William T. Vollmann has spent thirty years writing books that most people admire from a distance and few actually finish. A Table for Fortune is the logical endpoint of that project — four simultaneously published volumes, 3,000 pages, fifteen years in the making, priced at £150 — a novel that dares you to dismiss it as vanity before you've reckoned with what it actually does. The structural gambit is the most interesting thing here. Vollmann splits the book between two registers: the CIA sections, narrated by the institutional voice of the agency itself in sardonic, acronym-dense, multi-font prose, and the Matthew sections, where the syntax loosens into something sensory and Whitman-adjacent. The CIA narrator treats death and suffering as 'fun.' That's not shock value — it's a carefully constructed tonal trap, a seductive voice that educates you about Angola, the Stasi, and Abu Ghraib while you're busy enjoying the dark humor. When you catch yourself smiling at the mordant wit, that's the point. The central CIA figure, analyst DAVE, is recruited in 1967 for his photographic memory and spends the next several decades as a true believer whose faith curdles incrementally. Vollmann's thesis about the agency — that it went from terrible-but-effective before 9/11 to morally unmoored and executive-pleasing after — is not a fresh argument, but the granular daily texture he builds around it is. No American novelist has rendered the culture of the CIA at this level of operational specificity. The Matthew sections in volumes three and four earn their length in a different way. DAVE's cognitively impaired son, unable to inherit his father's comfortable hypocrisies, hitchhikes and rides freight trains through a country his father only surveilled from above. Vollmann's portrait of homeless life in California's delta region is unvarnished without being voyeuristic, and the Thomas Pynchon echo — the 'little parenthesis of light' in the stoner haven — is deliberate, an argument about where American counterculture's warmth actually lives. The Uwe Johnson comparison the review makes is the right one: Anniversaries builds the same slow-motion catastrophe out of domestic and political material, accumulates its weight through daily granularity rather than dramatic crescendo. What Vollmann adds is the insider's satirical register, the institutional voice as protagonist. When elderly DAVE notices a basket of towels 'just in case somebody wanted to bleed to death,' the comedy has become grief without announcing the transition. The problems are real. Three thousand pages at £150 is not an argument against the book's seriousness — it is the book's seriousness, priced into the transaction. The review notes no definitive answers to the liberty-versus-state question, which Vollmann frames as a feature ('where would be the fun in that?') but which some readers will experience as evasion. The Trump era material in the final volume, calling him 'a vile amusement consonant with this particular stage of American decline,' risks dating the diagnosis even as it names it. If you are the right reader — patient with digression, interested in institutional voice as a formal device, willing to let a 3,000-page argument develop at its own pace — this is the most serious attempt anyone has made in a generation to write the CIA novel that also contains the homeless novel that also contains the 9/11 novel. That is not a small thing. It is also not a thing for everyone, and there is no shame in that.
