The Last Contract: William T. Vollmann's Battle to Publish an Epic (2025)

A few years ago, the novelist William T. Vollmann was diagnosed with colon cancer. The prognosis wasn’t great but he went ahead with the treatment. A length of intestine drawn out and snipped. It was awful but it worked. The cancer went into remission.

Then his daughter died.

Then he got dropped by his publisher.

Then he got hit by a car.

Then he got a pulmonary embolism.

But things are looking up.

William T. Vollmann spent “twelve or fifteen years” researching and writing a novel about the CIA called A Table for Fortune; as of this writing it has a few back-channel blurbs from editors and assistants who’ve caught glimpses and say it might be his masterpiece, or at the very least a new sort of achievement for him. But when he finished it, in 2022, he turned it over to his publisher, the final installment of a multi-book contract (although even *that *part gets complicated), and that’s when, to use Vollmann’s words, “Viking fired me.”

His publisher of thirty years.

It’s more complicated than that.

For starters, when he first turned it in, A Table for Fortune was 3,000 pages.

But word count wasn’t the only issue.

Vollmann’s daughter Lisa had a drinking problem. It was worsening for years. Homelessness, hospitalization, dangerous encounters. Vollmann, who’s never owned a cellphone or used the Internet, bought a burner phone so he could call her every day at noon. If she answered he would offer his studio, tell her she should sleep there instead of outside, on the street, or at the shelter where some woman had tried to kill her.

She’d tell him no.

Mostly, she didn’t answer.

Lisa died in 2022. A year later he wrote about the whole situation for Harper’s: about Lisa, Viking, the novel.

He concedes in the essay, regarding A Table for Fortune, that maybe the untamed sprawl and uncharacteristic number of typos were a sign that he wasn’t paying as much attention in the final stages as he normally might. Fine.

He’ll grant them that.

But there was other stuff too — and this’ll sound craven, to be so business-minded about books when really, as Vollmann will be the first to tell you, his work has never sold many copies anyway. His editors and copy editors and publicists are true believers. They love the work and believe in *him. *The word “genius” comes up a lot in conversation and not with qualifiers; just short declarative sentences, wincing into the first syllable. “Jean-yus.”

Plus they’d been together thirty years, him and Viking, and of course they were there through everything he’d just been through: with the cancer, with Lisa, his whole trek through this novel . . .

But Viking, in their defense, might lean on the case that, if writing novels is an art, making books is a business, and if Vollmann’s job is the latter then theirs is the former.

So for instance: A Table for Fortune employs a number of different fonts to signify different speakers, memoranda, newsprint.

Well, Viking doesn’t own those fonts. And they’re not free.

Vollmann is serious about turning his novels into beautiful books, almost tangible works of art, and if you fan through any of his recent tomes you’ll see it’s never static. Paragraphs go for pages but if you look at the sentences they’re these long serpentine things and then they’re not. They’re short. Clipped. The prose generally chatty and peppered with exclamation points and the typeface often changes and there’s some ALL CAPS writing and then a photo. A drawing. A chart.

Using the specific fonts that he wants in A Table for Fortune, as opposed to some of Viking’s in-house alternatives, would raise the price of each printed copy by “two cents,” as Vollmann claims in a recent appearance on the TrueAnon podcast.

Likely exaggerating.

He’s still prickly about the whole thing, quick though he is to say, in all seriousness, that he isn’t upset, it's fine, and to chant his new mantra, the one he mentions on *TrueAnon *and a couple other podcasts while promoting a book in 2023 that turned into a scandal.

It’s the mantra that, six weeks after that *TrueAnon *podcast, I’m disoriented to hear through my phone in a friendly, congested, one-minute voicemail:

“Nobody owes me a living.”

I spoke with Vollmann about *A Table for Fortune *last year, and when I told him I’d be editing the hour-plus recording down to a fifty-ish minute podcast, I asked if there were any parts he considered central, or anything he’d like me to omit.

“Just please don’t make me sound angry,” he said. About Viking, the fonts, the novel. “I’m not angry.”

He explained his remorse for the whole thing and a hope that they might work again some day if he’s still around. He said he can feel things “winding down.” With corporate US publishing, for sure, and maybe his career overall.

But anyway.

“Nobody owes me a living.”

So what’s this book about?

*A Table for Fortune *is a history of the United States Central Intelligence Agency. Half of it focuses on an intelligence analyst, Dave, and the other half on Matthew, his son.

“When Bill mentioned that he was thinking of a CIA book I was so excited about it,” said Vollmann’s agent, Susan Golomb. “I just thought that he could do such a great job. And I'm glad he did [it].” Golomb has represented Vollmann’s work since The Royal Family, which was published a quarter century ago.

Updates about the novel were sporadic and vague over the decade-plus he worked on it, alongside other projects, but eventually Vollmann started hinting, more pointedly than usual, “that it was going to be very, very long.”

Golomb remembers receiving the manuscript alongside Paul Slovak, his editor at Viking, and the two of them having this bleak conversation over the phone where they just sort of echoed each other. “This is gonna be tough.”

Slovak, who retired from Viking in 2023, was Vollmann’s editor since 1990s The Ice-Shirt, as much a friend as a colleague at this point — an advocate and a handler. For a while, in the beginning, he was Vollmann’s publicist too.

The way Vollmann tells the story about delivering *A Table for Fortune *to Viking suggests it wasn’t too different from other books, which tend to be long and complex and pose new challenges about form and content: some heckling about length, cost, headaches and all the rest. “After seven hundred pages,” Vollmann reflects in the Harper’s piece, “[the novel’s] protagonist remained unborn, and my editor found that tedious; on the phone he got sharp about it.”

He nodded along with their points. Heard them out.

Took the feedback home with him and considered it. One thing they suggested was that he remove a long storyline about the CIA’s activity in Angola during the 1970s where they tried unseating a Marxist-Leninist government that would’ve made a good Soviet asset. They sold weapons, propagandized, and recruited mercenaries in an effort to create civil unrest and install a Western-aligned nationalist party.

It’s a blight on the history of the CIA. Not only for its colonialist jockeying but the fact that it failed. Angola aligned with the Soviets. Still, at the behest of President Gerald Ford, then President Jimmy Carter, the Agency showed data to prove that it was hopeless — same way, Vollmann says, that “president after president” had fed young Americans into the Vietnam War just a few years prior despite conclusive certainty, from the start, that there was nothing to gain.

They didn’t care, he says. All they wanted to do was “bloody the Soviets.”

Which might all be true, was Viking’s point, and it’s certainly very interesting — but what’s it got to do with our characters?

And so Vollmann read the whole book again. In earnest. Looking for places he could take stuff out. Storylines that served no larger purpose.

When he finished up and sent the new draft back to Viking, it was 400 pages longer.

The Soviets duly bloodied, Viking terminated the contract.