Poor People

I am half way through a book called Poor People by William T. Vollmann. I can say that I definitely set out to hate this book. The review in the Globe was positive, but the quotes they used from the text made me itchy: "I am sometimes afraid of poor people. . .my fear of people whom I define as poor is part of what defines me as rich." Insightful, yes, but I anticipated the release of the book like a school boy waiting for a fight after school. I was pacing, fuming, and making arguments against his callous assertions. Even the title was like a play on words: people that are poor, but also the statement we so frequently make when we feel pity "poor people."

The premise of Vollmann's book is that he traveled the world (the third world) asking poor people why they are poor and what makes them poor. This is an intriguing research question I think. He also photographed the people and includes in them in his appendix. The book is a series of profiles of real people whom he talked with, followed by his commentary on their lives and what he "heard" in their responses. The book moves fast, so the reader is whisked from country to country, meeting a host of characters.

Now that I am half way through, I am beginning to warm up to his arrogance and sarcasm and taking it as irony and not as truth. This sits better with me, for I am a big fan or irony. He makes statements that I often make as I am puzzling about poverty, inequality, and classism. I am thinking he just has the nerve to write it down and get it published. I find myself reading this book like I watch the Cobert Report on Comedy Central; I am constantly amused, but afraid that out of ignorance someone might tune in and think that Stephen Cobert is for real. I would hope this book's readers will sense the irony right away and not allow this academic's words to support their potentially ignorant opinions.

My final comments about the book thus far are from a research perspective. I understand that the book is being marketed to a wide audience (I bought it at Barnes & Noble), but his style neglects some of the important characteristics of writing up qualitative research. Namely, he doesn't use quotation marks to indicate what a person has said. He also doesn't clearly delineate when the interpreters are interjecting their own comments about what the interviewee has just said. This style makes it very difficult to follow what is directly quoted and what is editorialized by his interpreters or himself.

More to come when I finish. . .