The 250th year of the American experiment seems to invite a reckoning. For a young country, the United States is overblessed – or burdened – with myths about its foundation and how the nation has conducted itself at home and abroad. William T Vollmann’s 3,000-page novel A Table for Fortune is an epic attempt, 15 years in the making, to engage with the US’s past and present at an institutional and a personal level.
The four simultaneously published volumes offer both a family story and an insider’s history of the CIA, in order to show the consequences of the quest for liberty and the belief in American exceptionalism. Vollmann’s previous novels have explored the ideological basis of American society, most notably those of the Seven Dreams series, published from 1990 to 2015, which depict the generally disastrous encounters between American settlers and Indigenous peoples. A Table for Fortune continues this project by investigating the last 50 years of US foreign policy, at the heart of which is 9/11, with the book “tracing the roots of that crime in one direction and its poisoned harvest in another”.
Though the CIA has been fertile ground for many great American novelists – Don DeLillo, Norman Mailer – Vollmann is perhaps the first to represent the culture and daily activities of the agency in granular detail. His great gambit is to frame this as a dark workplace comedy of minor resentments, sexual tension and office banter. These sections are narrated by the institutional voice of the CIA itself in a relentlessly sardonic tone rife with acronyms, codenames and jargon rendered in multiple fonts.
The mordant humour of the narrator, who regards all forms of death and suffering as “fun”, has a seductive quality that allows Vollmann to educate the reader about a broad sweep of geopolitical subjects ranging from the Angolan civil war to the interrogation methods of the Stasi, and in doing so chart the hypocrisies and double standards of the agency. The central character of the novel is an analyst codenamed DAVE, recruited by the CIA in 1967 on account of 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”.
Vollman’s general verdict on the CIA seems to be that it has gone from being terrible yet generally effective before 9/11, a sort of necessary evil, to becoming increasing morally compromised due to its greater propensity for assassination and torture, as well as more concerned with pleasing the executive branch than gathering accurate intel. The inordinate length of the novel is justified by the amount of historical material it has to cover. As one of DAVE’s bosses says, “all we care about here is telling you the truth.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
