The Dying Grass by William Vollmann

revisiting a big book after a decade's interval

Our book today is William Vollmann's enormous 2015 novel The Dying Grass, an ostentatiously elaborate War and Peace telling the story of the 1877 Nez Perce War largely through the viewpoint of General Oliver Otis Howard, the US officer who dedicated himself to chasing down the Nez Perce leader Chief Joseph and his remaining scrap of a fighting force before it managed to escape into Canada. The book is nearly 1400 pages long, including, oh my, what doesn't it include? Transcriptions of headstones, contemporary and not-so-contemporary writings about the war, plenty of author doodles and black-and-white photos, a detailed chronology that starts around 8000 BC, mentions Howard's birth in Maine in 1830, and eventually winds its way to 1995, when military historian John Keegan, we're told, wrote: “Only the Americans have succeeded in creating a society of complete cultural uniformity.”