“Imperial”: A crazed obsessive navigates the West

Review by Paul Ingram

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“Imperial” by William T. Vollman

1200 pages, $35.00.

Vollman once referred to the gargantuan “Imperial” as his Moby Dick and while some have called the nearly 1200-page tome nearly perverse for appearing as a massive chunk of notes and indiscriminate ideas, the book’s singular focus on the single California county tells a widening story of the madness of the 20th century, a history of environmental transformation and racially-driven violence.

It’s a feverish work that begins with the story of the New River, the polluted river Styx that winds through the desert and throughout the long history of US – Mexico relations, with Imperial county as the stage. The first environmental catastrophe of the county was the Salton Sea, the result of engineers who chewed into the Colorado River for irrigation canals and wound up creating the acrid Salton Sea. For a moment, this sudden lake was full of resorts, but the lake has decayed over the century, becoming a salty, drying wasteland that stinks of dead fish and salt-marshes. The boosterism of early California gave way to the realities of the state’s shortsighted maneuvers, and Vollman tells this story with photographs, history, and a personal style that winds these together remarkably well.

Vollman spent nearly ten years putting the book together and its scope widens, rather than diminishes it’s subject, for the story of the Imperial Valley is not just the story of a twentieth-century borderland defined by a poisoned man-made lake and a sick river, but of a land defined by Spanish conquistadors, prostitutes, drug runners, farmers, migrant workers, cops, robbers, thieves and cowards alike. Imperial is the story of the creation of the United States, the scar of Manifest Destiny, and the Industrial Revolution.

It’s a heartbreaking, difficult work, but ultimately satisfying because the book transforms the dry, irrigated idea of a place into the rich history of our complex and often hypocritical world.

Although the work incorporates history, this is not the work of a historian. It’s the work of a crazed obsessive, Bruce Chatwin remixed with Hunter S. Thompson with a side of John McPhee. Vollman bounces across the “ditch” (or the All-American canal which splits Calexico, California from Mexicali, Mexico), lacking Spanish-language skills and steered by his obsession with prostitutes. He searches for hidden tunnels from the 19th-century, examines the condition of workers in the nearby maquiladoras, and tries and fails to navigate the polluted New River.

It’s a heartbreaking, tumbling work, almost too large and dense to be consumed as a single book, but for its flaws, the book is a fascinating read, a deeply personal examination of the American West, it’s flaws, tragedies, and subtle meanings.

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