Short Rhetoric for Leaving the Family

by Peter Dimock, Dimock Peter

Hundreds of novels have explored the war in Vietnam. This is the first to explore the world of the architects of that war, and it cuts terribly close to home. Dimock brilliantly exposes the pained heart of a single family and offers a vision of what their way of life still costs us all. His book raises with startling freshness ancient yet urgent questions about relations between image, word, and act.

Genres: Fiction

128 pages, Paperback

First published February 1, 1990

Reviews

[Tony · Rating 2 out of 5]

This had such promise: an epistolary novel as if by the son of one of the architects of the Vietnam War. He writes to his nephew and the son of his father's paramour (but not his father's son). Secrets, you'd think. And yes, some; but they are small.

Instead, this becomes a lesson in Rhetoric, probably the most pedantic course found in the curriculum. And unnecessary, too. It would be like: instead of writing a review, I wrote how to write a review.

If there's a point to this - and I admit no novel needs a point - it is that we should speak. And if we're going to speak, we just as well might speak so we can be understood.

Sometimes, it seems, you need to repeat a point to make it. Or maybe that's art, I don't know. But over and over, in slightly different form, our letter writer would offer some speech for the pleasured man, and follow that with: Some German friend for an idea of it afterwards. I have a German friend, but I don't know who Dimock's German friend is.

I would happily receive a letter from a son of the man who drafted the order of expansion after Tet. I wouldn't care that he was crazy. I'd like to know what he had to say about Vietnam, his small piece of it. But when I opened the letter and read how to give a convincing speech, how to move my body so as to increase the plausibility of what you say, how not to be too elegant or vulgar, how to bring my face close to the listener, how to affect a a pathetic tone by combining slow and graceful - sometimes halting - gestures with a sad and wounded expression and a calm, even tone of voice for the strongest effect, I would wonder why he would then say, Remember you are not an actor on stage.

Maybe my German friend will explain.

[Robert Wechsler · Rating 5 out of 5]

Second Reading (2015): Ten years later, I found this novella every bit as powerful and no less special than the first time. It is a portrayal of an instance of trauma, but not the sort of trauma we usually hear or read about. It's a personal trauma, a family trauma, and a societal trauma, all at once. The story is told via a first-person narrative that is no less unique. I still feel it is the best contemporary American work of fiction I have read. I highly recommend it.

First Reading (2005): It's amazing that a book of this quality has only received a couple of reviews. Few contemporary novelists have the courage to use the use of language to tell a story. In "A Short Rhetoric," Peter Dimock does this, and does it both successfully and appropriately. It is difficult to express, not to mention convey, feelings about the Vietnam War, especially when your father was one of the principal people leading the U.S. into it. To convey his feelings in a way he hopes will be useful, the narrator use rules of rhetoric to control and structure what he has to say, but his emotions still come pouring through.

For readers looking for a completely new literary experience, this is a great novel. It is experimental in all the best ways, and unlike so many writers of experimental novels, Dimock (an editor himself) understands that less is more.

The novella itself is not an enjoyable read, not in the traditional sense. It is what the author is doing, and what the narrator is doing, that provides the true pleasure (to use a central word in the novella). What makes this dramatic monologue special is the way the narrator employs the form of a lesson in rhetoric for the specific purpose of letting two young people know what their family members did during the Vietnam War. It is the bequest of someone who was not directly involved, but was nonetheless floored by the war and what his family members did. We know by the narrator's presentation that the narrator is not completely in control, no matter how hard he tries to control his feelings through the structures of teaching and rhetoric, but we don't know what is him and what is the language used by those involved in the war. It is a very sad novel about a tragic episode in American history, and the sadness is skillfully derived from a unique conflict between content and form.

[Joe · Rating 4 out of 5]

A remarkable if somewhat tiresome and frustrating book. It is narrated by a man driven to the brink of madness by his need to confront the horrors unleashed by his father—a McGeorge Bundy figure who was one of the bureaucratic architects of the Vietnam War. In order to keep his demons at bay, the narrator has latched on to the hyper-organized rules for discourse presented in the Rhetorica Ad Herennium, which he pretty much repeats in a failed attempt to talk about the unspeakable, to control life by regulating how we talk about it.

It's an intriguing project, and I will probably read it again. The problem, on a first reading, is that the narrator is tedious, absorbed in categories and pedantries, in much the same way the Ad Herrenium is. So while quite short, the book is actually kind of a slog to get through.

[Matthew · Rating 4 out of 5]

Impressively twisted language that, nonetheless, opens up to a very clear, very powerful story about Vietnam. Dimock uses the art of rhetoric—as described by the rhetorician Cicero and seen through the warped lens of his narrator—as the organizing principle for the book, and it works quite well. Better for me, I see, than others.

I'll allow that the book is not straight forward in the way it presents its story of a man's guilt over his family's involvement—on the national policy and militarily strategic level—in the Vietnam war. But to me, the strategy is sound. The voice of the narrator is academic as a pose, a mask. The family's crimes come from their intellectual participation in the war—which is to say, they have a similar affect about them.

I enjoyed the book quite a bit.

[Randy Cauthen · Rating 5 out of 5]

The son of one of the architects of the Vietnam War swallows the Rhetorica ad Herennium entire, learns of his father's crimes, goes mad, and spits the Rhetorica ad Herennium back out.
Much, much better than this makes it sound.

[Charles Cohen · Rating 5 out of 5]

I bought this book because I wanted a different Peter Dimock book, and seeing it out of the blue, I just took a flyer. So glad I did.

This book is so powerful and jarring and broken. To fit so much into such a short book, particularly with so much repetition about rhetoric filling the pages. But even the repetition became a part of the experience, and helped more fully demonstrate the brokenness of the narrator and his family. I inhaled this in like 2 hours, and I was almost tempted to jump right back to the beginning and read it again.

[Max · Rating 2 out of 5]

Read Coetzee's "The Vietnam Project" for a far better novella about the architects of Vietnam.

[Tuck · Rating 4 out of 5]

as ward churchill said about the twin towers attack, "the chickens WILL come home to roost". he got fired for that. this is a novel about dealing intellectually with our collusions. just how "guilty" or "not" are we?

[Stephanie · Rating 1 out of 5]

If I were General or Des, I would have put down the letter as soon as he decided to include his rough draft copy.

[Derek · Rating 5 out of 5]

Elegant and full of rage. Renders a perversion of reason worthy of that on which it is based.