are you kidding--this is whopping wonderful

books:


	• Tree of Smoke: A Novel Denis Johnson Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007 - 624 pages average customer review:based on 73 reviews view larger image
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High Novelistic Ambition

Tree of Smoke is a strongly written novel with only minor, forgivable flaws. Johnson has great skill in crafting believable, multi-faceted characters and knows the Vietnam era with intimate knowledge. Structurally, the novel is swift and tense, dense with action and drama. Johnson does juggle many characters about, and this dilutes, somewhat, the novel's impact. The plot also suffers from this overcrowding, losing some of its clarity along the way. But ultimately this novel is redeemed by the high quality of Johnson's prose. For 614 pages he maintains a high standard of precision on the level of word choice and sentence structure, an amazing accomplishment for a novel of such high, sustained ambition.

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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.

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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 military family, 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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are you kidding--this is whopping wonderful

What a book--what a trip. How could anyone retell the personal horror of Vietnam without resorting to some kind of judgment, some kind of distancing "who were these crazy folks?" Johnson is "these crazy folks" and so are we readers as this psychodelic story twists and turns toward destruction/salvation. So ambitious, so beautifully written, so full of humanity and inhumanity. I'm still reeling, wondering why this long book ever had to end. Gosh, this is one hell of a story...

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

Once upon a time there was a war . . . and a young American who thought of himself as the Quiet American and the Ugly American, and who wished to be neither, who wanted instead to be the Wise American, or the Good American, but who eventually came to witness himself as the Real American and finally as simply the Fucking American. That?s me.

This is the story of Skip Sands?spy-in-training, engaged in Psychological Operations against the Vietcong?and the disasters that befall him thanks to his famous uncle, a war hero known in intelligence circles simply as the Colonel. This is also the story of the Houston brothers, Bill and James, young men who drift out of the Arizona desert into a war in which the line between disinformation and delusion has blurred away. In its vision of human folly, and its gritty, sympathetic portraits of men and women desperate for an end to their loneliness, whether in sex or death or by the grace of God, this is a story like nothing in our literature.

Tree of Smoke is Denis Johnson?s first full-length novel in nine years, and his most gripping, beautiful, and powerful work to date.

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