William T Vollmann has written a 3,000‑page novel when the world appears to be done with big books

With forecasters of doom debating the end of reading, of publishing and of literacy in general, what should we make of William T Vollmann’s forthcoming novel, A Table for Fortune?

Spanning four volumes at 3,000 pages, is it madness? A determined attempt to silence print’s naysayers?

I have been writing about Vollmann’s works since I penned the introduction to “William T Vollmann: A Critical Companion” more than 10 years ago.

The 67-year-old author has spent his career going big, in every sense, and I would not be the first to describe his approach to his art as uncompromising.

His projects grapple with weighty matters such as global poverty, the history of North America and climate change. Few of his roughly 25 books run under 500 pages. About half try to keep his readers engaged for several hundred pages beyond that. Many of them supplement the text with photographs, epigraphs, glossaries, family trees, sketches, timelines, variant tables of contents, alternating fonts and notes to the reader. The essay “Rising Up and Rising Down,” his philosophical and journalistic inquiry into the nature of violence, clocks in at over 3,000 pages across seven volumes.

But to those who might argue that this is the worst time to put a monster of a novel into print since the days before Johannes Gutenberg created the movable-type printing press in the 15th century, I...

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