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: Another overrated National Book Award winner
Summary: 2 Stars
I had so looked forward to reading this book. Several novels concerning Vietnam are among my favorites. James Webb's Fields of Fire, Tim O'Brien's Going After Cacciato and John M. Delvecchio's The Last Valley are superior works of fiction. I had read D. Johnson's books before and found them neither riveting nor memorable in any way. But with all of the hoopla surrounding its release, I was ready for something special. It started off that way. For the first half of the book, around 300 pages, I liked what I read even though I wasn't working up much interest in the characters, and the book is probably two thirds dialog, and not particularly revealing dialog either. By the time I neared the end I no longer cared about either the story or the characters. I stopped with 30 pages left,with absolutely no curiosity about how it ended because my enthusiasm had departed many, many pages before. Again, the National Book Award had been given to a book that I felt to be thoroughly undeserving, murky, unfocused and oh so ponderous, like an overblown Mahler symphony. Anyone ever tried to read The News From Paraguay by Lili Tuck, another NBA winner? Spare yourself. At least that book was short. This one just went on and on and on, draining every last bit of interest the further on it went. This was no literary Apocalypse Now. But as I neared the end I experienced Apathy Now.Book Review: Very, very dull
Summary: 1 Stars
When the most helpful positive review for a novel includes the word "ponderous" in its title, it should give you pause. Ponderous is a good word for this novel. Dull is another. It's not that nothing happens. It's that people stand around thinking disjointed existential thoughts for 30 pages, then something happens in a single paragraph (say, someone gets killed),and then we get another 30 pages of disjointed existential thoughts about the one paragraph worth of action.
I didn't particularly care for the author's style, which is sort of dispassionate and deceptively lean. I say "deceptively," not because the writing actually contains deep reserves of hidden meaning, but because the book is over 600 pages long, which definitely does not qualify as "lean" to my way of thinking. It is over 250 pages before much of anything seems to happen, and the book has a rather lengthy epilogue (over 70 pages), where again not much of anything happens, so that' really over half the book if you think about it. Even if Denis Johnson's prose were the greatest joy this side of Heaven, that's a lot of joyous prose to slog through.
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: Like the Vietnam War, Tree of Smoke Has No Discernible Purpose
Summary: 1 Stars
I was a field radioman with the Marines in Vietnam in 67-68 and have authored two novels about the country myself, so when I read that Tree of Smoke was one of the best novels about Vietnam I bought it immediately. After the first 50 pages I was lost. The characters were poorly drawn and there did not seem to be any plot. I kept plugging away through the novel just as I once hacked through dense jungle, hoping to discover the author's point. It never got better, but I made it all the way through anyway, not wanting to waste the purchase price.
Tree of Smoke is so awful a story that I cannot list everything that is wrong with it, and B.R. Myers of The Atlantic Monthly has already done so. The main objections I have are these: (1) I did not become attached to the characters, so I did not care what happened to them, (2) there was no real plot, and (3) it was even more depressing than actually experiencing the Vietnam War in the jungles and rice paddies. If people and life were as disgusting as Denis Johnson portrays them, there would be no point to living.