Ambitious but Ultimately Unsatisfactory

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	• Tree of Smoke: A Novel Denis Johnson Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007 - 624 pages average customer review:based on 86 reviews view larger image
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Gets better after a slow start

I made the mistake of reviewing this book after reading only the first 200 pages. That was unfair to the book. It becomes a much finer book once the action finally moves to Vietnam. Certainly give this a book a chance. It may not be excellent from start to finish, but it is a surprisingly fast-moving and accessible book once it gets rolling.

Tree of Smoke

Tree of Smoke is paced and layered wonderfully. Slow, dry, alcohol and drug filled conversations unravel the intricate and then not so intricate web of spies and soldiers that is Johnson's Vietnam. Johnson is interested in life at the fringes and he obviously picked the right place. His prose patiently shows its beauty in long dialogue or horrible LURP missions and by the end Johnson has shown us a truly striking portrait of humanity living on the edge. Nothing is fully understood or solved, Johnson comes at things at tough angles, but this is the heart of his message: life is complex and hard and you can never quite get to the top of a tree of smoke.

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Ambitious but Ultimately Unsatisfactory

"Tree of Smoke" by Denis Johnson follows an unfortunate pattern in today's fiction. It begins beautifully but loses its way some 150 pages before it crawls to an unsatisfactory end. Johnson, inspired by Leonard Gardner and his single, slim yet influential novel "Fat City," is a poet of the despair and failure which define most human lives. In this ambitious novel he is excellent when he describes the JFK assassination and the onset of the war in Vietnam from the point of view of characters whose small lives are affected and sometimes even shattered by big events. He is the weakest when it comes to his central character, the character's role in military intelligence, and crafting a believable spy vs. spy narrative. He also insists that the Naval Post Graduate School is in Carmel, CA. I attended Monterey Peninsula College and can attest to the fact that NPSG is in nearby Monterey.

It is said about intelligence in general that there are three kinds of it in descending order: Human, Animal and Military. That said, military intelligence can be fascinating in its vastness, reach and degree of penetration. Yet those who know it the best are sworn to secrecy and can't write about it. Johnson, even though he was born in a family with some intelligence connection, isn't privy to any information that is not publicly available. Moreover, he lacks the requisite craft and patience to sustain the suspense in the long run.

I believe shorter novels are more in tune with our times. The great long novels of Dickens and Thackeray were often written in serialized form for popular newspapers and magazines. The novelists were far closer to their readership and were informed by it far more frequently than the solitary novelists of today who sometimes labor on a single book for years and may eventually get lost in the fog of their own speculations. Regrettably even some shorter works are not entirely immune to this malady.

To write a novel is indeed a great challenge at a time when facts are so many and so much stranger than fiction. A good novelist should be able to discern the reality of our times without being too boring or depressing.

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Mixed emotions

At first I didn't like the characters but my opinion changed the latter half of the book. I really liked the pace and depth. It was one of those books that keeps you thinking long after finishing.

reviews: 1, 2, 3, page 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13

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