Imperial by William T. Vollmann

(Viking, 1,306 pages, $55)

Imperial County, Calif., is home to one poisoned river, one toxic sea, and 160,000 people. It sits in the state’s southeastern­most corner, hard against the Mexican border. Until the beginning of the 20th century, it was desert, little more. But irrigation transformed it, spreading a lush quilt of lettuce, alfalfa, and cotton along a new network of canals. Prosperity didn’t last. Runaway canal water created the low-lying Salton Sea, which, after a brief heyday as a recreation draw, has grown dirtier and deadlier each year. One of its feeders, the New River, is perhaps the most polluted stream in America. Mexican immigrants hang in, drawn by the region’s remaining agricultural jobs. But dusty, hot Imperial is today California’s poorest county.

It’s hard to say whether William T. Vollmann’s latest opus really should be called a book, said The Economist. The product of a decade of labor, it reads like “a collection of jottings, musings, notes, documents, and interviews”—in other words, the raw materials that would be transformed into a book by most authors. “But persevere.” As odd and undisciplined as Vollmann can be, the National Book Award winner has an “ability to talk, it seems, to anyone.” With that talent, he has “penetrated the soul of a place that is like few others on earth.” Vollmann possesses a “fascination with the seamier side of life,” which ensures we hear plenty from prostitutes, drug runners, and people smugglers. In the end, the stories of their struggles tell us “something universal about the durability and ambition of the human spirit.”

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Imperial is probably longer than it should be, said Sam Anderson in New York. “About halfway through,” I began to get annoyed, even angry, at “the clumsy sentences, the digressive digressions, the gratuitously creepy metaphors” that initially get filed under “lovable quirks.” Yet such excess seems to be the price of hearing out a man who puts his all into every project. If only the results included true epiphanies, said Lawrence Downes in The New York Times. One can’t read these 1,300 pages without absorbing a general sense that the failed Imperial dream is the failed American dream. Mostly what we get, though, is Vollmann scratching his head.