In A Table for Fortune, National Book Award-winner William T. Vollmann depicts from the balcony-level of history the last half-century of American politics, war, and life. At once a family drama, bildungsroman, and national epic, this 3,000+ page, four-part novel may be our most ambitious writer's most ambitious work.
Parts 1 and 2 gather from the half-forgotten annals of the near-past –– Stasi documents, Iraqi newspaper articles, presidential radio addresses –– to form a vivid and mesmeric epic centered on Elliott Stevens, or DAVE, a CIA analyst whose glee at winning the Cold War is matched only by the dread that culminates in the nightmares of September eleventh and the resulting War on Terror. The hero of Parts 3 and 4 is Matthew Stevens, Elliott's son, whose efforts to divine the fate of his life and escape his parents result in homelessness, addiction, and perhaps even happiness.
Spanning from 1968 to 2019, these volumes comb together –– with Vollmann's trademark generous wit and Olympian prose –– a staggeringly well-researched, definitive history of American post-war foreign policy with a deft, moving chronicle of a family's descent into resentment and gloom. Not since War and Peace have the internal lives of characters and the history of a nation been forged together in so forceful a study of causes, fate, and nationhood.
Elliott and Matthew Stevens are "passengers within a divine bullet," which, like Gogol's troika before it, overtakes all flying to its nation's end. This boxed set, with all four volumes in hardcover, allows the book to be read as intended: as one towering novel, the magnum opus of one of the giants of literature.