Don't start your acquaintance with William Vollman with this book.

His major books -- "Europe Central," winner of the 2005 National Book Award for fiction and 2004's "Rising Up and Rising Down," an expansive overview of the world's penchant for violence -- are among the best books of the past several years.

A writer of great range, he indulges here largely in grandstanding and soapbox oratory as he "celebrates" the outlaw life of freight-hopping.

		"RIDING TOWARD EVERYWHERE" By William Vollman Ecco Press ($26.95)

For Vollman, it's a hobby. With friends, he enjoys sneaking on empty railcars traveling western routes and communing with hoboes in rail yards and those "hobo jungles" seen in old movies.

His pastime offers him the fantasy of the freedom of the road, like Jack Kerouac or his model, Thomas Wolfe, or an even older writer, Jack London, "lighting out for the territory."

The characters he meets -- Pittsburgh Ed, who used to be a machinist, Dolores and Cinders, women on the rails for years, nameless men in rickety shelters -- reflect a life since lost in modern "Plastic America," a place that makes Vollman feel more "unfree" every day.

Although he writes often "I want to get out of there," Vollman really goes nowhere in his search for everywhere. Lyrical passages of plaintive beauty and sharp portraits of the hoboes infuse this book with Vollman's quiet power as a writer, but this is a diary, no more or less.

We learn of his appetite for prostitutes (although he borrows cars, rather than use his own to pick up them), fondness for semi-automatic pistols and Jack Daniels for breakfast, and raw hatred of President Bush, but these and other elements don't add up.

As Vollman himself says:

"My critique of American society remains fundamentally incoherent. ... All I know is that although I live a freer life than many people, I want to be freer still. I'm sometimes positively dazzled with longing for a better way of being. What is it that I need?"

This book doesn't help us help him to find the answer.