A Review of William Vollmann's The Ice-Shirt
Deron Bauman

While I remain ambivalent about the majority of William Vollmann's work, I continue to find myself amazed by the narrative integrity of The Ice-Shirt. The second, I believe, in a series of historical fictions pertaining to the interaction between a variety of Native Americans and the various European factions who infiltrate their lands, The Ice-Shirt chronicles the interaction between Viking settlers and Inuit/Eskimo people in the regions of present-day Greenland and Iceland interspersed with contemporary accounts of urban and rural Greenland. This juxtaposition, in addition to the swiftly joined narrative of the more historical sections of the book, proves to be one of the book's greatest pleasures, providing for the possibility of a Modernist interpretation of a fairly straightforward historical narrative. While this interpretation certainly isn't essential to an appreciation of the book it does help supply a context for the book beyond contemporary historical fiction and, in addition to the deft narrative skills already described, provides an avenue for enjoyment of the book that a reader of contemporary, post-modern fiction might need in order to set aside ambivalence about the otherwise fairly straightforward narrative. Once a reader has given himself over to the skill of Vollmann's narration, however, (as it is fairly easy to do in the The Ice-Shirt) he will find room, perhaps, for an appreciation of the treatment of subject-matter in a way that except in all but the better of Cormac McCarthy's works contemporary, post-modern fiction has disregarded (to its detriment, I believe). For nowhere in Vollmann's Ice-Shirt is there evidence of the implementation of voice for voice's sake; nowhere, either, is there an attempt by the author to subvert the integrity of the narrative by calling into question the authority of the narrative; nowhere in evidence is there an attempt to draw attention away from the fictional toward the trope of the author, even in the sections in which the reader finds Vollmann to be a central character in the narration. In fact, one can be excused for wondering why so many of today's better writers -- and readers for that matter -- have allowed themselves to become so preoccupied by attention to voice and subterfuge when so much pleasure can be had in the well attuned attentions of an author prepared to present the world as it is.

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