SOURCE: "From the Folks Who Brought Us Winter," in The New York Times Book Review, October 14, 1990, p. 13.

In the following review of The Ice-Shirt, Sacks praises Vollmann's imagination, use of myth, and prose style, but argues that the novel fails to reach narrative closure.

Imagine a performance of Wagner's "Ring" cycle directed by Sam Peckinpah, with a new libretto by J. R. R. Tolkien and occasional music by Aaron Copland, and you'll be getting the feel of this ambitious, often enthralling novel about the Vikings' arrival in North America, in the blissful place they called Vinland, circa A.D. 1000. The Ice-Shirt contains notes and glossaries indicating that William T. Vollmann has drawn on medieval Norse sagas, legends of the Micmac Indians and Greenland Inuit, and his own travels along the North Atlantic seaboard. But his main source seems to be his powerful imagination, with which he imposes a...