Tree of Smoke: A Novel
by Denis Johnson
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Book Summary Information
Author: Denis JohnsonEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2008-09-02
ISBN: 0312427743
Number of pages: 720
Publisher: Picador
Book Reviews of Tree of Smoke: A Novel
Book Review: Quiet American: an encore
Summary: 4 Stars
Between Kleist and Conrad, I need to look at contemporaries once in a while, just for fairness to the new writers and for keeping updated.
I have frequently picked up award winners like this one (National Book Award for fiction in 2007) and have found them a mixed crop, as could be reasonably expected. I met some good writers this way, and I have been disappointed a lot as well. (Maybe most of all by the fairly recent German Nationaler Buchpreis.)
Where is Denis Johnson in this scenario? I would say, on the 'not bad' shelf, but not quite on the 'great' shelf. What have we got? A Vietnam novel, always a subject that interests me. Actually, there is a broader scope, it goes back to the Philippines with roots into WW2.
The 'story' is a multiplicity of stories, you can read each chapter as a short story if you want, but they are all interconnected and they span a time line of 20 years. Each story is in itself fairly simple, none has a traditional 'ending', I guess because real life does not offer stories with an ending.
You have a multiplicity of characters from all sides, but the main theme is taken from Graham Greene's Quiet American. Greene's 'hero' Pyle's real life model Lansdale has a cameo appearance here. That book is even quoted by one of the characters (a Canadian missionary; she also mentions the 'Ugly American', a quite different story, which Johnson's hero misunderstands.)
The writing is deceptively simple, the plot is more complex. Once in a while the simple writing develops special charms, when I have to chuckle over an observation or admire a simile.
'Are you sober? Slightly.'
Not knowing anything about the author before starting this book, I looked around here in amazon among the other reviews and also looked up information on his other books. It seems, Johnson has a reputation for writing under the influence, or let's say, dreamworlds are part of his world. Actually, more often this text here is more sober than one would wish it to be, though most of his protagonists are not sober quite a lot of their time.
What does the title mean? It is from Joel 2,30, and refers to the judgement day. My English version of the Bible has it as 'columns of smoke', but apparently 'trees' is an accurate translation of the Hebrew text. As you might have guessed, out secret service heroes use the term for one of their clandestine operations.
What did Greene write about Pyle, in the words of the journalist who is narrating the story (Michael Caine in the recent movie)? I never knew a man who had better motives for the trouble that he caused. The problem with the progress of history is that even these simple categories get blurred.
Summary of Tree of Smoke: A Novel
Winner of the National Book Award
One of the New York Times 10 Best Books of the Year
Named a Best Book of the Year by Time, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle, Amazon.com, Salon, Slate, The National Book Critics Circle, The Christian Science Monitor. . . .
Tree of Smoke is the story of William "Skip" Sands, CIA--engaged in Pschological Operations against the Vietcong--and the disasters that befall him. It is also the story of the Houston brothers, Bill and James, young men who drift out of the Arizona desert and into a war where the line between disinformation and delusion has blurred away. In the words of Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times, Tree of Smoke is "bound to become one of the classic works of literature produced by that tragic and uncannily familiar war."
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
War Books
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