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A Table for Fortune by William T. Vollmann. Arcade Publishing, 3,096 pages. 2026
“The permanent underworld of American public life,” wrote Christopher Hitchens, “has only ever been captured and distilled by novelists.” The sentiment comes from his review of Harlot’s Ghost (1991), Norman Mailer’s “magisterial bid for dominance” among the fictional literature of U.S government affairs alongside contenders Don DeLillo’s Libra (1988) and Richard Condon’s The Manchurian Candidate (1959). Hitchens pushed against the notion held by some critics that such work was merely the dramatized white noise of conspiracy theories. The world of covert action, he argued, was best anatomized by novelists willing to “listen for the silent rhythms, the unheard dissonances and the latent connections” and to “ruminate on the emotions and the characters and the motives” of the state. “‘Conspiring,’ after all, means ‘breathing together,’” noted Hitchens, adding: “Why not check the respirations?”
One needn’t press a stethoscope against the pages of A Table for Fortune, the latest novel by the writer and journalist William T. Vollmann, to discern the deep state laboring within. It hisses along like an oven’s flume during the years intel analyst Elliott Stevens works the kitchens of the CIA. Codenamed DAVE, his job is to parse and assess reconnaissance gathered from the “Night Land” (his term for the surveilled world) to cook up “product”: memos flavored with the agency’s occasionally cheeky and often fully capped glossary of acronyms, argot, and aliases that he delivers to his superiors. They in turn prepare all received product for the daily briefings Langley serves to its executive branch “customers.” In Vollmann’s contribution to the gov lit genre, an achievement in facsimile, this is how the proverbial sausage is made. How “product” is devoured and digested is another matter. Less than a year before 9/11, DAVE dishes up this report:
