As a reporter, Vollmann is nothing if not a realist, and he understands that in a climate of fear and global distrust, America's appetite for the suffering of others beyond its borders has atrophied steeply. So, to put things in perspective, he opens his meditation on September 12, 2001, in Thailand, where the catastrophic events of the previous day in America are dwarfed by the perpetual grind of washerwomen and vagrants living in a shantytown outside of Klong Toey.
Vollmann has covered wars and uprisings around the globe for more than 20 years now. Poor People is an offshoot of Rising Up and Rising Down, his award-winning 3,200-page study of violence. The chapters move thematically, drawing on interviews—usually done through interpreters—in many countries, from Colombia to the former Soviet Republic, from Thailand to Yemen.
Some of the people Vollmann meets are the victims of violence. A homeless Irish woman he interviews is raped; the residents of a village in the Tengiz Valley are poisoned by sulfur from the nearby oil refinery. Many more are simply, as they put it, victims of destiny. That's the answer they give when Vollmann asks why they are poor and others are not.
As in Rising Up and Rising Down, Vollmann refines definitions throughout Poor People—words like "rich" and "poor" and "normal." He appears to have badgered people with the same question: Why are some people poor and others rich? Implicit in this question, but not belabored by it, is Vollmann's constant refrain to himself: Why are they poor, and I'm not?
Like all of Vollmann's reporting, Poor People has a homespun quality—there are several sections about his own interactions with a homeless man who camps outside Vollmann's Sacramento office building. Footnotes bear the concrete details away, leaving room for plenty of face-to-face interviews with beggars, snow-shoveling peasants, washerwomen, prostitutes, people-smugglers and simple vagrants.
By steering clear of statistics, eschewing the normal social-science observations, Vollmann has written a book of enormous power—one that honors the magnitude of each story it records. "For me," Vollmann writes, "poverty is not mere deprivation; for people may possess fewer things than I and be richer; poverty is wretchedness. It must then be an experience more than an economic state. It therefore remains somewhat immeasurable."
Vollmann knows however well he asks the questions, or phrases his observations, that he is taking something from the people he interviews. "The more I write about this moment," he says, about giving a legless beggar in Belgrade a five-dinar note, "the more I degrade it; for making it significant cannot but seem a pretension to generosity or superiority. ... The significance was precisely in the insignificance."
And so time and again, this book bravely steers away from the sweeping generalization and into the author's profound empathy for the downtrodden. He touches them and gives to them, but most uniquely, allows them to say in their own words why life has laid them so pitiable, so low.