A TABLE FOR FORTUNE, by William T. Vollmann
To read the whole life and career of the fictional C.I.A. analyst Elliott Stevens (code name: Dave), together with the cavalcade of intelligence failures that led to and followed the worst terrorist attack in American history, you can buy the entirety of William T. Vollmann’s new 3,000-page novel, “A Table for Fortune,” as a four-volume box set.
Or, if you’re not a Vollmanniac, a passionate fan of his often extra-large books, you can purchase one volume at a time. At a page a minute, reading this heroic, fascinating and important work in full would take you about 50 hours without breaks.
Perhaps you need more “actionable intelligence,” as Dave says, to persuade you, some “PROOF of intention” from the author. Discussing an artist’s intention used to be a fallacy; good art, we’ve been told, stands for itself. But when describing and judging a work as purposeful, huge and challenging as “A Table for Fortune,” it might be necessary to bend a rule or two.
Luckily, in a surprisingly revealing but oddly self-deprecating eight-page preface, Vollmann states his intention in his first sentence: “‘A Table for Fortune’ is about September eleventh.” He goes on to report his problems bringing this intention to publication, paper costs be damned. Staring down a ballooning manuscript, his longtime editor at Viking asked him to make some cuts. Vollmann swears that he “hacked and amputated and abbreviated.” Yet somehow the book ended up hundreds of pages longer. “So I was justly fired,” Vollmann writes. (Arcade Publishing eventually picked up the project.)
He needed those pages because “A Table for Fortune” proceeds year to year, fear to fear, sometimes week to week, from 1968 and the Vietcong to 2020 and ISIS. Every day and some late nights bring Dave a tsunami of data — human intelligence, eavesdropping, satellite imagery, purloined documents, changing political demands — to verify, evaluate and report to superiors.
For Dave, the C.I.A. and Vollmann himself, synecdoche was not an acceptable method for reporting. Representation had to magnify particles and ramify parts. To communicate the agency’s decades of difficulties in processing its “data-atoms,” Vollmann took on a high-risk imitative form: a sprawling data-dense novel reflecting a sprawling data-collection agency. His decision about form and scale is the fundamental ambition — heroism in current publishing, if the tragic kind — from which other challenges in “A Table for Fortune” flow.
Although Dave spends his early career on the somewhat peripheral East Germany desk, Vollmann has him obsessed with the “big picture” of Cold War threats, asymmetrical conflicts and terrorist attacks, a perspective regularly blurred by incompatible facts and priorities. The big picture of “A Table for Fortune” thus has a perfect frame: shifting and shifty narration.
At times, the narrator seems to be a collective and cynical “we” that stands in for the C.I.A., as well as, perhaps, the polity and citizenry that enable it. Vollmann also uses a spooky limited omniscience for characters’ interior lives, simulates surveillance tapes of private conversations, includes photographs without captions or provenance, and makes first-person appearances to comment on his own novel.
Because of the photographs, facsimiles of German texts, newspaper headlines, seals and other archival material in “A Table for Fortune,” it may initially seem to be an earnest docunovel, both assembled from and corroborated by forensic records. It is in fact a mammoth unreliable narrative, complementing an unreliable organization that forges documents, manipulates images, lies or panders to politicians and protects its illusionists.
Vollmann splices into his C.I.A. history the tale of three generations of an all-American family — Dave’s father, a staunch anti-communist; Dave’s wife, Sally; their runaway son, Matthew; Dave’s lefty sister; and his wife’s conservative Republican relatives. But since the political is constantly disrupting the personal in Dave’s world, the family strand is as piecemeal and unpredictable as the agency strand. Readers must recognize the aggressions and evasions that knot the two.
For Cold War strategy, Vollmann uses the metaphor of a chessboard. His provocative move is presenting much of the agency and family data in long, knight-hopping, run-on, oft-interrupted, irony-soaked, pell-mell sentences. While this style is consistent with the novel’s other risks (its imitative form and unreliable narrators) as well as its noisy realism (foreign languages, redactions, acronyms, jargon, repetitions, parentheticals, font shifts and possible irrelevances), it also turns the reader into a Dave, a beleaguered analyst.
Still, I loved Vollmann’s combination of writerly challenges. I’ve never used the word “propulsive” in a review, but the novel’s methods — what Brecht called “alienation effects” — urged me on despite my having to read the entire book via PDFs on my laptop. (Or maybe I was propelled partly because I was reading texts that, like Dave’s incoming documents, didn’t have the authority and finality of bound pages.) “A Table for Fortune” is long, but its depiction of life inside the C.I.A. is never slow.
Some of the book’s features resemble those of other hefty and heroically chancy American novels — the documentary experiments of John Dos Passos’ “U.S.A.” trilogy, the fragmentary logorrhea of William Gaddis’s “JR,” the paranoia in Thomas Pynchon’s “Gravity’s Rainbow,” the hyper-patriotic voice of Uncle Sam in Robert Coover’s “The Public Burning,” the descriptions of tedious government bureaucracy in David Foster Wallace’s “The Pale King.”
If you’ve been defeated by one or more of these books, “be not afeard,” as Caliban says. “A Table for Fortune” continually pulls you back in with the gravity and magnetism of Sept. 11. From his early pages detailing the chaos of 2001, Vollmann keeps the attacks in our sights throughout, even as he works back to Vietnam and then through the decades of faulty intelligence and executive malfeasance that caused the catastrophe — and many others afterward.
At the end of “Gravity’s Rainbow,” an imagined rocket is descending on America. “A Table for Fortune” anatomizes and dramatizes the origins and aftermath of four real planes.
Before Vollmann, other American novelists also went long to grapple with a protean C.I.A.: Don DeLillo in “Libra,” Norman Mailer in “Harlot’s Ghost,” Denis Johnson in “Tree of Smoke.” DeLillo’s protagonist, swamped by his sources while writing an account of the Kennedy assassination, reminds himself that “it’s essential to master the data.”
Given the density, extent and frequent obscurity of Vollmann’s data in “A Table for Fortune,” a deadline reviewer who wants to eat and sleep cannot fact-check the author’s material and his 150 pages of sources. But I can say that the narrative, though fragmented, is congruent with Tim Weiner’s two histories of the C.I.A. — “Legacy of Ashes” and, more recently, “The Mission.” It also contains granular facts, as well as affecting scenes, that Weiner doesn’t have in his mere 1,200 pages.
In his preface, Vollmann says he’s not so much “against the C.I.A.” as he is the overreaching presidents who politicized it. Still, he has Dave and another analyst admit a “string of failures and unforeseen errors”: the fall of Saigon; the shah’s exit; “the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan; Iran-Contra; Gulf War One; September eleventh; our invasion of Afghanistan; Gulf War Two; Abu Ghraib.”
Dave is “addicted to the Kurds,” so Vollmann is particularly well informed on this stateless people whom the C.I.A. has used and betrayed several times — most recently, says Dave, by President Trump (code name: Mogul). Vollmann knows about Saddam Hussein’s use of poison gas on his own Kurdish citizens at Halabja, the differences between the Kurdish political factions P.U.K. and P.D.K., the role of the Turkey-based terrorist group P.K.K., the complicated politics of the no-fly zone in northern Iraq. The author (code name: Bookbinder) also describes his visit to Kurdistan and includes photographs he took there.
I’m vouching for the history in “A Table for Fortune” because I fear that readers who have not lived through the years Vollmann surveys may not register this novel’s importance, its commitment to rooting out marginal or inconvenient truths. That would be unfortunate because the shameful tactic of politicizing the C.I.A., often through obfuscation and misdirection, is happening again, Dave says, with Mogul “vandalizing the intelligence community.”
“A Table for Fortune” exemplifies a genre of books I call “monsterpieces,” culture-mastering excessive novels that deform conventional narrative into ingenious and instructive monstrosities. Vollmann’s “Europe Central,” which won the 2005 National Book Award, is such a novel.
In “A Table for Fortune” — “Europe Central” times four — Dave repeatedly imagines foreign “monsters ringed round” America, preparing to devour it. A reader may be tempted to argue that the real aggressor here is America, a Dr. Frankenstein served and haunted by an agency that kills, like Mary Shelley’s monster, across the planet. Sewn together from thousands of parts, the monster (the agency or the novel, take your pick) devours those who lack the persistence of Citizen Dave, a David inside the Goliath, an Ishmael inside the whale.
Dave seems to have been partly based on a real-life C.I.A. analyst — identified by the same pseudonym in “The 9/11 Commission Report” — who was thwarted from sharing critical information by the pre-9/11 intelligence wall between the C.I.A. and F.B.I. This Dave gets only a few (though fascinating) mentions in the commission report, but the life of Vollmann’s Dave, who is similarly stymied by “the wall,” is central in most of the novel.
In 1968, a 20-year-old Dave drops out of college to impress his veteran father, fly helicopters in Vietnam, kill “Reds” and have sex with bar girls. Skilled with languages, Dave is recruited by the C.I.A. and soon after marries his pre-Nam sweetheart. After more than a decade of strenuous trying, they have a son, Matthew.
Dave is equally industrious at the office, but, despite his photographic memory and rigor, after moving from his East Germany desk to the Iraq group, he rarely manages to break through Langley’s seven floors of bureaucracy with his history-conscious, minority-opinion analyses.
He worries about arming the Mujahedeen in Afghanistan, warns against toppling Hussein, finds no evidence of weapons of mass destruction, keeps an early eye on Osama bin Laden, and is disgusted with C.I.A.-sponsored torture. Dave respects Henry Kissinger and complains about liberals, especially those in Congress who try to control the agency, but he comes to despise goofball Bush and Machiavellian Cheney. Vollmann wisely avoids presenting Dave as a leftist mole or heroic whistle-blower. He’s a pragmatic patriot who, he says, holds his nose and votes for Trump in 2016.
Vollmann’s international data gives “A Table for Fortune” what Dave would have called “high intelligence value,” its expert interventions in fraught history with its dozens of actual plots and real people. The novel’s domestic data provides something like a unitary linear plot as Dave ages, becomes increasingly detached from his TV-informed wife, and finds himself secretly at odds with just about everyone except a female military analyst (code name: Cindy).
Unfortunately, Vollmann’s description of Dave’s wholesome and then burdensome suburban family life in McLean, Va., is full of postwar stereotypes and clichés, like much of the popular culture — movies, TV, music on Dave’s car radio — that Vollmann pipes in. He’s never been great on “normal” characters, and of the major characters, only the neurodivergent and rebellious Matthew consistently strays out of normal range.
On Page 260, we come across a strange aside: Dave and his wife, Sally, think “that this story is about them,” Vollmann writes. “In fact they were never any more than automatons whose mechanical projections help simplify to a level appropriate to the stupidity of the majority out there who lack even a CLASSIFIED clearance.”
This may be the C.I.A. “we” being unreliable again, but the comment can feel true of many characters, particularly early in the novel. As it inches along and includes more information about Dave’s circle (the one outside the “magic circle” of the agency), “automaton” figures gain human status, though their responses to political and familial conflicts may be predictable to Dave and the reader. Unlikely as it may seem, large parts of Vollmann’s four volumes resemble the realism of John Updike’s four Rabbit novels and Richard Ford’s five books about Frank Bascombe.
In his 60s and even into his 70s, Dave continues analyzing the aftermath of 9/11: He criticizes Obama’s drone warfare, foresees the rise of ISIS, pities Syrian refugees. But, depressed at home and then terminally ill, he can’t summon his earlier passion. As his energy dissipates in the novel’s fourth volume, Vollmann switches his focus to the hyperactive Matthew, part of a generation that comes of age in the shadow of 9/11.
Cognitively limited and emotionally labile, Matthew erroneously believes his father supported C.I.A. torture, so after high school he decides he hates Dave and impulsively cuts himself off from his family. From 2004 to 2020, Matthew is on the road, randomly searching for an America he can love, an “old-timey” country.
Matthew thinks of this as “going straight.” His methods are using meth or marijuana whenever possible, hitchhiking or riding the rails, and questioning a range of people about their notions of America — other addicts, obviously insane people, a judge, Mormons, small-business men, young and older women he immediately falls in love with, and many, many others.
Some of Matthew’s — and Vollmann’s — best moments are not those addled conversations but vivid appreciations of American nature, where the homeless Matthew sometimes camps. He spends months in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, which Vollmann, an area resident, knowledgeably and affectionately describes.
The C.I.A. does dirty tricks; Matthew specializes in temporary “dirty jobs.” Vollmann employs Matthew as a means to highlight the impoverished, addicted, mentally ill and homeless, some of them war veterans. But Vollmann’s un-“holy fool” can be as unreliable as the agency, his perceptions, conclusions and memories often befogged by his drug use.
Although several people Matthew meets call him “simple,” Vollmann states in the preface — more intention! — that he is the “real hero” of “A Table for Fortune.” Maybe he is a hero because Matthew refuses, like Vollmann, to own a cellphone, and he escapes government surveillance — the many-armed apparatus that for a time targeted Vollmann as a Unabomber suspect. Or perhaps Matthew’s a hero because he does what Vollmann did and described in his “hobo” memoir, “Riding Toward Everywhere.”
Like his father, Matthew fears “Night Land monsters,” and, like his creator, collects unusual quotations. After the complexities and high stakes of the C.I.A. sections, Matthew’s generosity and wandering anecdotes can be a relief, but even I, maven of monstrosity, think his doper stories go on far too long, with too much repetition and too little “actionable intelligence.” You could swoop in and out of the Matthew sections in Volume 4 and reduce your temporal investment.
Like Dave surveilling the world, I hoped to identify the “big picture” — not of historical events or even of the C.I.A. but of “A Table for Fortune” itself. In his preface, the author mourns the death of his beloved only child, Lisa, who was 23, and notes that she and Matthew shared some self-destructive experiences. Vollmann also reveals that he, like Dave, has an “incurable form” of colon cancer. Given this family data, what might have been Vollmann’s personal intention, his big picture?
Dave thinks of the C.I.A. headquarters as a “great Pyramid of gray metal.” “A Table for Fortune,” a four-sided, monumental novel assembled from many small pieces and containing secret passageways, is neither an Ozymandias statue nor a monstrous Sphinx; it is not just a capstone to Vollmann’s career but a whole pyramid. The “big picture” of this monsterpiece, for me, is a deconstruction of the pyramid scheme of American politics: Successive governments accrued profits and power by using the myth of an omniscient security apparatus to promote American exceptionalism, mislead taxpayers and promise them a prosperous and safe future. That is, until our twin pyramids came down.
A TABLE FOR FORTUNE | By William T. Vollmann | Arcade | 3,025 pp. | $149.99
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