YOU BRIGHT AND RISEN ANGELS

A first novel that appears to be only half of a gargantuan, Pynchonesque epic chronicling a revolution by insects against electricity, with the many human characters as players for each side. Vollmann has the ambition and imagination to fuel a metafictional army, but his overwriting - often cryptic and dense with tumbling 200-word sentences - leads the unwieldy enterprise into a swamp from which it never escapes. Told in a slangy voice that shifts between computer-hackese, Yahoo redneckism and revolutionary rhetoric (which quotes Lenin and small-arms operation manuals in equal doses), the book follows the picaresque adventures of the controllers of electricity, led by Mr. White, a fictitious contemporary of Edison, and the insect's human cadre led by Bug, whose life we follow from a gothically cruel childhood onwards. This essentially simple conflict gets drenched in Vollmann's feverishly surreal imagination, which grows as exhausting as David Lynch's in Dune. For instance: Bug wears earplugs that give him a sixth sense by receiving messages from the insect world; electricity in its purest form exists as blue, animal-like globes; one minor character's tongue wears tape that turns the shade of the lie he tells from white to black; another has drunk so much developing fluid in a photo lab that pictures appear on paper he touches. Through it all what is missing is a sense of what this hectic invention is really aiming for. By book's end, the revolution is just in fill swing. An intriguing, exasperating end run on reality, but Pynchon, the coach here, knows the route far better. (Kirkus Reviews)