SOURCE: "The Ice-Shirt Cometh," in The American Book Review, Vol. 13, No. 4, October-November, 1991, p. 25.

In the following review, Bock describes The Ice-Shirt as a "near-masterpiece."

Since 1987, William Vollmann has published 1,524 pages of fiction—more than most writers wring out in a lifetime. The bulk alone would be worth remarking. As it happens, Vollmann's writing is wildly inventive and does not hesitate to deal with large issues. You Bright and Risen Angels, his first novel, creates a surprising, comic world of animated jungles, sentient electricity, urban realism, and political insurrection. In the age of understatement, he has set himself the task of describing the motives of his characters in admittedly sometimes excruciating detail. The Rainbow Stories introduced a journalistic dimension with its firsthand narratives of Vollmann's sojourns among disenfranchised San Francisco subcultures, like those of skinheads, prostitutes, and the homeless. Now he has undertaken an ambitious, seven-volume "Symbolic History" of...