SOURCE: "Captain Subzero and the Lost Expedition," in The New York Times Book Review, February 27, 1994, p. 6.

McManus is a poet and novelist. In the following review of The Rifles, he admires and appreciates Vollmann's ability to convey massive amounts of useful information, but faults his narrative method as hasty, ungainly, and ultimately hubristic in its ambitions.

While The Rifles is the third book to be published, it is Volume 6 of William T. Vollmann's startlingly ambitious project, Seven Dreams: A Book of North American Landscapes, seven long novels in which he proposes to narrate the entire "symbolic history" of the settlement of North America. Volume 1, The Ice-Shirt (1990), recounts the arrival of the Norse in Greenland in A.D. 981, and their clashes and accommodations with the native Inuit during the next 300 years. Volume 2, the 990-page Fathers and Crows (1992), chronicles in prodigious detail the savagery that attended the 16th-century confrontations between...