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

Summary

William T. Vollmann in Rome, Italy, 2023, Photograph, Maria Moratti via Getty ImagesA 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...