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Tree of Smoke: A Novel

Description

Amazon Significant Seven, September 2007: Denis Johnson is one of those few great hopes of American writing, fully capable of pulling out a ground-changing masterpiece, as he did in 1992 with the now-legendary collection, Jesus' Son. Tree of Smoke showed every sign of being his "big book": 600+ pages, years in the making, with a grand subject (the Vietnam War). And in the reading it lives up to every promise. It's crowded with the desperate people, always short of salvation, who are Johnson's specialty, but despite every temptation of the Vietnam dreamscape it is relentlessly sober in its attention to on-the-ground details and the gradations of psychology. Not one of its 614 pages lacks a sentence or an observation that could set you back on your heels. This is the book Johnson fans have been waiting for--along with everybody else, whether they knew it or not. --Tom Nissley

Reviews

Rating: 5 / 5
Date: 2010-07-22
Summary: "Tree of Smoke"

A deep and sad book about the American hallucinogenic involvement in Asia, specifically the Philippines and Vietnam. It's a novel but like all great novels is more real that any factual account can be. Other reviewers cover the plot and the characters; suffice it to to say the characters are helpless against the inevitability of tragedy. I served in Korea ( before the time of the novel which begins in 1963) and for me the tone of the prose is exact. I detected perhaps Graham Greene as an influence and also maybe John Dos Passos - this book is a great companion to the Dos Passos' masterful ( and neglected) "USA" written in the 30s.

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Rating: 5 / 5
Date: 2010-07-22
Summary: "Amazing work"

I can understand it's not for everyone, because there is no more a cohesive story line than the Vietnam War itself had. That's the point, imo. It's a dark book about a dark time, and Johnson goes right to the dark hearts of his characters without any preamble -- they're not "cardboard" or "wooden" -- they're in a *war* and their best and most complex selves are not in evidence. Does war permit character development in actual soldiers and other operatives? It pares them down and destroys them more commonly, not only because one's best self is a burden in such weird and dangerous circumstances. People live and die, and kill, by sheer guesswork which is often wrong. They are saved, or killed, because of the mistakes of others, both intentional and careless. I think Johnson captures not only the folly of government actions, but the screwed up, alcoholic hearts of his characters, who are soldiers and soldier wannabes, failed soldiers and has-beens with real glory in their pasts. Instead of the typical "what happens" of a story, Johnson gives us insight into what these people are thinking. What is the thinking that propels the activities of war? There are a lot of big ideas in this book. Ideas about war, about different cultures, about government hubris and individual pride, stupidity, and need, about love and loss and religious faith and alcoholism. One thing about most of Johnson's work: if you have any curiosity about alcohol abuse or drug abuse, if you've ever wondered how addicts think, it's all there. The denial, the good intentions, the utter failure of the will, the cockeyed "planning" for the future, the misconceptions and bad judgment. He's a national treasure, and it's a big book. But, not for everyone. It benefits from at least a passing familiarity with the facts of the Vietnam War, which, sadly, not everyone has. Also, lots of people and things die in this book. If you don't like the dark, read something else. If you want another novel that takes a look at the CIA and its screwups, try The Company.

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Rating: 2 / 5
Date: 2010-07-05
Summary: "Blowing Smoke"

After closely reading the first 250 pages of Denis Johnson's 624-page Vietnam War novel and skimming the rest, I returned it to the library in three pieces. The recently published $27 hardback was literally falling apart, thanks to a cheaply glued--not stitched--spine. The librarian said he devoted part of each day to repairing such shoddy new publications. Alas, the book's substance didn't hold together any better.

I'd seen "Tree of Smoke" praised to high heaven in a New York Times review and touted in dust-jacket blurbs by folks like Philip Roth, who should know better. Its wooden characters creaked, its plot failed to materialize after 75,000 words, and its imprecise and arrhythmic language tripped me up time and again, forcing me back to reread sentences in an attempt to figure out what the hell they meant. Boredom soon set in. And this is a novel nominated for the National Book Award, which raised my expectations. I should have known better, having suffered through leaden nominees of previous years.

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Rating: 1 / 5
Date: 2010-07-02
Summary: "cruel"

Within the first couple of pages the book was so harsh and needlessly cruel that I put it down and never picked it up again except to throw it in the trash. Really terrible book! The first book that I have ever thrown away! I love books and movies about Vietnam and the war, but this one was just plane bad!

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Rating: 4 / 5
Date: 2010-04-16
Summary: "Fascinating, Frustrating, Brilliant"

The skinny: I loved Tree of Smoke, but I'm going to take some time this weekend to figure out more precisely why - this book fascinated and frustrated me. It's a very different type of Vietnam novel, focusing on the "secret war" instead of on the clash of arms, although there's that as well. But it's not verismo along the lines of The Things They Carried or psychedelic verismo a la Going After Cacciato - two great novels of Vietnam. Like ambitious Vietnam books, it speaks to broad topics on which it's hard to have an original thought. Yet Johnson succeeds and seems a wholly credible witness to the times and places he writes about so stylishly. For me, as good as his eye is and as intriguing as the Byzantine machinations of his characters, Johnson's brilliant dialogue carries the story - at at once tough, believable, and literary, and integral to the layering of Johnson's deep, organically wrought cast of Americans, Vietnamese, Brits, Germans, and others. (I frankly don't understand the fusillades he's drawn on both his dialogue and his characters.)

Tree of Smoke struck me more than a few times as an odd Asian doppleganger-counterpart to Roth's American Pastoral - depicting "the War that Deranged the Americans," individually and in their clusters of society, both home and abroad, exposing all their tender nerves and mythologized beliefs. Johnson gives us more than a few Kurtz-like figures, and Conrad resonates throughout the descent of Skip Sands, "Johnny Storm," and others into various forms of call-it-what-you-will. Johnson's Houston brothers vault from SE Asia to invade/descend into Roth's American scene, although two-thirds a continent away from suburban New Jersey. I suppose this kind of thing - call it "madness as a metaphor" for short, but the book is so much more than that - are about as hackneyed in a Vietnam novel as anything else; after all, for many writers, soldiers, and civilians, Vietnam was the psychedelic war, and the psychotic war, and many other related things to many people. But in my reading, Johnson gives this new and plausible depth and dimensions. And he does so, I should add, with a ferocious sense of humor and with descriptive powers that are flat-out supernatural. On page 4, in which he spins out the fate of an unlucky higher jungle primate, we get an early display of Johnson's powers, a hint of his sensibility, and a sense of how this may all play out.

I've docked the book a star for its threadbare "Ah....the nefarious CIA devours its own" theme that so many writers are drawn to. Democracies have a hard time with secret organizations, and democratic peoples spin yarns - delirious imaginings, conspiracies, short stories, novels, editorials, and such - about anything they can't peer into as deeply as they wish; I'm more than a little tired of this, and I apologize for a pet peeve. (If having said as much seems a spoiler, it will be one for only the most obtuse of readers, to include anyone who takes on the book without first having read the dust jacket or the cover of the paperback.)

But in the end, a lot of readers - as we can see from the reviews of those who were less impressed with the book than I was - will wonder about what Johnson has left us with. For so protean a novel, each of us will decide for ourselves. I'd like to ponder it a bit more. It's (obviously) not a book for everyone. It's talky. It takes its own sweet time. It's extremely calculated in its ambiguities. Readers who are not of Johnson's generation, who weren't devouring newspapers in the 1960s and 1970s, or who were never in uniform, may view much of this novel as obscure or pedantic. But Johnson ties things up pretty well by page 614, and Tree of Smoke gripped me, hard. To me, it created a literary world well worth inhabiting, and it made me want to read a great deal more Denis Johnson.