Poor People

Poor People collects twelve years of William T. Vollmann's writing on poverty. He frames the book as one question asked from many angles: why are you poor? The result is scattered.

Vollmann's curiosity takes him a long way, usually to places most writers avoid, and he is at home there. He spends time with drug addicts, prostitutes, criminals and people with nothing, and that company runs through everything he writes. In Poor People it puts us in front of what the poor go without. We turn away from poverty; Vollmann sits with it.

His suicidal lack of inhibition gives the book its punch. Snakeheads are Chinese gangs that traffic people abroad for sex work, and Vollmann chases snakehead leads in Japan after being warned it could get him killed. He knocks on doors with no plan for what happens if one opens. If the right person answers, maybe he can ask a few questions.

The view of the Tokyo underworld fascinated me, but Vollmann is more interested in the crime than in the women working off their debts to the snakeheads. He keeps asking what is going on here and why. The book's question goes unasked.

The same happens in Kazakhstan. An oil company has moved into a remote area and people are getting sick and dying. Those left behind cannot afford to leave. Vollmann goes looking for someone to hold accountable. Relevant, yes, but it isn't the question on the back cover.

Perhaps the question is the problem. Why are you poor? There are two answers. One: the world is unfair. Two: a chain of choices and circumstances led this person here. Only the second makes a story, and the book is short on them. The people Vollmann talks to are too busy making ends meet to trace the chain.

Poor People reads like something Vollmann assembled in his spare time between other projects. It falls short of what it could be.

My wife rates Evicted by Matthew Desmond far higher. Desmond stays in one country and stays put: a year alongside poor families, listening to them and to their landlords, the police and everyone else who turns up in their lives. He goes deep where Vollmann goes wide.