William T Vollmann's 3,000-page novel A Table for Fortune, 15 years in the making, is an epic attempt to engage with the US's past and present at both an institutional and a personal level. The four simultaneously published volumes offer a family story and an insider's history of the CIA, aiming to show the consequences of the quest for liberty and the belief in American exceptionalism.
An Insider's History of the CIA
Vollmann's previous novels, particularly the Seven Dreams series published from 1990 to 2015, explored the ideological basis of American society by depicting encounters between American settlers and Indigenous peoples. A Table for Fortune continues this project by investigating the last 50 years of US foreign policy, with 9/11 at its heart. The book traces "the roots of that crime in one direction and its poisoned harvest in another".
While the CIA has inspired many American novelists, including Don DeLillo and Norman Mailer, Vollmann is perhaps the first to represent the agency's culture and daily activities in granular detail. He frames this as a dark workplace comedy of minor resentments, sexual tension and office banter. Sections are narrated by the institutional voice of the CIA itself in a relentlessly sardonic tone, full of acronyms, codenames and jargon in multiple fonts. The narrator's mordant humour, which regards all forms of death and suffering as "fun", allows Vollmann to educate readers on topics from the Angolan civil war to Stasi interrogation methods, charting the agency's hypocrisies and double standards.
DAVE and the Decline of the Agency
The central character is an analyst codenamed DAVE, recruited by the CIA in 1967 for his photographic memory. DAVE is lecherous, emotionally repressed, unhappily married, and a true believer in the fight against communism. His only true pleasure is learning secrets and imagining himself "mindwinging" over enemy territory. Hearing Simon and Garfunkel's Bridge Over Troubled Water makes him "think of unwashed hippies masturbating". He jokes that Radicals "like the hammer-and-sickle position, but only on red sheets".
Vollmann's verdict on the CIA is that it has gone from being terrible yet generally effective before 9/11, a necessary evil, to becoming increasingly morally compromised due to a greater propensity for assassination and torture, and more concerned with pleasing the executive branch than gathering accurate intelligence. The novel's length is justified by the historical material it covers. As one of DAVE's bosses says, "all we care about here is telling you the truth. The only way to tell it is detail by detail." The recreation of the US's gradual ensnarement in global, unwinnable conflicts resembles Uwe Johnson's Anniversaries, with a similar sense of watching a car crash in super-slow motion.
Matthew's Quest for America's Soul
The third and fourth volumes follow DAVE's son Matthew, who suffers from an unspecified cognitive deficit. Convinced of his inferiority and bemused by the world, Matthew cannot accept the social and political injustices his parents take for granted. After the revelations of torture at Abu Ghraib, he embarks on a quest to find the soul of America, which he thinks of as "going straight". The prose shifts from the cerebral, cynical register of the CIA sections to something more sensory and impressionistic. Matthew hitchhikes, rides freight trains, sleeps rough and does a variety of drugs, trying to accumulate wisdom from books and people he encounters, developing a sort of Emersonian self-reliance.
In contrast to his father's dependence on secondhand intelligence, Matthew knows the US from "walking, digging, building, hiding, loving and living there". Vollmann offers an unvarnished portrait of homeless life in the US, but also allows Matthew to find community in the California delta among stoners and affable dropouts. With the closing of this bracket of security, Matthew falls into a darkness that mirrors the US's descent into the era of Trump, whom Vollmann calls "a vile amusement consonant with this particular stage of American decline".
A Sorrowful Diagnosis
In the last volume, the comedy becomes increasingly bitter. As an elderly DAVE moves around his home, he comes across a "basket filled with neatly rolled white towels, just in case somebody wanted to bleed to death". A Table for Fortune offers a profoundly sorrowful diagnosis for the state of a semiquincentennial US apparently no closer to resolving how to reconcile individual freedom with the role of the state. While the book supplies a multiplicity of opinions on this vexed question, it offers no definitive answers.
