Infinity and beyond Two acclaimed novelists indulge in knotty nonfiction projects BY JOHN FREEMAN

For some time now, culture’s drumbeat has been telling us the novel is dead, its thunder stolen by memoirs and quasi-fictional works, like the books of W.G. Sebald, that defy the concept of what constitutes a novel. Although the avalanche of conventional novels continues unabated, there is evidence that some essential writers have worked out a separation arrangement with the form. This fall, two of America’s most extravagantly praised novelists — William T. Vollmann and David Foster Wallace — will publish books that attest to their infinite seriousness about nonfiction.

As part of W.W. Norton’s new Great Discoveries series, Wallace is bringing out Everything and More, a short history of the mathematical concept of infinity. And next month, Vollmann delivers his seven-volume, 3500-page, 17-years-in-the-making book on violence, Rising Up and Rising Down (McSweeney’s). Both releases represent a shift in priorities for these authors. With its footnotes and hyperactive language, Wallace’s fiction has dramatized our anxiety over language’s failure to describe the tangible chaos of human emotions. That is partly why Infinite Jest was such a long book: One allusion never sufficed. In Everything and More, he uses his linguistic virtuosity to leapfrog the tangible and describe the abstract.

In a similar way, Vollmann’s fiction has fired linguistic buckshot at the strange muchness of our global society, from the march of white settlers across the North American continent (the " Seven Dreams " series) to the underbelly of prostitution in Southeast Asia (Atlas). Rising Up employs that same literary strategy of " flooding the zone " to extrapolate a theory of human behavior as it relates to violence.

Of the two titles, Everything and More seems easier to write off as an author on holiday from his day job. In his " Small But Necessary Foreword, " Wallace describes the project as " a piece of pop technical writing, " his goal " to make math beautiful — or at least to get the reader to see how someone might find it so. " Wallace, who claims to have nursed a " medium-strong amateur interest in math, " succeeds admirably. Fittingly, the wormhole he tugs us through is not math but language. He attacks words as a means of thinking abstractly, then notes that the symbol for infinity is referred to as " the love knot, " and cites the wonderfully poetic mathematical expression " the curve that satisfies the polar equation r2 = a cos 2O-. "

Happily, unlike many other books of its ilk, Everything and More does not linger on quirky biographical details about the mathematicians whose work it examines. Instead, Wallace leads his readers through a series of theoretical way stations. The early parts of the book lay the foundation for abstract thinking and its perils; the later sections then use concepts tamed down and made graspable to lure us into reading about — even understanding — the work of 19th-century Russian-born mathematician Georg Cantor, who answered the question: Is infinity just a concept or an actual reality?

Due to the book’s structure, it is highly unwise to skip forward, since a reader will only be confronted with a maze of mathematical symbols. Instead, Everything and More begs to be read slowly, and then reread. It sounds like a tall order to ask of a country obsessed with American Idol; then again, this is coming from a writer whose last novel was 1079 pages.

For a while, it seemed Vollmann was neck-and-neck in a size war with Wallace, Richard Powers, and anyone else who would take him on. With Rising Up and Rising Down, he has put the issue to rest: No American writer alive today is as crazy and productive and willing to risk his life as William T. Vollmann.

Drawing from nearly two decades of reporting (which Vollmann began as a recent Cornell graduate, when he went to Afghanistan to fight with the mujahideen), Rising Up is best described as a moral calculus for violence. Using the conflicts of the past tumultuous decade, during which America shifted from the Cold War to the War on Terror, it examines when violence is justifiable and when it is not.

One of the incidental pleasures of Rising Up is its meandering tour of hot spots across the globe — Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Yugoslavia, Cambodia, Burma, Somalia, Colombia — many of which Vollmann visited as a journalist on assignment. Although he was paid well, no doubt, the cost was high. Crossing from Muslim to Croatian territory in the Balkans in 1994, he saw one of his closest friends fatally shot by a sniper. Vollmann had to wait beside him in their jeep while the man died.

Still, the greatest anguish in Rising Up comes not from Vollmann but from the people he interviews. They are crushed and scoured by the weight of war. In one section, he talks to a woman whose boyfriend was cut into pieces by Croats: " No one has a chance to open my heart again, " she says.

" This is what violence does, " Vollmann writes in response. " This is what violence is. It is not enough that death reeks and stinks in the world, but now it takes on inimical human forms, prompting the self-defending survivors to strike and to hate, rightly or wrongly. " In spite of its great intentions, Rising Up and Rising Down can never end that cycle. It does help us understand it, though, and that glimmer of empathy is at least a start.

John Freeman can be reached at jfreeman4@nyc.rr.com

Everything and More was released Oct. 13. Rising Up and Rising Down hits stores Nov. 10; copies may be preordered at www.mcsweeneys.net