Just linking to a worth-reading article, on William T. Vollmann.
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.
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 to 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.
Enjoy.
