I finally managed to read Denis Johnson’s National Book Award winner Tree of Smoke.  Though I’ve long been an admirer of Jesus’ Son, really a collection of related short stories, I’ve never found the same power in any of his novels (I believe I’ve read them all except for Angels).  I like them fine, actually, but none really hit me in the gut the way Jesus’ Son did.  So all the hub-bub and awards really raised my expectations for Tree of Smoke.  I’m sorry to say after lugging the brick-like 600+ page British paperback edition of the novel around for over a week, this one didn’t quite do the job either.

It has been a long time since I’ve read any work of fiction where I had a hard time distinguishing among the characters.  There are many here, and a number of them here just kind of melded together for me.  There was no cohesive plot to carry me through those 600 pages (that’s fine, but there wasn’t much else carrying me either).  And as true as they might be, there were also just too many Vietnam cliches here (the whores, the crazy Colonel, the rogue soldier going native, the self-destructive vet…you get the idea).

Some positives:

Kathy, a somewhat imbalanced Canadian nurse, is probably the best female character Johnson has ever written.  They’ve been a weakness of his, but this one really works for me and is my favorite character in the book.  It takes a while, but she really grows into a very original and very real figure.

Then there are just those fragments of truly inspired writing.  There aren’t as many as there should be but there were enough to get me to the end.  My favorite was the last sentence of this section:

He worried about his mother.  She didn’t make much money at the ranch.  She exhausted herself.  She’d grown thinner, knobbier.  She spent the first half of every Sunday at the Faith Tabernacle, and every Saturday afternoon she drove a hundred miles to the prison in Florence to see her common-law-husband…Whenever he mentioned enlisting in the service, she seemed willing to sign the papers, but if he left her now, how would it all turn out for her?  She had nothing in this world but her two hands and her crazy love for Jesus, who seemed, for his part, never to have heard of her.

Johnson is always at his best in down-and-out America.  As for Nam Lit, I think I’m pretty much satiated by Tim O’Brien’s Going After Cacciato and Graham Greene’s The Quiet American.  Roger that.

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