A Short Rhetoric for Leaving the Family Book

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.