Tree of Smoke: A Novel by Denis Johnson Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Tree of Smoke: A Novel
Book Review: An Interesting and Unpleasant Novel
Summary: 3 Stars
Tree of Smoke is about people trying to cope with the chaos of the intelligence community and the Vietnam War. The principal characters are associated with a rogue CIA operation to develop a double agent.
Skip Sands is a patriotic, young operative who is enthralled by his charismatic uncle, "The Colonel." The uncle has been in the military and intel community his entire adult life. The Colonel is using army assets to work out the logistics of his plot (code-named "Tree of Smoke") to secure a double agent. Skip wants to see action in service to his country and the Colonel wants to break Skip in gently and keep him safe.
The book shows how the attitudes and the relationships of the characters change as the war continues. Tree of Smoke contains some comedic moments reminiscent of "Catch-22" and "M*A*S*H" (such as when the new troops make their first visit to a bar in-country). There just weren't enough of those funny scenes to make this book a pleasant read.
There really is an interesting story and great character development in Tree of Smoke. Unfortunately these elements are buried in 600 pages that are mostly bleak and depressing. Though it is an interesting book, I cannot recommend Tree of Smoke for entertainment purposes.
Book Review: An exquisitely written, long, ponderous, heart-rending and at times frightful novel
Summary: 4 Stars
The novel begins with the senseless, needless and heartless shooting of a tiny, wild monkey, "not much bigger than a Chihuahua dog", by eighteen years old Seaman Apprentice William Houston. He was walking in the Grande Island of the Philippines, looking for a wild boar to hunt. He doesn't find a wild boar. He sees a harmless and helpless monkey in a tree, instead, and shoots it with a .22-caliber rifle. When the fatally wounded monkey falls to the ground, he picks it up. Johnson writes, "With fascination, then with revulsion, he realized that the monkey was crying. Its breath came out in sobs, and tears welled out of its eyes when it blinked. It looked here and there, appearing no more interested in him than in anything else it might be seeing." When I read the brief episode, the brutal and senseless killing of a harmless wild animal which was foraging for food and minding its own business - five paragraphs in all - I was quite outraged, at first. But soon it dawned upon me that, after all, this novel was about the Vietnam War; and wasn't the Vietnam War needless, senseless, brutal and outrageous also? I calmed down and continued to read.
The novel is about two brothers named William Houston, a Seaman Apprentice, and James Houston who serve in the military in the Vietnam War, and a CIA agent named Skip Sands, and his uncle Colonel Francis Sands, and another intelligence officer named Storm, a military man from South Vietnam named Hao and a spy from North Vietnam named Trung, and a Canadian aid worker named Kathy Jones, a nurse who goes to Vietnam after her husband, a priest, is killed. Because of the author's digressive, ruminating and reflective style, the story at times is difficult to follow. The length of the novel (614 pages) is a hindrance also. The beauty of the novel lies mainly in Johnson's prose. Gripping, descriptive passages, vigorous and fascinating dialogues, and biting commentaries flow off the pages. His prose is lucid and smooth-flowing and almost poetic; many of the sentences are as bewitching and elegant as these: "From all around came the ten thousand sounds of the jungle, as well as the cries of gulls and the far-off surf, and if he stopped dead and listened a minute, he could hear also the pulse snickering in the heat of his flesh, and the creak of sweat in his ears. If he stayed motionless only another couple of seconds, the bugs found him and whined around his head."
The book reads like a collage of a series of episodes put together. The characters ponder over a bewildering array of philosophical, spiritual, metaphysical and religious questions. Even the title of the novel itself- Tree of Smoke- can be traced to the Bible. But Johnson's keen observations of nature, and his ability to describe the wonders of nature with the magic of his pen, cast a spell on the reader and hold the reader's attention. At the end of the novel I felt as if I had been standing by the Niagara Falls at night, listening to the ear-splitting wails of its dark, swirling, foamy water rushing towards its inevitable doom. And when I shut the book an extraordinary thing happened: I felt as if I was seeing a sliver of the moon emerging from dense, gray clouds in a dark, starless sky, its silvery light beginning to light up the gloomy sky. Denis Johnson is a masterful writer. Reading this book was an awe-inspiring, dizzying, bewildering and at times frightful experience.
Book Review: Anti-war clichéd characters
Summary: 2 Stars
I really wanted to like this book. I tolerated the intentional lack of narrative focus, thinking maybe there would be some payoff, but the further I got the more irritated I got. The characters are simply a post modern liberal's vision of what war and the military are like; white enlisted men are soulless, stupid, aimless white trash who's primary aim seems to be to get laid and get drunk. The black soldiers are hostile, muscular and vastly superior soldiers operating on a mysterious "deeper" level. CIA agents are naïve brainwashed young men or pathological nuts. The Vietnamese people are deeply spiritual people yearning for freedom from the western colonial yoke.
This book is an excellent example of what modern literary fiction has descended to. There is nothing new here, just a reaffirmation of the `60s antiwar stereotypes
Book Review: Apocalypse Again?
Summary: 2 Stars
Denis Johnson's newest novel, 'Tree of Smoke' has been lauded as a veritable masterpiece. In fact, the liner blurb asserts it is 'unique' in all literature. It was graced with the National Book Award.
With high expectations of a seismic-level reading experience, I pre-ordered this book and carefully read it, even reading some sections twice. As with his previous novels, 'Angels', most particularly, Johnson excels in the descriptions of the hard-luck, 'down-and-out' American and his raw depictions of this segment of Americana are hard to beat. Having grown up in Phoenix, Arizona during the era depicted in this book, I found his scenes on Van Buren Street both familiar and strange: I saw all the things he saw, but never analyzed them in this manner. Thus, the gift of a true writer. I knew some people in Phoenix who could have been models for the Houston brothers, complete with their war experiences in Viet Nam and could only marvel at the exactness of Johnson's depictions of these characters.
The book stumbles and falls with the Viet Nam war sequences. By now, this 'police action' has been mythologized as 'war on acid', with zoned-out psycho soldiers who fragged their officers, military staff and policy makers who inhabited parallel universes making decisions accordingly and exploited 'natives' prone to sphinx-like utterances that were doubtlessly profound, if intelligible...which they usually weren't. Johnson follows this model perfectly. He does so right down to borrowing the characters of Colonel F. X. Sands, a Coppola'Apocalypse-Now'/'Heart of Darkness' cypher, continuing the homage with psychedelic Sgt. J.S. Storm reprising the role played by Dennis Hopper of the crazed, stoned and idol-worshipping photographer.
Some of the plot lines dangled in space and were left that way: why, for instance, did Sands order the execution of a European priest in the Huk insurrection? What role, exactly did the German BDD agent play: was he an independent contractor or was he in the service of the Federal Republic? Why tag Sands' nephew 'Skip' with the responsibility? The role of Skip more-or-less paralleled that of Captain Benjamin L. Willard, played by Martin Sheen in 'Apocalypse Now', was a pastiche of pseudo-profound insights and pithy observations. Adding a new twist, Skip serves as a translator of the exquisitely obscure but perpetually cook Antonin Artaud during the many spare hours awaiting assignment: at least Capt. Willard used his off-time to good effect, to wit, getting insanely drunk. Finally, Skip's leap into insanity culminating in a gun-running conviction and execution were not justified by the character's development in the book. Storm's self-immolation during a bizarre native ritual could be excused as insanity, but it's timing, following the confirmation of the death of Col Sands by his bizarrely named confrere, Anders Pitchfork (this name undoubtedly alludes to something profound; I'm not sure what), is unbearably convenient. In summary, an interesting book. A masterpiece...well, no.
Book Review: BR Myers incoherent
Summary: 5 Stars
BR Myers review in THE ATLANTIC is completely wrong. It's possible, of course, that he simply has mistaken politics. TREE OF SMOKE is one of the great novels of our era. It isn't "about" Vietnam; it's about moral uncertainty. It's about what becomes of people so confused, so lost, so lied to that they at last have no idea where they are or what they're doing. Johnson created this word with language, with form, with plot, and with genius.
He's in Iraq writing the sequel, according to his wife. The lies and misdirection of Vietnam got us the big lie of Iraq. I'm certain Johnson will have something to say about this soon.