A Table for Fortune by William T Vollmann review – a hugely ambitious 3,000-page portrait of America’s decline

This insider’s history of the CIA explores the last 50 years of US foreign policy with granular detail and mordant humour

The 250th year of the American experiment seems to invite a reckoning. For a young country, the United States is overblessed – or burdened – with myths about its foundation and how the nation has conducted itself at home and abroad. William T Vollmann’s 3,000-page novel A Table for Fortune is an epic attempt, 15 years in the making, to engage with the US’s past and present at an institutional and a personal level. The four simultaneously published volumes offer both a family story and an insider’s history of the CIA, in order to show the consequences of the quest for liberty and the belief in American exceptionalism.