What Tom Bissell is working on

I'm currently in that low-ebb, dead-time period between having finished a book and waiting to start a new one. The book I recently finished, and the first-pass galleys of which I am currently awaiting, is called The Father of All Things. It's a travelogue of my Vietnam-vet father's and my trip to Vietnam in 2003, though it also becomes an examination of the war's effects on the children of those who fought it. I also try to get to the bottom of several niggling questions about the war, writing essaylets on questions such as, Was Ho Chi Minh a Stalinist? Why was South Vietnam so corrupt? Could the United States have really won the war if it did things differently? I started the book shortly after the war in Iraq began, and had one rule while I was writing: No cheap historical connections between Iraq and Vietnam. But a couple people who've read it have said to me, "I love how you so subtly connected what happened in Vietnam to what's going on in Iraq." I can't decide if I'm happy about that or not. I have decided, though, for better or worse, that my Vietnam war book is very much an Iraq war book, because how could it have not been?

Other than that, I just finished an essay for Harper's about the director Werner Herzog, who might very well be my favorite living artist. Which made it very difficult to write. How do you get a reader to stick with you for over 7000 words that basically find new ways of saying, "Herzog is great"? I did this, I hope, by exploring the ways Herzog bends the line between fact and fiction in his
documentaries and feature films, allowing me to conclude--or almost conclude--that fiction and nonfiction don't really, properly speaking, exist. Finally, I am preparing for a trip to Scotland to write a short and, I hope, amusing piece about my childhood fascination with the Loch Ness Monster, which I'm writing for the Virginia Quarterly Review.

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