision of America is precisely to embrace the myth and the promise, in all its swooning, idyllic, but haunted, glory, Vollmann’s rendition is the opposite, a dense thicket of a nightmare: brutish, ugly, miserable, shit-streaked, and in the end, deeply, quietly, tragic.

And did I write that it’s all written in barely penetrable Elizabethan English, complete with variant orthographies, italics and font sizes whirling out of control, florid introductions and epigraphs, and almost a hundred pages of endnotes and glossaries? What at first looks like literary grandstanding gives way to a slow immersion into a Language peppered with unexpected moments of rapture. Paradoxically, the distance created by the prose makes the events even more unbearable. (I do wish we heard more from our good narrator William the Blind, whose rare atemporal interruptions are very welcome, as it shocks the reader momentarily out of the muck and into some sort of self-recognition.)

So read it all, if you can, even the endnotes; if anything, the latter provides a fascinating, if somewhat daunting, glimpse into Vollmann’s indefatigable capacity for historical research. I’m happy to wander down any digressive garden path Vollmann wishes to lead me, in any case.

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