A chronicle of global suffering, one human at a time

In 1936, James Agee and Walker Evans took an assignment with Fortune magazine to study the conditions of white sharecroppers in the U.S. South. The magazine didn't publish their findings — it hardly made for light reading — but "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men," the book which grew out of Agee and Walker's interviews, eventually became a classic record of the Great Depression. Here, in photographs and poetic prose, were the wretched of America's earth.

National Book Award-winning novelist William T. Vollmann ("Europe Central") clearly admires Evans and Agee's intentions a little more than their book. He just as clearly believes we need to repeat their assignment over and over again, lest the anguish of the destitute attain the dusty remove of history. "Poor People" is his contribution to that endeavor, and there's a good chance we'll be reading it in 70 years, too.

As a reporter, Vollmann is nothing if not a realist, and he understands that in a climate of fear and global distrust, America's interest in the suffering of others beyond its borders has atrophied steeply. So to put things in perspective, he opens his meditation on Sept. 12, 2001, in Thailand, where the catastrophic events of the previous day in America are dwarfed by the perpetual anguish of washerwomen and vagrants living in a shanty town outside of Klong Toey.

Vollmann has covered wars and uprisings around the globe for more than 20 years now. "Poor People" is an offshoot of "Rising Up and Rising Down," his 3,200-page study of violence. The chapters move thematically, drawing on interviews — usually done through interpreters — in a huge variety of countries, from Colombia to the former Soviet Union, from Thailand to Yemen.

Some of the people Vollmann meets are the victims of violence. A homeless Irish woman he interviews has been raped; the residents of a village in Kazakhstan's Tengiz Valley are poisoned by sulfur from the nearby oil refinery.

Many more are simply, as they put it, victims of destiny. That's the answer they give when Vollmann repeatedly asks why they, and not others, are poor. Implicit in this question is Vollmann's constant refrain to himself: Why are they poor and not me?

At the back of the book, Vollmann appends his own photographs of many of the men and women he interviews, their images less a stamp of this book's authenticity than a recognition of the unknowable qualities of human suffering.

"For me," Vollmann writes, "poverty is not mere deprivation; for people may possess fewer things than I and be richer; poverty is wretchedness. It must then be an experience more than an economic state. It therefore remains somewhat immeasurable."

How, after all, would he measure the poverty of Sunee, the alcoholic washerwoman whose 8-to-5 employment pays her just enough for rice at lunch and a bottle at the end of the day? Or what about the Cambodian girl he meets with the massive deformed nose, or the Kenyan prostitute he followed into a Nairobi slum?

Vollmann knows that however well he asks his questions or phrases his observations, he is taking something from the people he interviews.

"The more I write about this moment," he says, after giving a legless beggar in Belgrade a five-dinar note, "the more I degrade it; for making it significant cannot but seem a pretension to generosity or superiority ... The significance was precisely in the insignificance."

By steering clear of statistics and eschewing the normal social-science observations, Vollmann has written a book of enormous power — one that honors the magnitude of each story it records and allows the downtrodden to say in their own words why life has laid them so low.

John Freeman is president of the National Book Critics Circle.