On the beaten track

As one of our more intrepid cultural interpreters, William T. Vollmann has traveled with the mujahedin in Afghanistan, smoked crack with hookers and camped out at the North Pole. So it's not surprising to find him riding the rails. In "Riding Toward Everywhere," an account of his adventures as a slumming hobo -- expanded from a January 2007 essay he wrote for Harper's -- Vollmann improvises his way across the United States with a series of clandestine hitches courtesy of the transcontinental train system.

Nothing new, you say? As a vehicle for probing the dark underbelly of America, examining the virtuous souls of the underclass and any number of other hoary literary conceits, riding the rails is so 19th century. But Vollmann still finds some juice in the conceit, so much so that his literary gift propels this slender, elegantly written book along like a third rail. Only at the end, when the book turns as monotonous as the train rides themselves, does "Riding Toward Everywhere" peter out.

Vollmann thinks a lot about savagery and the human capacity for suffering. It's a major preoccupation of his numerous novels and volumes of reportage, and this book carries the themes forward. The author, as he explains near the beginning, is a man given to frequent reflection -- even self-recrimination at times -- about his place in the world.

"All I know is that although I live a freer life than many people, I want to be freer still," he writes. "I'm sometimes positively dazzled with longing for a better way of being." I'm not sure what "dazzled with longing" feels like, but it sends him off to find satori hopping trains in rail yards in Sacramento, Seattle, Spokane, Wash., Cheyenne, Wyo., and elsewhere.

The book begins with some autobiographical musing, as Vollmann talks about his otherwise conservative father's anti-authoritarian streak, which apparently has leaked into his own DNA. "As I get older, I find myself getting angrier and angrier" at his "increasingly un-American America," he rages. What really upsets him is having to take his shoes off at the airport gate. But is that really evidence of rampant un-Americanism? As a polemic, "Riding Toward Everywhere" is shrill and unconvincing.