An Experiment in Scotch

Impe­r­ial is like Robert Caro’s The Power Bro­ker with the atti­tude of Mike Davis’s City of Quartz, if Robert Caro had been raised in an aban­doned grain silo by a band of feral rac­coons, and if Mike Davis were the com­mu­ni­ca­tions direc­tor of a heav­ily armed lib­er­tar­ian sur­vival­ist cult, and if the two of them had some­how man­aged to stitch John McPhee’s cor­tex onto the brain of a Gila mon­ster, which they then sent to the Mex­i­can bor­der to con­duct ten years of immer­sive research, and also if they wrote the entire man­u­script on dried banana leaves with a tou­can beak dipped in hobo blood, and then the book was line-edited dur­ing a 36-hour pey­ote séance by the ghosts of John Stein­beck, Jack Lon­don, and Sin­clair Lewis, with 200 pages of end­notes faxed over by Henry David Thoreau’s great-great-great-great grand­son from a con­crete bunker under a toxic pond behind a maquiladora, and if at the last minute Her­man Melville threw up all over the man­u­script, ren­der­ing it illeg­i­ble, so it had to be re-created from mem­ory by a community-theater actor doing his best impres­sion of Jack Ker­ouac. With pho­tographs by Dorothea Lange.

Found in Sam Anderson’s review of William Vollman’s lat­est book, Impe­r­ial.