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Michael Herr: Remember and praise

Michael Herr, 76, author of Dispatches, one of the most admired books to come out of the Vietnam War, died on Thursday. When asked to recommend books on the war, I often have said, "Well, have you read Dispatches yet? Start there."

As a tribute, allow me to think aloud about its virtues — and about the genre it helped create, that of the nonfiction novel.

That genre has been around for as long as nonfiction has. Everyone could make their own lists of true stories at book length, stories both scrupulously reported and beautifully written: Xenophon's Anabasis (after 400 B.C.) or Daniel DeFoe's Journal of a Plague Year, written in the 1660s, with its trenchant depictions of people fleeing an epidemic decimating London:

You can make your own list, I'm sure.

Michael Herr's Dispatches  (quite a title, reminding us of the genre of war reporting, and also of Herr's own job as a war correspondent for Esquire) appeared in 1977, about two years after the treaty that officially ended the war in Vietnam. That timing helped make it a great book: It seized a moment and a need: for an authoritative, compelling gaze at a national trauma, a failure, a defeat, with humane, empathetic attention and devotion to the facts, and yet with the shaping flare of the artist. We were still grappling with what the war was, the hole it had torn in our society, the pitiful waste and suffering of it.

To succeed as what they call creative nonfiction, a book has to hit on a shape for the story it embodies, a way of telling that helps the unruly facts cohere, if only by a trick of the voice. Think of the way Truman Capote's In Cold Blood is written, or Norman Mailer's Executioner's Song, or Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. All these are often claimed as pieces of New Journalism, and, to take the label seriously for a moment, what made them new was this stipulation of a point of view expressed in language, the creation of a voice that was also a lens. In Dispatches, as in all these works, the author discovers a voice, a way of wielding language, that propels his account.

Herr creates something close to a stream of consciousness. Instead of weaving a unified story — concentrating, say, on a single battle, or telling the story of one particular soldier — he chooses instead to amass details and let the sensory avalanche establish how it felt to be there:

There is a blurriness to it, a rush, but that does not dissolve or overwhelm the details. There is no doubt, ever, where we are or how it feels. Herr is an artist who can balance the onward flow with pinpoint attention.

Another thing Herr captures was the talk. Here I hear the tenor of the 1970s, strung out, hallucinatory, sky-high, whether on psychopharmaceuticals or the ultimate drug, war itself. Hear it in the talk of Page:

Talk like that, manic, italicized, comma-spliced, headlong, percolates through the male-authored fiction and nonfiction of the 1960s and 1970s, in Joseph Heller, Capote, Wolfe, Walker Percy, Saul Bellow, Mailer. Now go and watch Apocalypse Now: It's there, too.

We definitely do meet amazing people, including

Herr can also hitch up and produce straight-ahead, clean reportage, that lucid, clear-eyed writing that distinguishes the best U.S. journalism everywhere. Here is his unforgettable account of entering the
city of Hue by truck:

His book is often called surreal, and so it is — never so surreal as in passages like this, dry and just-telling-it, facing us with the impossible reality of it all, and always with the undercurrent of commentary, what made Americans uneasy, what Americans misread. (As in the entire war.) This is the nightmare we have created and cannot awake from, the super-real, the real beyond the real.

Swinging from the rush of unbearable reality to the clear depiction of war as it is, Dispatches has remained the best-known single book on the war. Herr was trying to do something new with the truth: in the language of the moment, of drugs, of war, of a Hendrix riff (a "long tense organic guitar line that made him shiver like frantic electric ecstasy was shooting up from the carpet through his spine straight to the old pleasure center in his cream-cheese brain"), to take us behind what we expected to what we could not choose but see. In taking us there, Michael Herr made a work of art.