Tarts and the Taliban: the weird career of an unquiet American

This is a cautionary tale about the hype that sometimes gathers, and sometimes doesn't, around American literary fiction in Britain. Let's take the example of a lauded US novelist – a bold, wild and provocative guy, who also happens to be an expert on the Taliban. He publishes an epic blockbuster, crammed with sex and soul. It wins rapt plaudits from a regiment of critics. The LA Times call him a "monster of talent, ambition and accomplishment"; The New York Times finds his "furious imagination" "extraordinary"; while The Washington Post hails his portrait of San Francisco low-life as a "masterpiece". His novel wins the Silver Medal of the California Book Awards; and the prize website purrs that the work "sets out to do for San Francisco what Joyce did for Dublin". And so, ecstatically, on.

Now, what becomes of such a hot property on this side of the Atlantic? Does the publisher rush-release it in response to an outbreak of rapture, as occurred this week with Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections (see page 13)? That would be unlikely, since the book in question has no British publisher at all.

We're talking about The Royal Family by William T Vollmann: a Penguin author in the States, but apparently rejected by Penguin (and everyone else) over here. Now, the enterprising distributor Turnaround has made up for this oversight by releasing copies of the US paperback (£12.99, from 020-8829 3000, or orders @turnaround-uk.com).

In a few years' time, will wise heads judge that the ubiquitous Franzen scaled the heights while the (in Britain) invisible Vollmann missed the mark? Or vice versa? If you have plenty of spare time over Christmas (they're both hefty volumes), read the pair and then decide. What we can know for certain is that the process by which one very ambitious novel scoops the pool while another sinks without trace still owes more to rhetoric than reason.

The prolific Bill Vollmann (born in 1959) is a curious, driven, contradictory character. He would, it strikes me, make a great fictional protagonist himself. Over the past 15 years, he has published more than 5,000 printed pages, across half a dozen doorstop novels. Rambling, picaresque, ludic and often obscene, they plunge grubbily into the Californian mean streets at one moment and then ascend lyrically into the weather-beaten, blood-soaked early history of America the next.

The Royal Family runs in parallel a tale of middle-class fear, fraud and loss in San Francisco, a private-eye quest, and the existential shocks and consolations of life among the whores of the Tenderloin district (a favourite setting). If Jonathan Franzen descends from Don DeLillo and Saul Bellow, then Vollmann probably counts as the bastard offspring of Henry Miller and John Dos Passos – with a strong dash of the Beats in his literary genes as well.

He can be pretty hard going, what with his vast American scorn for both proportion and quality-control – and the American sentimentality that finds signs of sanctity amid all the sleaze. Yet many passages of The Royal Family soar and sing with a power that has few equals in its time. Redemption comes from the gutter, not the suburb: a trite post-romantic theme, perhaps, but seldom expressed with such force and grace.

So how do the Taliban figure in this strange career? As a footloose young graduate, Vollmann began to specialise in high-risk, combat-zone journalism. (Much later, his driver hit a mine in Bosnia; two other passengers died.) So he went to hang out with the anti-Soviet mujahedin, and eventually wrote a non-fiction account of his escapades: An Afghanistan Picture Show.

Last year, Vollmann delivered a long, gripping slice of reportage to The New Yorker about the Taliban regime. This remarkable piece, published on 15 May 2000, predicted that their supporters would soon "be hijacking American planes". The fan of San Francisco prostitutes paid his respects to the burqa-clad women of Kabul, and to the puritan ideology that kept them hidden. "Conflicted" is the West Coast word, I think.

All of which makes William T kind of weird, but far from dull. Personality aside, his raw talent alone should have secured him a berth on this side of the ocean. Yet The Royal Family slipped through our nets. As ever, the publishing – and media – trade stands open to correction.