Good morning and please listen to me: Denis Johnson is a true American
artist, and “Tree of Smoke” is a tremendous
book, a strange entertainment, very
long but very fast, a great whirly ride that starts out sad and gets sadder and
sadder, loops unpredictably out and around, and then lurches down so suddenly at
the very end that it will make your stomach flop. It comes with the armor and accouterments of a Major Novel: big historical theme (Vietnam), semi-mythical
cultural institution (military intelligence), long time span (1963-70, with a
coda set in 1983) and unreasonable length (614 pages), all of which would be
off-putting if this were not, in fact, a major novel, and if Johnson’s last big
book hadn’t been the small
collection of eccentric and addictive short stories
called “Jesus’ Son” (1992). “Tree of Smoke” is a soulful book, even a numinous
one (it’s dedicated “Again for H.P.” and I’ll bet you a bundle that stands for
“higher power”), and it ought to secure Johnson’s status as a revelatory for this
still new century — a prediction I voice confidently but reluctantly, and with a
little disappointment and dismay.Reluctantly, because Johnson has always been an elusive figure, one of the
last of the marginal masters. He’s not a recluse, but he’s not out humping his
ego, either: I’ve never read an interview with him (though I haven’t looked very
hard), or seen a picture of him that wasn’t on one of his book jackets. More
important, it has often seemed as if the books themselves — there have been six
novels, a book of short stories and one of plays, three volumes of poetry and a
collection of journalism — have bloomed spontaneously from the secret fissures
that crisscross Americana: jail cells, bad neighborhoods, bus stations, cheap
frame houses in the fields beyond the last streetlight. They’re full of deprived
souls in monstrous situations, hapless pilgrims on their way to their next
disaster. But unlike most books about the dispossessed, they’re original (how
strange it feels to use that word these days, but it fits), and what’s more,
deliriously beautiful — ravishing, painful; as desolate as Dostoyevsky, as
passionate and terrifying as Edgar Allan Poe.I spent a long time reading “Tree of Smoke,” and as I neared the end I found
myself wishing it were longer. The grief I mentioned above: there are very few
writers today who can get that on the page, and our literature is tepid without
it. Epiphanies occur in almost every book, but a credible apocalypse is much
harder to find. And a little redemption in the last chapter is so common that
it’s barely noticeable; but how many books can really convey what it means to be
lost, let alone, as this one does, what it might mean to be
found?GET THIS BOOK FREE.BUY SELL RENT BOOKS FROM THE LINK BELOW.