SOURCE: "Northern Exposure," in The Nation, New York, Vol. 258, No. 11, March 21, 1994, pp. 384-87.

In the following review, Ulin claims that in The Rifles Vollmann does not fully develop his themes or his characters.

I've often thought of William T. Vollmann as the oddball monk of American letters, a man who sits in a stark room creating his illuminated manuscripts (literally illuminated, since Vollmann's work routinely features maps and line drawings by the author, sketched in a primitive, if evocative, hand) twelve or fifteen hours a day, stopping only to go on fact-finding missions or to pick up a hooker and pretend that he's fallen in love. Actually, given Vollmann's avowed fascination—some might say obsession—with prostitutes and other denizens of the urban demimonde, the monk analogy doesn't hold up in any but the most abstract way. Yet when I consider his profligacy (since the appearance of his...