"We Always Leave Things Unfinished"

This piece was independently reported and self-financed. If you value work like this please consider becoming a paid subscriber. It helps make future pieces like this possible.He doesn’t have a cell phone or use the internet so it takes a week to get the answer but finally his publicist comes back with a politely breathless email confirming that, yes, if I can make it out to Sacramento next week William T. Vollmann will meet me at 9 a.m., June 23, at a small coffee shop that’s been built into an unsuspecting structure and then from there we can walk to his studio, hang out til around noonish. It’s June 15th. I start reading his new novel, A Table for Fortune. It comes out in August. It’s 3,096 pages. Calling around, preparing the article, I mention to sources that I’ll be flying out and interviewing Vollmann. A source implores me to read as much as I can. Says they saw someone talking with Vollmann, pretending to’ve read the whole book, but then got outed. I ask if Vollmann was angry. They wouldn’t say angry, no…more like “visibly upset.”I read faster.It’s about a CIA intelligence analyst. His name when he’s home is Elliott Stevens but at Agency HQ his name is DAVE (all caps). He was a helicopter pilot in Vietnam. He has a genius IQ and photographic memory. He comes home and settles down with his all-American girlfriend Sally. He lusts after his sister-in-law. He reads reports. He promises things to his wife without much intention of honoring them: a vacation, a new house, a child. She bores him. He loves her.It’s about the world slowly changing as you go about your job.It’s gripping, complicated, entangling.There’s no chance I will finish in time.The book’s editor, Isaac Morris, explains over the phone how A Table for Fortune is divided into basically two hemispheres: DAVE’s, at the CIA, and later on the life of his less-intelligent but more empathic son Matthew. It’s the latter part where he feels the most moving material, the heart of the book.I tell him I can only read so much before the interview.

Should I skip Volume Two and read some of Matthew?He says if I’m really short for time, and want a thorough sense of how the book works, then yeah, I might want to jump ahead.I cross the country and get to the coffee shop at 8:45 and he’s there already, dark jeans with a black windbreaker, typing in an armchair. He studies me from a few paces as I go toward him. Hackles up. Thirty years ago while researching a novel in the arctic his sleeping bag caught fire and his eyebrows have never grown back but I can see a slight pale ridge lifting with welcome once my hand is out.Vollmann shuts his laptop. Goes quickly to his feet with an “oh hi” and other niceties, knees bent and arms kinda wide like a gunslinger.There’s an empty mug beside his chair. He’s been here a while.I’ve only read 700 pages.Vollmann bags his things while I buy a Pellegrino and then join him in the dining room. Awkward in our backpacks til he leads us out to the sidewalk and I ask what he was working on.“I’m doing this piece about Cuba for Granta.”1It’s a shady suburban-ish street full of walk-ups. He tells me about interviewing people around Havana and how they’d hide their faces or ask to stay off-camera while telling him how bad the fuel crisis has gotten. The average bus is three hours behind schedule, so they’ve got these special white buses so that “at least the doctors and nurses can get to the rat-infested hospitals on time.” At one point he felt guilty at being driven around so he could conduct his reporting but then a taxi driver told him, in confidence, that for him, personally, it makes more sense to sell his monthly fuel allotment, on the black market, than to fill up his car and try to shuttle a living.Vollmann moves quick and tilty up the sidewalk. Our elbows graze and his windbreaker says “vwip,” “vwop,” the walk feeling almost like a jog until finally he slows, we’re getting ready to jaywalk, and as he leans out, checking both ways, he apologizes about moving so slowly.

“I have cancer.”What makes the Cuba situation so “sad” (and he does keep calling it sad despite the swell of what looks like anger) is that it doesn’t have to be this way. Mexico wants to give them oil. The island could bounce back in a few weeks. But Donald Trump signed an executive order imposing tariffs on any country that sends oil to Cuba.“I was just so disgusted and ashamed of our country to see all these heaps of garbage that can’t be picked up, cuz there’s no fuel,” and so residents are dragging their trash outside to the street and burning it in piles. “You’re breathing the smoke of garbage. And there are these people bending over through the smoking garbage trying to find food. So we’re uh,” blinking like to ground himself, facing forward and switching to his prose voice, that monotone, “we’re really making Cuba great again,” irreverent.No sense getting worked-up about these things.“I’ll be dead very soon.”“Chemo mind” keeps him in a fog. The cancer causes pain such that he can hardly sleep. “Last night I got about an hour.” When he finally got up he had to take an opioid, which makes him “fuzzy.” All of this is compounded by the medical marijuana that’s proven a great help but leaves him kinda fried. “I couldn’t believe, after a couple weeks in Cuba, how much sharper I was, mentally, because all I had was my opioids.”Hence he’s not tangled in any big fiction project right now. For nearly 40 years he’s been working simultaneously on each volume of a sprawling septology, Seven Dreams. It tells the history of the North American continent. Volume Five, The Dying Grass, came out in 2015. Reviews were glowing. The Washington Post called it “the reading experience of a lifetime.”But every book since then has been a problem: too many pages, too many fonts, the title’s controversial, there’s too much math; releasing a two-volume art book in 2022, with a pair of understaffed indie publishers, Vollmann kept getting galleys sent back with typos throughout, shoddy production quality on the photos, publication running a year behind schedule. He doesn’t have the time for it anymore.

He’s working on two short books right now: one’s a long personal essay, the other one’s literary criticism. Straightforward stuff. There’s no mention of fiction.“Do you feel any pressure to finish Seven Dreams?”“I’m not gonna touch it.” Resigned and certain. He says finishing even one of the two remaining volumes would likely take “more time than I have left.” Plus the fights it’ll prompt with his publishers. “About a quarter of the last one is completed, and then much less of the other one.”“I don’t want it to come out looking like a piece of crap so,” he flaps a hand, hits a thigh, “just forget it.”He shows me a wall with a long art sequence called “CUNT,” with a collection of other paintings beside it: nudes and studies, bodies warped and accurate, writhing or posing. The display is a proud one. He seems happy to show me.Above the paintings there’s a shelf with a row of framed photos. Artful black and white from reporting trips around the world. Vollmann himself in drag as “Dolores.” A Black soldier. A woman cradling one child on her hip while holding the hand of another. His daughter Lisa in a school photo, smiling.0:00-1:00Audio playback is not supported on your browser. Please upgrade.The illness didn’t feel like much of an obstacle in his Cuba trip, though he did worry about getting detained someplace, his opioids stolen.In 2024 Granta was planning to send Vollmann to Tajikistan.“That’s when my cancer came back.”So they waited a year. When he was clear to travel, they proposed sending him to Iran. He was interested in seeing the Strait of Hormuz. But unlike his earlier war reporting—in Bosnia, Iraq, Somalia, Ukraine, the DMZ, to name a few—he’s budgeting his energy. Assessing his comfort. “I looked at [the Iran trip] and thought, ‘No. I don’t want to fly into Tehran and then go all the way across the country, to the Strait of Hormuz, getting insulted and detained and threatened, [and] maybe never even get[ting] there.” Hence: Kuwait. It’s nearly a thousand miles from Hormuz, but it made more sense. “

I’m getting sickerrr, I tire more easilyyy, I can’t run as faaast…”We pass a youngish couple walking their dog and Vollmann jolts his voice for a cheery good morning, which they return, and we keep on walking.“It may be the last of these war things I can do.”Granta offered him some easier topics. Cryogenic immortality was one. He mulled it over and told them, “Y’know, I just don’t care about those rich people, and I probably wouldn’t have a nice enough necktie to talk to them.”Passing a homeless guy with a hoodie and aimless red-eyed shuffle Vollmann jolts his voice for a cheery good morning. The man blinks. Pauses. Watches us pass. “Mornin.”He’s writing the Cuba piece across three documents. He opens his laptop and checks the wordcount for me: 32,000.Ambivalent frown as he shuts it: “So that’s not such a long article.”He knows they’ll cut it down but, contrary to a reputation for being difficult with publishers (“that craphead Vollmann,” he calls himself), he’s not bothered. “Why not be a compliant prostitute?” A magazine isn’t presenting itself the way a publisher does. “They don’t pretend [this article will be] the ideal length that’s gonna make this piece shine. It’s the length that works for them, based on the number of ads they have.” Plus he can always take the whole unexpurgated draft and use it in a book.He’s working on two nonfiction books that’re nearly complete but otherwise feels no stress about what’s left behind. His voice gets tighter as he talks about things he’s leaving in the drawer. “They’ll either come out or they won’t, and,” pausing, his voice breaking, “I’ve done a lot of what I set out to do in my life.”Does A Table for Fortune feel like a crowning achievement?“Yeah. It does.”0:00-0:31Audio playback is not supported on your browser. Please upgrade.He asks me, “How do you like Sacramento?”“I’ve never traveled this far.”“Oh!” Pale ridge raised.I tell him it’s a nice quiet place but really it just seems quiet.