With the exception of documentarian Spike Lee's award-winning "When the Levees Broke" (and Dissent magazine), these fundamental questions were never sufficiently answered by a media obsessed with showcasing ravaged storm victims without investigating the societal roots of their endemic impoverishment. Unfortunately this is par for the course. Regularly American cameras pan down on urban cesspools like Calcutta or Port-au-Prince, Haiti , capturing the pathos for a news segment and then moving on to sports scores and stock indexes. The net effect is that we see the destitute, we cringe at their dire circumstances, but we don't contemplate their inner lives.
Fortunately, the indomitable globetrotter William T. Vollmann, a recent winner of the National Book Award for his novel "Europe Central," has stepped into the breach. Building on a journalistic tradition made memorable by Jack London ("The People of the Abyss" ) and James Agee ("Let Us Now Praise Famous Men ") among others, Vollmann travels to Thailand, Mexico, Yemen, Afghanistan, and Japan (there are many more locales), fueled by a burning question: "Why are you poor?"
Avoiding bleeding-heart clap trap, Vollmann gets answers that are both varied and profound. Handing out money along the way, he encounters a bruised gallery of down-and-outers -- drunks, whores, floor cleaners, criminals, panhandlers, beggars, and toothless survivors -- all clawing away for a daily meal. With great finesse he enters their hardscrabble lives and procures a slightly better intellectual understanding of the flesh-and-blood reality of povertyland. "People who are poor but not in imminent danger of perishing," he writes, "have more of a chance of catching their breath and actually conceptualizing their poverty."
Take, for example, Sunee, an alcoholic Thai woman he befriends in Bangkok's Klong Toey slum, where arthritic women sell sugarcane juice in plastic bags and starving cats with mange roam the alleys . After spending a few days with Sunee, hearing nauseating tales of haunted corrugated shacks and methamphetamine highs, Vollmann offers a possible reason for her bleak circumstances: destiny. Void of emotion, he essentially says God made some folks rich and other folks poor. And that's just the way it is.
