William T. Vollmann (left) came to the New York Public Library Wednesday night for a “Live at the NYPL” interview, conducted by journalist/author Karl Taro Greenfeld. The subject was Poor People, the first new book from Vollmann since he won the National Book Award in 2005 for the story collection Europe Central; think of the new book as a globetrotting Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, with Vollmann wandering the planet asking his interview subjects, “Why are you poor?”
Although the sell-out crowd admired Vollmann’s artistry and his audacity, it was clear that some in the audience found his attitudes a bit unsettling. “Maybe it’s better to be accepting about your poverty than angry about it,” he conjectured early in the evening—that bit of semi-fatalism actually didn’t bother people so much as the idea that if poor people choose to face their poverty by drinking themselves into oblivion, we should respect their decision and, in the case of a homeless man who lives in the parking lot next to his California studio, buy him a bottle for Christmas if that feels right. One audience member wanted to know why Vollmann didn’t have more to say about (I’m condensing and paraphrasing here) how imperialist patriarchy kept poor people poor, and Vollmann replied that he was more interested in what poor people themselves thought about their condition, and in any event there’s not that much individuals can do to overthrow imperialism. Instead, he said, you have to deal with poor people not as problems but as individuals. “If we see people who are poor,” he advised, “we can listen to them.”