Tree of Smoke: A Novel
by Denis Johnson
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Book Reviews of Tree of Smoke: A Novel
Book Review: A Cross between HEART OF DARKNESS and CATCH-22
Summary: 4 Stars
TREE OF SMOKE revolves around Colonel Francis X. Sands, a civilian operative for the CIA who has his own base and his own recon contingent and even his own helicopter. The Colonel is a renegade of sorts and he soon gets himself in Dutch with the higher ups in the CIA. His troubles begin when he writes an article for the CIA publication outlining the differences between intelligence and analysis. Intelligence officers collect the data but their superiors may misinterpret it for political reasons or for their own personal advancement. The Colonel is an alcoholic and really can't articulate what he wants to say so he has another man translate his ideas. This man turns him in to his superiors. Matters go further south when the CIA murders a Catholic priest in the Philippines who was mistakenly rumored to have been providing arms to Moslem revolutionaries.
If there is a main character in the story it's "Skip" Sands, the Colonel's nephew, also a CIA operative whom the colonel seems to be protecting. He is given out of the way assignments and his main job seems to be to type and organize the Colonel's interview files. While in the Philippines he witnesses the murder of the priest and also has an affair with Kathy Jones, a Canadian missionary whose husband Timothy has been murdered by the rebels. The story moves from 1963 just after Kennedy's assassination to 1983.
In 1969 the Colonel is "running" a double agent named Trung, of the Vietcong; the other CIA agents are highly suspicious because of the Colonel's idea to try to make the North Vietnamese believe that some renegade CIA agents want to plant an atom bomb in Hanoi harbor. They think he just might do it.
There are also two brothers, William and James Houston. William is in the Navy and seventeen-year-old James joins the Army, where he becomes a LURP or tunnel rat, special operatives who go down in the Vietcong tunnels, often high on speed, to ferret out Charlie. Both of these guys are seriously messed up, but they just might be the most interesting characters in the book. Both get in bar fights and have little respect for women, even their own mother, a religious fanatic. Both do prison time. At one point William Houston wonders when some disaster will come along and push him into making something of himself. He's twenty-six at the time.
TREE OF SMOKE carries on the modern tradition of parading as many viewpoint characters on stage as possible. There are the two Sands, there're the Houston brothers, there is Kathy Jones, there's Trung and a South Vietnamese businessman named Hao who is just trying to stay alive and wind up on the right side; there's also Ming, the colonel's helicopter pilot, and Jimmy Storm, a sort of aide de camp to the colonel, who is definitely a CATCH-22 character. Towards the end of the book he goes looking for the mysterious colonel who's supposed to be dead. The colonel has a mysterious element that will remind you of Kurtz in HEART OF DARKNESS.
Have patience with this one. Don't listen to the people who flunked the marshmallow test; it's a decent comment on the Vietnam war without a whole lot of battle scenes; it also includes some subtle and not so subtle tie-ins with our modern quagmire.
Book Review: A Three Star Novel
Summary: 2 Stars
The writer Chaim Potok said once in an lecture I heard him give that a librarian had told him, when he, as a youngster, was checking out a book by Evelyn Waugh-- whom he thought was a woman-- that one should always give a book he didn't like 100 pages before quitting reading if the writer was a respected author. I thought of Mr. Potok's advice many times while reading TREE OF SMOKE-- all 614 pages-- although I soldiered on, hoping against hope that it would get better. Winner of the National Book Award for 2007 and praised by critics in most major publications save one that I was able to find, B. R. Myers' review in the ATLANTIC MONTHLY, TREE OF SMOKE is about Vietnam and covers a span of years from 1963, the year of President Kennedy's death, to 1970 and then skips to 1983. It has many characters including Skip Sands who works for the CIA, his bigger-than-life uncle, Colonel Francis Sands, two redneck brothers in arms, Billy and James Houston, an Adventist nurse named Kathy, several North Vietnamese and South Vietnamese characters as well as many bit players. Almost to a person the characters are not sympathetic. War is hell, the Vietnam War and all others. There is enough sex and cynicism to go around. Johnson, a recovering drug addict, sees the universe as pretty depraved. It is one of violence and betrayal. Kathy comes closest to the moral center in this novel although it very well may be outside this story. One character describes a situation as "Disneyland on acid."
Much of this far-too-long novel is tedious although occasionally brief passages stand out but they are too few and far between. Johnson's description of Skip Sands' grief and guilt, upon learning belatedly of the death of his mother, for example: "Then remorse crushed him physically, the blood pounded in his head, he struggled for breath-- he hadn't called, hadn't written, left her to ride to her death on a gurney all alone in helplessly polite apologetic midwestern confusion and fear."
Vince Passaro's review in NEWSDAY, where he heard in this novel "Whitman in his erotic excess," has to be the strangest comments any reviewer has made about TREE OF SMOKE. Occasionally I heard Hemingway, but certainly never Whitman, in the sex scenes between Skip and Kathy-- I hesitate to call them love scenes. Case in point: "It rained again, and then it was night. She couldn't return now to the missionaries in Bac Se. They slept together side by side, without sheets, she in one of his rough hand-washed T-shirts and he in boxer undershorts. Following breakfast the next morning she left for Baca Se on her black bicycle, and Skip never saw her again." This passage could have been straight out of A FAREWELL TO ARMS.
Johnson pretty much sums up his novel in a passage on page 192: "Deals struck in a half dozen languages, sinister rendezvous, false smiles, eyes measuring the chances. Psychos, wanderers, heroes. Lies, scars, masks, greedy schemes." Charles Bukowski would have liked this novel. Tolstoy would have not.
(You can go back and correct everything in a review except the rating. I meant to give this novel three stars.)
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.
Book Review: Dense, slow, but powerfully written. Won't appeal to all readers.
Summary: 4 Stars
This is a powerful, well-written book, and one of the best I've ever read about the Vietnam war, though it's less about the direct experience of war, and more about the madness, surreality, and moral confusion that swirls around war's fire (the "tree of smoke"). Johnson is a writer's writer. His prose is poetic and psychologically rich, full of passages I that I sometimes rewound my audiobook just to hear again. His dialogue and description are often lifelike, surreal, profound, and quotable all at once. The book's central figure, The Colonel, an old school warrior with a blunt-spoken, avuncular manner and a powerful (and renegade) sense of personal mission, is one of the most colorful characters I've come across in a while. Johnson's window into the world of counterintelligence offers a rich perspective on a United States driven by a sense of post-World War Two clarity and purpose that becomes more mythical and mirage-like as his characters find themselves foundering in uncertainty.
Read the sequence about teenage American soldiers newly arrived in Vietnam and perhaps you'll understand what I mean. They act exactly like you'd expect teenagers to, immature, without a clue what's going on, but determined to maintain their teenage bravado, even as the veteran soldiers mess with them. These scenes are effective, darkly funny, and totally believable; after reading them, I wondered how so many other authors managed to get teenage American soldiers so *wrong*.
However, there's no denying that Tree of Smoke will repel some readers. It's a depressing book, and portrays a war seemingly lost in the souls of those conducting it, as their convictions drive them into murky moral paradoxes and places of existential isolation. Few of the characters are very likable or even very knowable, particularly the young infantryman James, who, aside from the rush of sex and combat, dwells in a vacuum of indifference. The novel's also long, meandering, and full of sequences that, like the characters themselves, seem to wander for pages and pages without clear purpose (e.g. Jimmy Storm's bizarre quest into the jungles of Malaysia at the end of the book, long after the war is over). In fact, one could remove entire chapters without significantly altering the overall plot or changing the message Johnson has to impart.
Yet, this is a haunting, searing, mesmerizing work, touching on many significant themes, though they never quite coalesce into an easily digestible whole. Tree of Smoke is a book to read for the vivid, hazy intensity of Johnson's vision. If you appreciate writers like Faulkner or Cormac McCarthy, check this one out; if pulp like Tom Clancy is more your style, then stay, stay, stay away.
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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