A TABLE FOR FORTUNE

A massive, highly demanding novel of history and ideas.

Vollmann’s latest has 9/11 at its core. His principal protagonist for roughly half of this 3,100-page novel (about half the size of the U.S. tax code, granted) is CIA agent DAVE, always capitalized, code name for one Elliott Stevens. DAVE has come in from the field to live a safe suburban existence in a place his wife, Sally, detests: “Fortune had imprisoned her for life in McLean.” DAVE, though, is content at CIA HQ, working his secret magic on world politics: Angola, Yemen, Iraq, Grenada, the Eastern Bloc. “We hired you because you were Crazy Elliott,” cajoles a station chief, trying to lure DAVE back into the action, but Sally notwithstanding, he’s outwardly content with his present life. His neurodivergent son, Matthew, is endlessly inquisitive but never receives a straight answer: “Dad, is it, is it true that two days after September eleventh, the only passenger plane that was allowed to take off carried Saudis back to, to Arabia?” he asks, and is answered with a “not my department” shrug. DAVE sometimes wonders where his youthful bravery has gone, while a teenage Matthew takes to the road in a quest for the real America, which he’s sure exists somewhere beyond the Beltway, “beautiful, foul, filthy, infinite and noble.” For all DAVE’s intrigues, messy personal life, and emphatically different ideas of America, Matthew is by far the more interesting character. Vollmann’s novel, with its insistently odd typography and pages-long paragraphs, is an impeccably researched catalog of world history from the 1960s to the present. But negotiating its logorrheic obsessiveness is like listening to Mozart through heavy static, with occasional perfect moments coming through the crackle: “Compared to the jihadists, we’d barely begun to suffer. How many September elevenths would break us?…Probably not even the generals knew.”

Hugely ambitious and with rewards for those with ample time to spare.