A Tree of Smoke

It's been a while again since I have talked about some of what I am reading. Currently at the top of the stack is the National Book Award winner, A Tree of Smoke by Denis Johnson. In short, which the book is not, the book is about the Vietnam War. Well, not so much about the war as about its inherent insanity. We are introduced to psychological operatives from the CIA, a couple of brothers from Phoenix, a missionary widow, and some Vietnamese whose allegiance we are not quite sure of.

In sections about each year of the war starting with the assassination of JFK we are carried into the whirlpool that defined a decade- and then some. Amazon.com says about the novel

It's crowded with the desperate people, always short of salvation, who are Johnson's specialty, but despite every temptation of the Vietnam dreamscape it is relentlessly sober in its attention to on-the-ground details and the gradations of psychology. Not one of its 614 pages lacks a sentence or an observation that could set you back on your heels.

It is an amazingly written book. The prose flows and, yes, each page has one of those sentences that make you stop in wonder that someone could think that up and make it fit. You get pulled into the whirlpool that is both the book and the war. The insanity of that war and those who played around with it for better or worse is at once intriguing and a stomach-turning wish that it weren't so true.

As I have said more often than not in these posts, truth is sometimes far too important to get lost in facts. This book proves it. It also proves that much of what we know is nothing more than that tree of smoke, a figment of imagination that takes reality and sucks all the life out of it while being nothing. Grief is the emotion of this book and it does it well. So well you are glad to get to the end- and wish it could go on forever.

Perhaps it does.