1/12/08- Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson

I put off reading Denis Johnson's "Tree of Smoke" until I could allot it a substantial chunk of time. Totally unnecessary (the delay not the reading).



"Tree of Smoke" contains multiple storylines that span 20+ years of time and make full use of 600+ pages but the actions are not dense and the dialogue is natural.

It's dialogue strewn with references to some of my favorite authors (E.M. Cioran, Henry Miller, Georges Simenon, Graham Greene, etc). Dialogue that comes from characters who may be misdirected or waylaid by doubt, but who are rarely ignorant of their ways.

"Tree of Smoke" is a novel about a CIA Psy-Op agent in Vietnam. And what may or may not be an intelligence-gathering operation. But it's more about people then about plotting. People who do an awful lot of fucking, drinking, sweating and eating but who also have a spiritual hunger that's caused them to have done a lot of thinking.

Intense, everyday people who've turned to belief systems (Catholicism, Calvinism, Chinese medicine, the Muses, and the Four Truths of Buddhism among others) in an attempt to turn apprehension and experience into something noble. Or at least justifiable. Some succeed at this, more fail.

Historical references to Vietnam are present, but minimal. So minimal that what is described could have happened (or even BE happening) in just about any war.

EXHIBIT A
"Tree of Smoke-(pillar of smoke, pillar of fire) the 'guiding light' of a sincere goal for the function of intelligence-restoring intelligence-gathering as the main function of intelligence operations, rather than to provide rationalizations for policy. Because if we don't, the next step is for career-minded power-mad cynical jaded beaurocrats to use intelligence to influence policy. The final step is to create fictions and serve them to our policy-makers in order to control the direction of government." --Tree of Smoke (p254)

The first Denis Johnson novel I bought (Already Dead) I read twice because I had to figure out why I disliked it so much. The second (Resuscitation of a Hanged Man) I read twice because its notions of faith and hope stabbed me and I had to open the wounds again to see just how deeply I'd been cut. I'll read 'Tree of Smoke' again... knowing how it all ends might make it even better the second time around.