A few weeks ago, the arts section of The New York Times turned its solemn eye on literary fiction. On Monday, the fine novelist and short-story writer Steve Stern got conscripted as the surely reluctant poster boy for this year's literary-fiction-is-not-selling feature. This is news? Herman Melville and Nathanael West discuss the problem daily on Mount Parnassus. Almost 40 years ago Wilfrid Sheed, in his classic essay "The Minor Novelist," dryly observed: "He tries to keep away from Sunday supplements which discuss the death of the novel. He has a theory that it is bad luck to read more than three articles on the subject a week."

The next day in The Times, the fine novelist and short-story writer (and poet, and essayist, and native New Yorker-Beekman Place variety-and all-around bon vivant and civilized gent) Harry Mathews got off much easier in John Strausbaugh's adroit and amusing profile. While his books didn't escape being tagged with the description "chronically underappreciated," the piece otherwise gratifyingly focused on his intriguing (in a couple of senses) new novel/memoir My Life in CIA. Personally, I can't think of an American writer since Nabokov whose commitment to the principles of aesthetic bliss and autonomous, self-delighting creation makes the dreary counting-house particulars of sales figures and such more distasteful and beside the point. But then I'm just wild about Harry, and have been since the 70's, when I discovered his vertiginous, unregenerately avant-garde novels The Conversions (1962) and Tlooth (1966).

That's "C.I.A.," by the way, not " the C.I.A."-the definite article is a shibboleth that marks you as an outsider. In the course of his Paris-centered literary-expat life in the 50's and 60's, Mr. Mathews' Ivy League, upper-class background and peripatetic habits gave rise to the suspicion that he was a Company man whose novelistic career was a mere cover for spy-guy activities of a darker hue. This was a perfectly reasonable surmise in the agent-infested Europe of the Cold War, where the C.I.A. notoriously funded such highbrow ventures as Encounter magazine.

The suspicion just happened to be dead wrong, and it pained Mr. Mathews keenly to be so misapprehended. "I wanted to play a part in the grand conspiracy of poetic subversion," he laments. "But how could I get a hearing if people thought I was an ordinary, paid conspirator?" Then two lefty Chilean friends observe that "you have been given the makings of a glorious comedy" and advise him to "Show them they're right. Make the role your very own." In other words, the solution to his vexing identity crisis is to become the novelist of his own life. Call him Meta Harry.

What ensues is a delicious mixture of plausible autobiographical fact and sheer fabrication that reads as if Chuck Barris had decided to recast Confessions of a Dangerous Mind after attending a meeting of the intellectually acrobatic French literary group Oulipo-Mr. Mathews is its sole American member-and brought in Flann O'Brien and Georges Perec for the rewrite. Over the course of the meticulously observed political events of that ugly year 1973, when he's not ingesting the best food, wine and culture that Paris had to offer (the angst, melancholy and lust-tinged loneliness in this book are nothing if not elegantly appointed), Mr. Mathews busily constructs a spookish alter ego for himself.

He co-opts the name of Locus Solus, a literary magazine he co-founded, for the title of a putative travel agency specializing in services for those suffering from "travel-stress dyslexia." The cure? Trains and buses whose departure times read the same from left or right. He cultivates a friendship with an unlikely fan and lapsed literary scholar whose real job is performing oil-market analysis for Zapata Petroleum, Bush père's old outfit. He commissions the weaving of a Khadistan saddle blanket (is there even such a country? Beats me) that encodes a map of a Siberian energy complex. This last wheeze leads to a Marx Brothers–ish farce: Mr. Mathews gets himself rolled up inside an Oriental rug and delivered to a home where he becomes the uninvited guest at a French right-wing dinner party and just misses getting a foot job from an attractive midget.

Inevitably, Mr. Mathews' stratagems take on a life of their own and threaten to pull him in over his head into real danger. But the hugger-mugger is grounded in the believable particulars of the author's life, and whenever the proceedings lean even slightly Ludlum-wise, he instead swerves (Charles) Ludlam-wards with some adroitly rendered piece of Oulipian business or absurdist nonsense. I'm particularly fond of his unconsummated dalliance with one Marie-Claude Quintelpreaux (COINTELPRO-get it?); their chaste bouts of not-screwing achieve an almost tantric level of complexity. The book's climax is a beautifully rendered pastoral idyll of sheep-wrangling in Mr. Mathews' beloved Vercors region of France; the scene ends with a ski pole sped on its fatal trajectory with the apostrophe, "Athena, guide my arm!"

In short, in My Life in CIA, Mr. Mathews has resuscitated that sadly neglected genre, the put-on. At one point in the book, he tells us that "Since the age of ten I had made a habit of escaping from the world of everyday disappointment into the paradise of art, where satisfied desire was the rule." The year 1973 was a major node of everyday disappointment, yet the author manages to re-enchant it with his high wit and linguistic agility, and the sort of no-sweat aplomb and insouciance that he shares with his literary friends and allies, the New York Poets. He accomplishes this with such nimble charm-his hard work and literary discipline gracefully concealed-that one is tempted to dub Harry Mathews the Fred Astaire of American letters. I won't fight that temptation.

Gerald Howard is a book editor in New York.

Toward the climax of The Armies of the Night , Norman Mailer delivers one of his finest bolts of lightning-like illumination, his intuition of the immense psychological distance between the demonstrators and the soldiers facing off outside the Pentagon that day in late October 1967. The formerly well-behaved SAT-taking children of the urban middle class confronted the harder-bitten products of the working class, with "their easy confident virility and that physical courage with which they seemed to be born," and for the moment, advanced placement's moral fervor caused the shop rats to blink. In the late 60's, this passage electrified me and my college friends, for we were precisely the sort of kids Mr. Mailer marched with, and we were separated from the young men fighting the war we so despised both by the merest knife edge of circumstance and by a huge gulf of academic ability and expectation: We had our student deferments. You couldn't contemplate this then without an unease strongly resembling guilt. I still can't.

In They Marched Into Sunlight , his important, timely and moving new book, David Maraniss, a Washington Post editor and author of fairly definitive biographies of Bill Clinton and Vince Lombardi (what a pair!), has applied the Anthony Lukas full-on journalist-as-historian approach to Mr. Mailer's flash of perception. In this sort of book, the writer typically finds some event pregnant with social and historical significance and, by dint of prodigies of research and reporting and composition, produces something like a panopticon in prose form, with the event seen from every angle, all possible points of view comprehended, with-big gamble-ultimate meaning finally delivered. Pick the wrong event, or pile up too many facts and quotes and backgrounders, and the whole edifice can collapse under its own ambition and self-importance.

David Maraniss has won the gamble, and won it decisively. His historical template comprises two near-simultaneous events that took place a few days before the 1967 march on the Pentagon. On Oct. 17, the Black Lion Battalion of the First Infantry Division-the storied Big Red One-marched into an ambush set almost accidentally by a Viet Cong regiment in the Long Nguyen Secret Zone in South Vietnam; the ensuing slaughter reminded one of the survivors of Little Big Horn. Among the 61 Americans killed were Lt. Col. Terry Allen Jr., whose legendary father had commanded the division in World War II, and Maj. Donald Holleder, a fabled All-American football player at West Point. Gen. William Westmoreland and the military P.R. machine tried to spin the encounter with an inflated V.C. body count into a set-piece battle that the enemy lost, an imposture that fooled nobody-not the press (Peter Jennings makes an impressive cameo here, calling the brass' bullshit), and certainly not the traumatized survivors of Alpha and Delta companies.

The next day, on the Madison campus of the University of Wisconsin, a bastion of progressive thought and politics, a large student demonstration seeking to block recruiters for the Dow Chemical Company (infamous at that time for its manufacture of napalm) spun completely out of control. Ill-prepared riot police (what training they'd had came from Chicago cops!) were called on campus, the students refused to vacate a building, and the whole thing devolved into a nightstick-wielding, head-cracking, tear-gas-soaked nightmare, with horrified and ineffectual university administrators looking on. (The presence of the San Francisco Mime Troupe, in town for a performance, provided the requisite period touches of absurdist guerrilla theater.) The result was a vastly more radicalized student population, a polarized and demoralized faculty, and a thoroughly pissed off and hostile state legislature. In retrospect, this fiasco feels like the pilot episode for later campus confrontations: Columbia, Cornell and, most lethally, Kent State. In 1970, the nadir of student radicalism would be reached at Wisconsin when the bombing of the Army Math Research Center took the life of a physicist in the building.

Two debacles then, 10,000 miles apart, but fortuitously linked by timing and their pertinence to the supercharged American agon of the period. The rote accusation of the time on the right was that while American boys were dying in the jungles of Vietnam, long-haired dope-smoking draft-dodging college students were doing the protesting. True enough, but Mr. Maraniss unpacks that tendentious cliché in something like real historical time and allows his readers to make their own judgment. His portrayal of the brave and doomed men of Alpha and Delta companies is a triumph of empathy; they certainly deserve Mr. Mailer's attribution of physical courage. There's First Lt. Clark Welch, the book's hero, the superb commander of Delta Company, whose doubts about the mission are squelched by Col. Allen; Mike Troyer, who pens supremely bitter grunt's laments to his parents back in Ohio ("The whole damn war is run by the book and Charlie can't read English so he gets all the breaks and we usually get killed"); and Joe Costello, a grenadier from Long Island, whose abrupt return, despite his wounds, to the field of battle to rescue soldiers left behind struck me as the single bravest action I've ever read about. Mr. Maraniss renders the horrific combat action with a mixture of precision, horror and deep feeling that is almost unbearably moving: My tear ducts got a workout. The added testimony of Vo Minh Triet, the commander of the V.C. regiment who set the trap for the Americans, is invaluable in grasping the battle in its larger context-a great piece of reporting on the author's part.

The transitions to the Madison-campus sections can be abrupt, and the contrasts sometimes unflattering; we move from a realm of iron necessity to one of choice and ambiguity. The figures here lack the grandeur that life-and-death struggle confers. Still, Mr. Maraniss does an excellent job of conveying the troubled atmosphere on the politically engaged campuses of the era, with their beleaguered liberal administrators, riven faculties, student radical leaders high on the existential fumes of Historical Action, and the mass of students driven this way and that by the confusing swirl of events. Like Mr. Maraniss, who describes himself as a naïve freshman onlooker in Madison in 1967, I was a freshman on a campus that cracked up (Cornell in 1969 … oh, man), and he captures the strange, unsettling excitement of it all perfectly. Also on the Wisconsin campus in 1967 was none other than Dick Cheney, a graduate student in political science who affected indifference to campus events and the large political issues informing them-showing the talent for vaguely sinister non-engagement he's since perfected in his Vice Presidential bunker. As Mr. Maraniss makes obligatory side trips to Washington to describe high-level sessions-with Lyndon Johnson in his familiar role as Captain Ahab-I was struck by how closely Robert McNamara, Dean Rusk, the brothers Bundy and others in the best-and-brightest set reminded me of their successors in imperial hubris, Wolfowitz and Co.

Like hundreds of thousands of my generational cohort, I carry around a huge steamer trunk of unresolved issues dating from the 60's, so I was rooting for Mr. Maraniss to orchestrate the painful and often discordant elements of that era's history into a moving threnody of loss and forgiveness. And he has done that, particularly in the book's magnificent coda. If it's the American soldiers who come off as admirable while the students' moral and political engagement in some cases seems adulterated by opportunism and self-dramatization-well, that's something the high-SAT crowd will have to live with.

Earlier this month The New Republic published one of the most sickening articles I've seen in years: "Willpower: Why the Public Can Stomach Casualties and Elites Can't." I ask you: At this dangerous historical moment, with our neoliberal hawks apparently feeling that our political leaders are in need of bucking up to accept higher body counts of the sons and daughters of the working class, can there be a more pertinent book than They Marched Into Sunlight ? It should be read by those who seek to craft a principled and effective resistance to the Bush administration (if only to avoid repeating the mistakes of an earlier generation). It should be read by those who are curious about the ugly origins of our red state–blue state political divide. There's a raft of prize nominations clearly headed this book's way, and they'll be richly deserved.

As a stylist, Mr. Maraniss isn't a patch on Norman Mailer, but he has provided a crucial part of the Vietnam-era drama missing from The Armies of the Night . (We can see this clearly now, 35 years later.) In doing so, Mr. Maraniss has written the greater book. He quotes the late Wisconsin historian of nationalism, George Mosse: "What man is, only history tells." They Marched Into Sunlight does the job.

Gerald Howard is an executive editor at large at Doubleday Broadway publishers.