CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

William T. Vollmann’s 3,000 Page Novel on 9/11

With forecasters of doom debating the end of reading, of publishing and of literacy in general, what should we make of William T. Vollmann’s forthcoming novel, “A Table for Fortune”?

Spanning four volumes at 3,000 pages, is it madness? A determined attempt to silence print’s naysayers?

I have been writing about Vollmann’s works since I penned the introduction to “William T. Vollmann: A Critical Companion” more than 10 years ago.

The 67-year-old author has spent his career going big, in every sense, and I would not be the first to describe his approach to his art as uncompromising.

His projects grapple with weighty matters such as global poverty, the history of North America and climate change. Few of his roughly 25 books run under 500 pages. About half try to keep his readers engaged for several hundred beyond that. Many of them supplement the text with photographs, epigraphs, glossaries, family trees, sketches, timelines, variant tables of contents, alternating fonts and notes to the reader. The essay “Rising Up and Rising Down,” his philosophical and journalistic inquiry into the nature of violence, clocks in at over 3,000 pages across seven volumes.

But to those who might argue that this is the worst time to put a monster of a novel into print since the days before Johannes Gutenberg created the movable-type printing press in the 15th century, I would say that Vollmann’s approach is needed now more than ever.

The ‘poisoned harvest’ of 9/11

After reading Vollmann’s works and occasionally speaking with him in person or via post, I join others in being powerfully struck by his unrivaled intelligence, empathy and work ethic. His books are not big for the sake of being big. They reflect the deep sense of responsibility he feels toward his subjects.

In the case of “A Table for Fortune,” that subject is, as Vollmann declares in the opening volume, the cause and effects of 9/11 – “tracing the roots of that crime in one direction and its poisoned harvest in another.”

It is a novel of ideas and a novel of feelings, the former expressed in the tale of a CIA man who bears the code name DAVE, and the latter the purview of his son, Matthew. DAVE is a brilliant, deeply........

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