Tree of Smoke
While I was reading Denis Johnson's flawed Vietnam epic, Tree of Smoke, I was telling people it was like Apocalypse Now in book form. Now that I've finished, I stand by that description. Like Apocalypse Now, the journey is great, but the ending goes a little off the rails (it even includes an embarrassing scene that may have been lifted directly from the movie). The first half of Tree of Smoke is fantastic. It includes one of the most amazing combat scenes I've ever read (the description of the Tet offensive is right up there with The Red Badge of Courage and the best scenes in The Killer Angels). But as things begin to unravel in the war, so do things in the book. Lesser characters come to the forefront for no apparent reason and main characters disappear abruptly. Not all of the characters make it out alive, but those that do are irrevocably damaged by their experiences.
Overall, a must read for fans of Johnson. If you've never read Johnson before, try Angels (a sort of sequel to Tree of Smoke now since one of the characters carries over in Angels) and Jesus' Son (one of my all-time favorite books) first.
Overall, a must read for fans of Johnson. If you've never read Johnson before, try Angels (a sort of sequel to Tree of Smoke now since one of the characters carries over in Angels) and Jesus' Son (one of my all-time favorite books) first.
posted by BayonneMike at 1:20 PM
2 Comments:
Huge fan of Johnson's Poetry. The way he can grasp the saddness and, it's like he feels it and then whatever words come out, even if they don't seem to make any sense at all, will completely immerse you in saddness...It's just beautiful and leaves me wanting to cry or scream or something.
OUR SADNESS
There’s a sadness about looking back when you get to the end:
a sadness that waits at the end of the street,
a cigarette that glows with the glow of sadness
and a cop in a yellow raincoat who says It’s late,
it’s late, it’s sadness.
And it’s a sadness what they’ve done to the women I loved:
they turned Julie into her own mother, and Ruthe--
and Ruthe I understand has been turned
into a sadness...
And when it comes time
for all of humanity to witness what it’s done
and every television is trained on the first people to see God and
they say
Houston,
we have ignition,
they won’t have ignition.
They’ll have a music of wet streets
and lonely bars where piano notes
follow themselves into a forest of pity and are lost.
They’ll have sadness.
They’ll have
sadness, sadness, sadness.
I so wanted to love "Tree of Smoke" (Jesus' Son also being one of my favorites) but I just didn't. Like his last full length novel, Almost Dead, it's disjointed and ultimately fails by being too broad.
That said, I still think he's a brilliant writer. Sometimes he's so beautiful and dead-on with his words, I'm stunned.
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