A Short Rhetoric for Leaving the Family
Peter Dimock
"Astonishing ... a remarkable novel" - John Leonard, The Nation
War divides nations. It divides families too, even when they are on the same side, and none more so than Vietnam. Peter Dimock's haunting novel is the story of one American family torn apart by its role in a war that still haunts a country's conscience.
A Short Rhetoric for Leaving the Family takes the form of a letter from a self-appointed father to two boys, one his nephew, the other his adoptive son. The letter explains the family history; it offers as well a guide to life by teaching the forms and methods of classical rhetoric. But its author's hidden agenda - reminiscent of Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier - is to have the next generation turn against his and their family.
For the examples he draws on for instructing them in rhetoric are war crimes - and particularly those of his father, a special assistant to the President during Vietnam, responsible for America's so-called "policy of reprisal". And as the painful private story unravels, it reveals a corruption in thought, action and language itself whose terrible consequences extend from a divided family to the country itself.
Hundreds of novels have explored war. But this is the first to explore the world of the architects of the war that helped define a century, and it cuts terribly close to home. Peter Dimock brilliantly exposes the pained heart of a single family and offers with startling freshness a vision of what their way of life still costs us all. "A singular book. Peter Dimock's A Short Rhetoric for Leaving the Family possesses the rich intricate, and subtle patternings of the verbal lacemaker's craft. A remarkable debut" Toni Morrison
"An intriguing, even perplexing enactment of memory that journeys into the disturbing coldness that lay at the heart of America's Vietnam" Ariel Dorfman
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About Peter Dimock Peter Dimock was born in 1950 in New Haven, Connecticut, the son of a classicist who taught Greek and Latin at Smith College. A registered Conscientious Objector during the Vietnam War, he studied history and literature at Harvard before going on to graduate research at Yale into the literary construction of American historical narrative. Peter Dimock now lives in Brooklyn, New York, and works as an editor at Columbia University Press. A Short Rhetoric for Leaving the Family is his first novel.
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