Customer Reviews

TREE OF SMOKE.

5 star:		(37)
4 star:		(19)
3 star:		(17)
2 star:		(24)
1 star:		(36)

 

 

I was very disappointed. I'd read Angels years ago and had wanted to get back to Johnson. My qualms are not with the writing--Johnson is a gifted stylist and you must be careful not to gloss over certain passages or paragraphs which are dense philosophical insights wrapped in great prose and at times poetry. Nor with the politics--those dismissing the book for its lack of aviation verisimilitude or because it wasn't as good a Vietnam book as some others, are evaluating an apple as an orange.

My disappointment is with the characters and the plot. This is at heart an intellectual work: it ruminates and dazzles, but the characters remain distant and abstract, and each time I became caught up in a subplot, it would be discarded. It was a novel that made me think--but I also wanted to feel.

Skip Sands is the fulcrum around which the novel moves, but I never was able to fully grasp his character--or care about him. And, while he thinks a lot, he doesn't do very much.

Take my review, however, with a grain of salt. I've seen some reviewers refer to Tolstoy, and I have to admit, I felt the same way about Sands as I did about Pierre in War and Peace.

"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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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.

Tree of Smoke, Johnson's sprawling novel about Vietnam, is structured around the narratives of many characters, which include The Colonel, a hybrid of Colonel Kurtz and Lt. Colonel Bill Kilgore from Apocalypse Now (a dash of Hannibal from the A Team); Skip Sands, the Colonel's nephew and fellow CIA operative; Kathy Jones, a humanitarian worker from Canada; brothers Bill and James Houston; Lt Storm, an insane violent psychedelic dervish who supports The Colonel; and Vietnamese men Trung, a Buddhist Vietcong double agent, and How, a Saigon businessman working with the Americans.

TOS has many great things about it. As those familiar with Johnson's work will attest, the prose is electric - engaging, energetic, fresh. The characters of the Houston brothers and Skip Sands stand out as especially strong, distinct, and moving. Brothers James and Bill are the typical down and out, edge of respectable society guys that Johnson is so good at bringing to life. Skip Sands also comes across well. He is an introspective man, educated, morally conscious. His struggle is the struggle of the nation, full of good intentions and patriotism, faith in God, etc, which all come under fire when confronted with ludicrous nature of the war.

TOS's main weakness is it tries to accomplish too much with too many different points of view. The result is too much expository writing, too much generalization. Overall Johnson grapples with many themes - religion, patriotism, horror, innocence, death. These are big issues, better dealt with obliquely, through the specificity of characters and their situations. As a result of generalization, many of the characters feel flat. Colonel Sands is a complete stock character taken right out of a mediocre movie. Lt Storm speaks like a bad television movie - "this is getting psychedelic, man!" The Vietnamese characters are never fully penetrated, and feel as though they are placed in the novel to provide some sort of balance to the American perspective. Kathy Jones only comes alive at the very end of the novel.

I found the book worth reading all the way through. The total perspective on the Vietnam War is nothing new, and in no way compares to classics like Herr's "Dispatches" or most of Tim O'Brien's oeuvre. There is a directionless to the book that I found frustrating, but flashes of greatness as well.

One word of note, the plot definitely picks up at the end, and I found the last third by far the best - so keep reading.

I just couldn't get into this book; I was real patient, trudging through more than 300 pages before I abandoned it. I felt characters were two dimensional; I felt no connection to them. Was there a plot in there? This is only about the 3rd book I've given up on in my life (I can be pretty obsessive!). I acknowledge that this was a literary work reviewed very favorably. Perhaps it was well crafted, it just was not for me. I'm glad others experienced great pleasure from reading it.

I got my first taste of this novel when I read a chapter published as the short story "1966" which appeared in the June 2007 fiction issue of The New Yorker. The story was typical of Johnson's prose in that it followed characters living on the edge of society, engaged in chaotic, painful lives, but describing everything as if it was nothing unusual. While such a rambling, bender-filled narrative can be tolerated and even enjoyed in short spurts, it starts to become untenable in a massive novel such as this.

Perhaps the most interesting character in the book is Colonel Francis X. Sands, a brash braggart who shuns military fatigues, and yet has incredible pull with almost all military branches-clandestine and not. The story, though, unfortunately focuses on Sands's nephew, Skip, who, fresh out of CIA training camp longs for action and slowly watches his sanity ebb in the trauma of war. Skip is not a character we sympathize with easily, and the rest of the cast meets our needs no better. The language, imagery, and authenticity of this story seem beyond reproach, but the pacing and narrative arc will most likely make you put this behemoth away before the choppers lift off from Saigon.

TREE OF SMOKE is yet another terrific Viet Nam novel, an anti-war novel, but it is more than that on its deepest level. It is written with great compassion about the condition of humanity.

The opening paragraph, noting the senseless death of one man (who happens to be President Kennedy), is beautifully juxtaposed with the sniping death of the monkey, and the mutual anguish of it. For senseless killing kills and kills the killer too. It is a karma entrenched in human history, a cycle that we cannot shake.

Not only are monkeys used literally and symbolically throughout the novel but the young American's Vietnamese counterpart, Trund, is nicknamed Monk, and double-meanings and allusions to Buddhism and Judeo-Christianity envelope the better angels of the novel's worldview.

Just as Joseph Heller's CATCH-22 was about World War II but read as an anti-Viet Nam War novel, this is a Viet Nam novel that can be read as an anti-Iraq War novel. The 'tree of smoke' in the title represents many things, among them the mushroom cloud of weapons of mass destruction and the fear of them used as both an excuse and a weapon.

Some critics have said that the 'tree of smoke' was imaginary, and I won't argue that (although President Nixon's secret plan to win the war was based upon this threat), but this is a novel, and its deeper meanings will resonate with readers in different ways.

TREE OF SMOKE's size might intimidate some, and it is over 600 pages, but it is big and fast, easy to read, a comfortable book to open and hold. The story keeps moving, and the pages fly by deceptively fast. There is a strong field of nominees for this year's National Book Award, but this one has to be my pick for its beautiful writing and its sense of compassion. An unforgettable novel.

Normally the average Amazon customer rating on a book matters to me lots and I am quicker to read the customer reviews than editorial reviews. But the relatively negative reaction to Tree of Smoke has left me perplexed. I've seen far far less powerful less well-written books get far better ratings.

I found Tree of Smoke extraordinary. To me it was a book that included unique, compelling characters; an exciting plot line (albeit certainly far from easy to understand); and outstanding writing used to describe generally terrible circumstances. I agree with reviewers suggesting the book reminds them of Heart of Darkness and Catch 22 - and believe it does so with remarkable originality and beauty

I think perhaps what made this book unappealing to many made it great literature and worthy of National Book award for me. There is no clear "hero" to the story and if there are any heroes (eg the Colonel??; the Houston brothers?? Skip Sands??) they are all really far from being your "prince charming types" (i.e all heavy boozers; all at rim of law etc). There is also no "happy ending". What there is is relentless tension from beginning to end, told from perspective of characters that remind me of what folks that were in Vietnam might actually have been thinking

I urge readers to try Tree of Smoke, but enjoying it requires tackling it with a "i am reading a complex allegory" mindset, not a "great summer read"

Really? National Book Award? Really? Although Johnson has captivating scene followed by captivating scene, the book as a whole is bloated and over-written. I kept waiting for the corner to be turned and for there to be a tremendous payoff, but I finally ran out of steam and did something I rarely do. I gave up after 500 pages. With slightly more than 100 pages to go, I simply lost my will to care. Johnson is attempting to put together a mosaic. He goes about it in the right way -- he selects beautiful tiles, in this case, interesting scenes and brilliant dialogue. But in stepping back from this impressive tome, I'm not sure he has fully accomplished what he set out to do: to look at all the complicated and confusing aspects of the Vietnam War and put them into a cohesive narrative. It was a worthy effort, but in the end, arguably, a failed attempt.

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.