Vollmann's 3,000-Page CIA Epic Takes On America's Decline

William T Vollmann has published a 3,000-page novel, A Table for Fortune, in four simultaneous volumes, 15 years in the making, that offers both a family story and an insider's history of the CIA.

The book arrives in the 250th year of the United States, a moment that, as the Guardian's review notes, "seems to invite a reckoning." For a young country, the United States carries an unusual weight of myths about its foundation and its conduct at home and abroad. Vollmann's epic attempts to engage with the American past and present at both an institutional and a personal level, in order to show the consequences of the quest for liberty and the belief in American exceptionalism.

The novel continues a project Vollmann has pursued across his career. His previous fiction has explored the ideological basis of American society, most notably the Seven Dreams series, published from 1990 to 2015, which depicts the generally disastrous encounters between American settlers and Indigenous peoples. A Table for Fortune extends that inquiry into the last 50 years of US foreign policy. At the heart of that half-century sits 9/11, with the book "tracing the roots of that crime in one direction and its poisoned harvest in another."

How does Vollmann write the CIA?

The CIA has been fertile ground for major American novelists before, including Don DeLillo and Norman Mailer. But the Guardian review argues Vollmann is perhaps the first to represent the culture and daily activities of the agency in granular detail.

His great gambit is formal. He frames the intelligence world as a dark workplace comedy of minor resentments, sexual tension and office banter. An institutional voice — the CIA itself — narrates these sections in a relentlessly sardonic tone, thick with acronyms, codenames and jargon rendered in multiple fonts.

The humour is mordant. The narrator regards all forms of death and suffering as "fun". That seductive quality allows Vollmann to educate the reader across a broad sweep of geopolitical subjects, from the Angolan civil war to the interrogation methods of the Stasi. In doing so, the review argues, he charts the hypocrisies and double standards of the agency.

What does this change for the American novel?

The book positions Vollmann as the novelist who has gone furthest inside the machinery of US power. Where DeLillo and Mailer circled the intelligence world, Vollmann documents its office life, its paperwork and its private cruelties, at a length few publishers would risk.

The publication of four volumes at once, in the country's 250th year, turns the novel into a deliberate act of national accounting. Whether readers will follow Vollmann through 3,000 pages of institutional sardonicism is the question the review leaves open — but the ambition itself marks A Table for Fortune as one of the most ambitious American novels of the decade.