William T. Vollmann’s subject is 9/11. Always is, always was. Even before the attacks happened, they were somehow his thing. An Afghanistan Picture Show, Vollmann’s debut, was advertised as a Cold War memoir of a 22-year-old’s adventure battling the Soviets with the mujahideen. But it was really an inadvertent introduction to people and a place that were destined to become the enemies of America.
Vollmann has spent his career writing around that day in 2001 – the first and main event of the 21st century – dissecting with retractor and forceps the American empire built before 9/11 and the country that the attacks created. Now, in his new novel, Vollmann faces the subject straight on. “A Table for Fortune is about September eleventh,” he writes to the reader at the start. “How did we get to September eleventh, and into how many feculent sloughs did we crawl from there?” His fans are beginning to dream: could this be the book that finally gets Vollmann the recognition he deserves?
I say An Afghanistan Picture Show was Vollmann’s debut, but it hardly counts. He finished writing the book in 1983, but no publisher wanted it, so he xeroxed manuscripts himself and sold them at a loss of $6 a copy at two bookstores in San Francisco, where he lived; at City Lights, a beatnik favorite, and Bound Together, run by an anarchist collective. (In 1992, Vollmann finally sold the book to Farrar, Strauss and Giroux.) Vollmann was in his mid-twenties then, a jobless computer programmer, and being unpublished cut him up.
Vollmann was never going to be the frontman of his era. He’s not very billable
In a previously unseen July 1985 letter to some London friends of his, Bob Harbison and Esther Whitby, Vollmann wrote:
Quite frankly, I don’t know whether I’m a good writer or not. I’ll be turning 26 this week. I’ve never had anything published. I’ve gone to some so-called writers’ groups, and when I read my stuff I dislike it less than the stuff the other blowhards read, but it bores me just the same… I’d really like your opinion as to whether I have what it takes to be published. If you don’t think so, let me know.
A month earlier, Vollmann had sent Bob and Esther a draft of his first novel, You Bright and Risen Angels. He was anxious for a response. When Vollmann was a student at Cornell University, Bob, a polymathic professor of architecture in London, had visited Telluride, the obscure, self-governing house – part of Cornell – where Vollmann was a scholar. Bill and Bob became friends. Vollmann knew that Esther, Bob’s wife, was an editor at André Deutsch, a publisher that had recently put out books by Philip Roth, V.S. Naipaul, Norman Mailer and Margaret Atwood.
Vollmann hoped that Esther and Deutsch might consider publishing Angels, a story about a beleaguered computer programmer (the author) running a software (the text) which tells of a historic war between imperial “reactionaries” and compromised “revolutionaries.” Last year, I met Esther at her home in north-west London. I asked what she thought when she read the draft. “I was,” she said, “thrilled by it.” While shipping Angels to London, Vollmann also sent it to a squad of American publishers, attaching a letter addressed to them all, the “Various Publishing Luminaries,” “Ladies and Gentlemen,” entreating them to buy the book. None did, so Vollmann was published in Britain before America.
Vollmann has never been wholly accepted by the American mainstream. Not like Tom Wolfe, whose first novel, Bonfire of the Vanities, was published the same year as Angels, in 1987. It was released without struggle and after serialization in Rolling Stone. While Vollmann’s book came out to some nice praise, Bonfire confirmed Wolfe – picture-perfect in his Twain-y white suit – as the literary king of New York. It earned him the right, two years later, to produce a manifesto for the future of American fiction. In “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast,” published in Harper’s Magazine, Wolfe duly argued that writers should be more like him. He called for more “young people with serious literary ambitions” to write “big realistic novel[s],” about hippies, the Black Panthers and end-of-century American life.
By the mid-1990s, Wolfe had vacated the title belt of the American literary scene. On May 17, 1996, its new challengers gathered where the East Coast intelligentsia were watching: on an episode of Charlie Rose about the future of American fiction. At the table were David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Franzen and Mark Leyner. Wallace’s Infinite Jest had been released in February that year (his first novel was published in 1987, like Wolfe’s and Vollmann’s), and in April, Franzen had written his own manifesto for Harper’s, in part a reply to Wolfe’s seven years before, titled “Perchance to Dream.” Wolfe’s essay “was probably the high-water mark for sublime incomprehension,” Franzen wrote. “Television has killed the novel of social reportage.”
A decade-long conversation about the novel’s form had taken place, and Vollmann had sat it out. Or, rather, the conversation had sat him out. It wasn’t like Vollmann was absent. No, he was around, freeing a child sex slave in Thailand on assignment for SPIN magazine, getting injured and watching two friends die in a landmine explosion in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and writing books where the characters were prostitutes he’d picked up in real life. He was working, too, on Rising Up and Rising Down, a seven-volume, 3,500-page consideration of the morality of violence. There was nothing sexy about Vollmann’s work. He was never going to be the frontman of his era. He’s not very billable.
Vollmann’s current period was announced by the publication of an essay in 2023, “Four Men.” He sought out three homeless men – he called them “outdoor people” – on the blocks of Reno, Nevada, ostensibly to get at the “rot” of American cities. (Vollmann was the fourth of his own “Four Men.”) The essay descended into a confrontation with Vollmann’s approach of giving lowly people the High Literature treatment, of “fattening on tragedies”: “Why not flail around in defense of my all-American single proprietorship? In other words, why not go to Reno and make money from the sufferings of homeless men?”
But the piece had a third register. Vollmann said that his daughter, Lisa, had died the year before. She had been an outdoor person herself, an alcoholic suffering a “protracted dying.” He had been grieving and hadn’t earned much money recently. He needed cash. To worsen matters, his usual publisher, Viking, had dropped him after he’d delivered the manuscript of his latest book. This was A Table for Fortune. It’s too long, they said. It uses too many different fonts. The protagonist remains unborn after 700 pages. It’s tedious. Vollmann would not abridge the text. He refused to standardize the fonts. The protagonist would remain late-term. “I replied that with Lisa dead I had less to lose.”
In March last year, Arcade Publishing took on the book. It said it would honor Vollmann’s wishes on font and length; publication of A Table for Fortune was set for March this year; the book would be released in four volumes, totaling 3,500 pages: “a sweeping history of American foreign policy from 1968 to 2005” focusing on a CIA analyst and his family. In October last year, I received an email from Isaac Morris, the editor of the novel at Arcade. He didn’t know how, but Vollmann had come to learn of the possibility of this article. He wanted to offer me a galley.
For a few months, it seemed like I would be able to interview Vollmann. Through Morris – Vollmann doesn’t use the internet – we settled on a few days when he might call me from Sacramento, where he now lives. The days came and went, and then Isaac emailed. Vollmann couldn’t do it. In recent years, he had been suffering from colon cancer. He was in too much pain to talk. Would a response to a letter suffice? In the meantime, I could read the first volume of A Table for Fortune. The other three books were still being typeset. Isaac said Vollmann was doing most of the designing himself. Publication had been delayed to this summer.
How can I judge a novel I haven’t read in its entirety? I can’t. Did I even read volume one? I acclimatized. The first quarter of A Table for Fortune is arranged like a report from an overdue inquiry. There are family trees and organizational taxonomies and a section dedicated to “Codenames, Acronyms, Abbreviations, Foreign Words and Mystifications.” There is a note “To The Reader” where Vollmann talks about Lisa’s death (“She was the love of my life”) and explains the dispute with Viking and the whole business with the length and the fonts. Then there are maps. The novel begins after 50 pages.
Ah yes. The fonts. They are useful. Much of the first book is made up of intelligence reports, made distinguishable from the main text by the use of a typewriter font. In other bits of the story, which are straight-up “REDACTED,” a sans serif font is used.
How can I judge a novel I haven’t read in its entirety?
The volume begins with a laying of the table, a chessboard: a description of George W. Bush’s cabinet and their desires and interrelations. The narrative then rolls back in time, and the first book ends in 1982. In his letter to me, Vollmann referred to the galley I had received as an “error-ridden old draft.” He was being harsh. A Table for Fortune (book one) is the drawing of an arrow. One reads it knowing that affecting events are being set up. It is an introduction to “DAVE,” the CIA analyst. (His name is always capped.) Vollmann told me that he believes DAVE to be “well-intentioned.” He said he personally believes the Iraq War was wrong, so he has “had to sprinkle extra empathy DAVE’s way. I need to be fair and more than fair.”
Vollmann also said that the third and fourth volumes of A Table for Fortune are “more lyrical” than the first. This second half is reportedly about the wanderings in America of DAVE’s homeless son, Matthew. Expect Vollmann’s trademark topics – prostitution, drugs, riding freight trains – to feature. This novel is about 9/11, and, obviously, other fallen towers. “Matthew is not Lisa, although I have clothed some of his wretchedness in her sorrows,” he writes in volume one’s introduction. In short, A Table for Fortune is a book about everything Vollmann has previously written. “No matter how much we compartmentalize,” Vollmann wrote to me, “deep down we can hardly deny all the things we simultaneously are.” He told me he loved Esther, who died in May aged 91.
At the end of his letter, Vollmann told me the working titles of some upcoming projects. “Next books (if I live long enough): THREE DARK STORIES + HOME + LISA, A LOVE STORY. In haste, Bill.”
Comments