A 3,000-Page Novel About America's Decline Gets a Guardian Review
The Guardian has reviewed A Table for Fortune, a 3,000-page novel by William T. Vollmann, and it describes the book as a hugely ambitious portrait of America's decline. The review was published on 4 November 2026.
The book is long enough to need a shelf of its own. It arrives as four volumes, released at the same time and sold together as a box set, meaning a boxed collection of separate books. Arcade Publishing, which is part of Skyhorse Publishing, lists the set under the identifier 9781648211881. Vollmann, a National Book Award winner, has said the work took him 15 years to make.
The story mixes two threads. One is a family story. The other is an insider's history of the CIA, the US Central Intelligence Agency. The central character is an analyst codenamed DAVE, who the CIA recruited in 1967 for his photographic memory. According to the Guardian, the novel uses that history to show what follows from the American pursuit of liberty and belief in American exceptionalism, the idea that the United States is uniquely special among nations.
The Guardian's reviewer says the book offers a deeply sorrowful diagnosis of the United States as it approaches its semiquincentennial, the 250th anniversary of the country's founding in 1776. That is the reviewer's reading, and the newspaper's headline puts it in the same terms.
Vollmann is no stranger to large projects. His Seven Dreams series, published from 1990 to 2015, follows encounters between American settlers and Indigenous peoples. A Table for Fortune continues his interest in the country's history, though it takes a different route, through the lives of ordinary people and the agencies that watched them.
The book has been reviewed elsewhere in the months before the Guardian's piece. The New York Times published its review on 8 July 2026. Alta, the online literary magazine, ran its own review on 28 September 2026, and wrote that the novel draws on personal grief and California landscapes.
For readers, the practical question is the format. A four-volume set at this length is a serious commitment, and most libraries and bookshops will stock it as a set rather than as separate titles. Anyone curious about the book can start with the publisher's listing or with the reviews above.
