Tree of Smoke: A Novel by Denis Johnson
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Book Reviews of Tree of Smoke: A Novel
Book Review: Confusing and Diverse (3.5 stars)
Summary: 4 Stars
This was a hefty book and I'll lead with a criticism. It was about 100 pages too long. I found 200 or so pages in, it started to drag. It did pick up nicely though. I also found the end a little tiresome.
This is a very masculine piece of fiction. The main characters are manly men doing manly things in a very confusing place. As it's a war novel, there is a lot of testosterone in evidence.
Skip Sands is the most central character, a CIA Operative who is largely unimportant and often confused as to what's going on. He is definitely a pawn of his legendary uncle F.X. Sands, a senior CIA Operative usually referred to as the Colonel. The Colonel protects Skip, giving him largely useless duties.
The Colonel is larger than life, plays by no rules and is renegade who gets away with a lot of things. He's charismatic, influences people easily and is a born leader. The legend of the Colonel often takes on a life of its own.
Other characters with story lines are the Houston brothers who both end up back in the U.S. after Viet Nam and are largely unable to live normally.
The book is sprawling and ambitious. It really captures the ambiguities of the Viet Nam War well. You need to be patient with this book as it doesn't flow in a standard way. I really did enjoy it but can see how it would drive some people a little crazy. It is not an easy read but it's very original and well worth the effort.
Book Review: hardly a novel driven by plot
Summary: 4 Stars
Reading some of the complaints regarding this novel one might get the idea that there are readers out there who are still stuck on plot. "Nothing happens in the first one-hundred pages"! This is a finely crafted novel that delves deeply into great themes, it is not, nor was it meant to be a "thrilling page-turner" ala King or Grisham. One wonders what these negative reviewers would write if they were to read "Ulysses," "In Search of Lost Time," or "Moby Dick".
Johnson's writing is prose poetry. The reader does not hustle through the pages unless he does not read for anything other than who-did-what-to-whom-and-when-and-how did they do it. This text requires a slow, but concentrated, reading so that the prose, filled with elusive references, "new fired from the mint" metaphors, and engaged with painting lush, contradictory characters as they tread cautiously over war-torn terrain. Johnson gives us the haunting picture of the sixties with all of its crudity, its toxic self-seriousness, its righteous (and unrighteous)rage, its painful pleasures, and its sense of organized chaos. Enjoy.
Book Review: Vietnam, receding in the rear-view mirror
Summary: 3 Stars
"Tree of Smoke" is big, convoluted, and meant to be consumed whole in a long read, immersing the reader in the reflections of a fun-house mirror, the military's disintegrating role in Vietnam. There's a flood of imagery, an exhausting descriptive style that one appreciates or soon is overwhelmed by. In its 600 pages are characters that, true to the times, seem to be aimless, or at least helpless in the way of unfolding disaster.
Johnson has some heady company in writing about the watershed event of the 1960s, but at this remove from the events of 1963-1970 (the span of time covered in "Tree of Smoke") Vietnam is less a place of combat than a canvas to spread his cast of characters. Reviewers and many readers were dazzled by the novel's hallucinogenic tone ("whacked-out" was another positive accolade) in which plot is secondary to the effect of the author's spiraling prose.
Like many of its characters, the novel loses its way. The intent is to convey the undeniably chaotic forces at work in this unwinnable war; every man must find reasons for his survival, or work toward his redemption. Some find nothing but the heart of darkness. But survival or redemption requires a moral certainty, and here there is none. The characters only become more obscured in their jungle hell, and the Vietnam war oddly recedes from view as the novel progresses. The war remains central to the action, but as a refraction of the country's moral dilemma. For a novel with so much technical detail, which is considerable, Johnson manages to make Vietnam into a Hollywood abstraction.
Much has been written about the book's echoes of Graham Greene in "The Quiet American," his tale of Vietnam during the French colonial period of the 1950s, and the character of Skip Sands does share some of the optimistic idealism of that novel's Alden Pyle. Both men have their dreams turn dark as their idealism fades. But this is just one aspect of "Tree of Smoke," and the two books describe different eras. Greene's story revealed itself in its British reserve; Johnson's novel is overstuffed with meaning, and spins with centrifugal force, filled with characters we have a hard time knowing, or much caring about.
A big topic, a big book: reviewers and readers have given Johnson a large pass for this, but many of them may mistake the book's sheer weight for seriousness. Through the smoke and confusion we learn little about war or the human condition we don't already know, and of Vietnam even less.
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Book Review: Vietnam Collage
Summary: 3 Stars
Tree of Smoke, Johnson's sprawling novel about Vietnam, is structured around the narratives of many characters, which include The Colonel, a hybrid of Colonel Kurtz and Lt. Colonel Bill Kilgore from Apocalypse Now (a dash of Hannibal from the A Team); Skip Sands, the Colonel's nephew and fellow CIA operative; Kathy Jones, a humanitarian worker from Canada; brothers Bill and James Houston; Lt Storm, an insane violent psychedelic dervish who supports The Colonel; and Vietnamese men Trung, a Buddhist Vietcong double agent, and How, a Saigon businessman working with the Americans.
TOS has many great things about it. As those familiar with Johnson's work will attest, the prose is electric - engaging, energetic, fresh. The characters of the Houston brothers and Skip Sands stand out as especially strong, distinct, and moving. Brothers James and Bill are the typical down and out, edge of respectable society guys that Johnson is so good at bringing to life. Skip Sands also comes across well. He is an introspective man, educated, morally conscious. His struggle is the struggle of the nation, full of good intentions and patriotism, faith in God, etc, which all come under fire when confronted with ludicrous nature of the war.
TOS's main weakness is it tries to accomplish too much with too many different points of view. The result is too much expository writing, too much generalization. Overall Johnson grapples with many themes - religion, patriotism, horror, innocence, death. These are big issues, better dealt with obliquely, through the specificity of characters and their situations. As a result of generalization, many of the characters feel flat. Colonel Sands is a complete stock character taken right out of a mediocre movie. Lt Storm speaks like a bad television movie - "this is getting psychedelic, man!" The Vietnamese characters are never fully penetrated, and feel as though they are placed in the novel to provide some sort of balance to the American perspective. Kathy Jones only comes alive at the very end of the novel.
I found the book worth reading all the way through. The total perspective on the Vietnam War is nothing new, and in no way compares to classics like Herr's "Dispatches" or most of Tim O'Brien's oeuvre. There is a directionless to the book that I found frustrating, but flashes of greatness as well.
One word of note, the plot definitely picks up at the end, and I found the last third by far the best - so keep reading.
Book Review: A mixed bag..
Summary: 3 Stars
The inside of the jacket:
This is the story of William "Skip" Sand, CIA - engaged in Psychological Operations against the Vietcong - and the disasters that befall him. This 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 its vision of human folly, this is a story like nothing in our literature.
First of all, I read this book, sort of the same way I watch The Unit on television. When I watch The Unit, I am usually sitting on the couch, paging through a magazine. When a scene comes on with the wives, I put down my magazine and watch, when the war story comes back on, I pick back up my magazine. Why do I even watch The Unit?? Because I control about 99% of our Tivo watching, my husband's 1% is The Unit and a couple of shows from Spike TV. If he can watch Project Runway, Criminal Minds, Top Chef, Real Housewives of Orange County, and all the other shows that I make him watch, then I can watch The Unit.
So, anyway. I did read this book, all 614 pages of it. I could tell that it was a good book and an interesting book if you like war stories, and covert operations, and things like that. I just kind of paid more attention to the characters and their personalities and less on the covert operations part, and even then it held my interest. So, if you like war based stories, then you would probably really like this!