is reviewed in today's Boston Globe:
His ambitions here are more humble: a series of digressive essays about his addiction to jumping freight trains. Vollmann and his favorite traveling companion, a droll and unretiring fellow named Steve, are self-described "fauxbeaux." They don't have to ride the rails; they choose to.
Vollmann frames his journeys as a personal response to "the unfreedom that is creeping over America," though the disappointments of his personal life grease the wheels as well. It's no coincidence that he responds to his wife's request for a divorce by heading to the local train yard.
Vollmann's lyric prose manages to convey both the velocity of train travel and the intensity of the sensual experience, a jolting achievement in an era of "comfort travel" that has sought mostly to annihilate our relationship with the landscape. "We passed our hotel," he writes, a bit later. "There came a crossing, and Cheyenne reached vainly after us with her last streets. We stayed low. Then there was nothing beside us but grass and highway." And still later, "I know very well that the Barstow yard, seen from above on a desert night, shows its row after row of lights to advantage, like a beautiful woman smiling with all her teeth."
