By CHARLES McGRATH

HOLTVILLE, California - William T. Vollmann, legendarily prolific, has written nine novels, including “Europe Central,” which won the National Book Award in 2005; a seven-volume, 3,000-page history of violence; and a book about hopping freight trains, a hobby of his even though his balance is so bad that he has to use a bucket as a stepstool.

His newest book, “Imperial,” released by Viking Press in July, is 1,300 pages long and took him 12 years to write. Its two great themes are illegal immigration - the struggle of thousands of Mexicans to sneak into the United States through California’s Imperial Valley - and water, which has transformed parts of the valley from desert to seeming paradise but at great environmental cost.

A companion volume, published by powerHouse Books, contains some 200 photographs he took while working on “Imperial,” for which he also wore a spy camera while trying to infiltrate a Mexican factory, and paddled in an inflatable raft down the New River in California, a rancid trench that is probably the most polluted stream in America.

Mr. Vollmann, who just turned 50, is reclusive, despite being married and the father of a daughter, and oldfashioned: a wandering, try-anything writer-journalist in the tradition of Steinbeck or Jack London.

Mr. Vollmann collects pistols and likes to shoot them. To research his novel “The Rifles,” he spent two weeks alone at the magnetic North Pole, where he suffered frostbite. He has traveled to Thailand, Bosnia, Somalia, Russia, Afghanistan and Iraq, among other places, studying war and poverty, and has a habit of picking up prostitutes just about wherever he goes. He has spent considerable time with skinheads, alcoholics and crack addicts, and has ingested plenty of illegal substances himself.

“Crack,” he said recently, “is a really great drug - it’s like having three cups of coffee at once.”

“Imperial,” which is about the vast and arid region in the southeastern part of California, bordering Mexico, is an extreme Vollmann production: brilliant in places, nearly unreadable in others. There are lyrical passages, and labyrinthine ones along with scientific chapters, complete with graphs, on salinization and agricultural productivity.

The more interesting stuff includes chapters on narco-ballads - songs, outlawed in Mexico, celebrating drug lords - on early California history, on the Chinese-dug tunnels in Mexicali and on Mr. Vollmann’s lingering breakup with an old lover.

On a cloudless, sunbaked summer day, Mr. Vollmann toured some of the landscapes that had inspired him. “I used to think the Imperial Valley was hot, flat and boring,” he explained. “But I crossed over here, stayed in a hotel and realized the place was full of secrets.”

At one point he peered through the Mexican side of the border fence. “I think countries have the right to maintain their borders,” he said, “but on the other hand, think of the thousands or so who have died just trying to get to the United States so they can clean toilets. It seems horrendous that they shouldn’t have a better life, especially if they’re willing to do work we aren’t.”

He visited the Terrace Park Cemetery here in Holtville, where unidentified people who have died crossing the border are buried in a bare field.

Mr. Vollmann stood there quietly for a while and said, “You wonder how many are never found and never brought here,” and he added, an edge of sarcasm creeping into his voice: “At least they won’t be stealing our tax dollars anymore. That’s very important.”


William T. Vollmann, peering into Mexico, photographed a Mexican deported from California, below.