Snap Judgments

Jonathon Keats

Sacramento’s most celebrated living writer, William T. Vollmann won the National Book Award three years ago for Europe Central, an epic collection of war stories. While his 17 works of fiction and nonfiction have been wildly inconsistent over the years, ranging from groundbreaking to gratuitous, he deserves another round of recognition for his latest book, which captures the inside world of train-hopping hoboes with enormous humanity and insight. At the core of this extended narrative essay are several dozen characters—like Badger, who started riding the rails when he was five years old, abandoned on the tracks by his parents. Badger knows plenty about survival, such as how to avoid the railroad bulls and where to stash cigarettes and booze. But even with his decades of experience, his hobo’s life is as uncertain as freedom itself: The American dream of dodging all resp­onsibility is tempered with night­marish anxiety about the future, chased away, cash permitting, with a fifth of liquor.
To research his 188-page book (with 65 of his own matter-of-fact photographs), Vollmann took to the rails himself, “catching out” on boxcars and lumber cars and grainers, which lets him speak directly to the thrill of ad hoc adventure. Yet he never mistakes his “fauxbeaux” escapades for the hard hobo life, making his book a rare mix of sociological honesty and psychological truth. A