[In the following mixed review of The Rainbow Stories, James compares Vollmann's literary technique and ambitions to those of Tom Wolfe and Thomas Pynchon, arguing that the stories in this collection belong somewhere in between the former's reportorial style and the latter's "fabulism."]

Halfway between Tom Wolfe's journalism and Thomas Pynchon's fabulism, William T. Vollmann's Rainbow Stories search for a new form. In stories that blend colorful documentary evidence with a novelist's dark imagination, Mr. Vollmann offers images no ordinary reporter could glimpse, no typical novelist invent: a 16-year-old skinhead called Bootwoman Marisa bites her lip while a dragon is tattooed on her thigh; a bag lady carries around black plastic sacks filled with her most prized possessions, dead pigeons; a murderer called The Zombie preys on homeless people, feeding them crystal-blue Drano before he decapitates them; a legendary practitioner of thuggee kills for the goddess Kali.

Mr. Vollmann's loving attention to the grotesque particulars of anatomy and murder is often as disturbing as he means it to be. Yet these 13 lengthy tales, each composed of dozens of short takes that substitute for plot or narrative momentum, are also maddening in their overblown language and self-indulgent accumulation of facts. There are touches of hard brilliance in The Rainbow Stories, but the reader must mine for them as if they were diamonds, must be prepared to emerge covered with carbon dust and exhausted by the effort.

With titles like "The Yellow Sugar" and "The Blue Yonder," the stories are casually tagged to the colors of the spectrum—red for blood and prostitution, yellow for myth and romance, a cold blue for loss and death. The most plentiful and striking are based on his own observations in San Francisco, where the 30-year-old author (now based in New York) lived for several years.

In California, Mr. Vollmann dropped in on the neo-Nazis who called themselves the San Francisco Skinz, drifted among the prostitutes and homeless people of the Tenderloin district, visited the morgue. He emphasizes the factual basis of his fiction in the final entry, "A Note on the Truth of the Tales," in the acknowledgments that echo names from the stories and in the authorial voice of a man named Bill, who weaves through the book commenting on his own reporting. "This revelation cost me twenty dollars," says the footnote to a section detailing a brief encounter with a prostitute in a parking lot. In comments included with the press material prepared by his publisher, Mr. Vollmann explains how a friend introduced him to the Skinz and describes the dangers of his forays into the Tenderloin. However fictional his persona, he did his research.

This reporter's impulse is the last thing anyone might have expected. Mr. Vollmann's first novel, You Bright and Risen Angels: A Cartoon, was a playful, satiric extravaganza about a battle for world domination between the insect kingdom and the inventors of electricity. The narrator is a computer programmer who calls himself "the author" and refers to his own "meaningless judgments." His characters have wills of their own.

Similarly, the author's persona in The Rainbow Stories is that of a helpless observer who absolutely refuses to judge or draw conclusions. As Mr. Vollmann says in his preface, "I have become a mere recording angel instead of a Michael or Gabriel." He accumulates distressing scenes as if he were building a huge compost heap, expecting that these organic elements will eventually turn into something useful.

Mr. Vollmann's descriptions are often amazing in their power to attract and repel at once. For three grueling pages he describes the autopsy being performed on an alcoholic named Evangeline, one of The Zombie's victims. He follows the scalpel as it roams over her body, removing "magnificent purple" kidneys, peeling back the skin that covers her face and sawing through her skull. He includes just enough recognition of her humanity to keep readers from turning away in disgust. "Evangeline's liver was a chapter entitled: 'What I Wanted.' The text was short, but not without pathos: 'I wanted to feel loved and warm and happy and dizzy.'" This is Mr. Vollmann at his most daring, vile and humane best.

But every story is also absurdly overwritten. "The yellow-blue points of the moon had strained and strained to embrace each other and bitterly dissolve each other into a gooey orb like necrotic flesh so that the moon's lonely extremities would be taken into one putrescent ball of self," he writes of one moonlit night. Even the darkly comic fable of a man who so loves his neighbor's green dress that he steals it from her closet—and marries it—goes on too long.

And always Mr. Vollmann assumes a smug, unholier-than-thou attitude, as if there were something inherently valuable in his forays to the seamy side of life. "The autopsy of a street alcoholic is as worthy of study as the gloating reminiscences of a millionaire," he says in an interview released by his publisher, apparently without questioning whether that gloating status quo is a standard worth engaging in battle. Even if it were, Evangeline's autopsy is not framed as an accusation against the rich. It is not framed at all, and that lack of social context and fictional shaping is the collection's deep and serious flaw.

"I do not want to investigate causes and hypothetical has-beens; The Zombie was a thing without a cause," Mr. Vollmann writes. Time and again he eludes judgements in just this way, sliding out from under the fiction writer's need to make his characters whole, no matter how ambiguous they may be. What, after all, does Mr. Vollmann's fiction reveal about the source of the skinheads' hatred, except that they had terrible childhoods? What does exposing Evangeline's guts do, except reinforce the easy platitude that we're all human? In the end, Mr. Vollmann merely hides behind the reporter's adherence to facts; but he is writing fiction, so the "facts" are always suspect.

The Rainbow Stories leave Mr. Vollmann wandering in a no man's land between Wolfe and Pynchon, accumulating details that in themselves cannot match his huge ambition and talent.