Tree of Smoke

Denis Johnson's National Book Award winner should be another worthy addition to the canon of literature written about the Vietnam "conflict." (isn't that a hypocritical euphemism?) I'm afraid, though, that it won't reach the audience it deserves because it is just so unrelentingly dense. At well over 600 pages it becomes as daunting as that other tome, A Bright Shining Lie. I've been valiantly listening to Tree of Smoke in my car for several weeks now and at half way through I've given up the ghost. Plus, I received another novel from Library Journal Thursday and have 10 days to read it and write the review. Since it's by one of my favorite authors, Francine Prose, I'm all over it right now.

The trouble is that I really was enjoying Johnson's book even as I was losing patience with it. One of the characters, Kathy Jones, a widow and supposed missionary to Southeast Asia, shares her name with my dear buddy and college roommate. Every time I heard the name I thought, I should be at Doc's having a burger with Cath instead of riding around making up errands just so I can listen to this damn book! Now I realize that Smoke is probably one of those books that really does need to be read and savored. I will likely go back to it and finish it the old fashioned way. I've read a couple of not so flattering reviews about the book, the biggest criticism being that the characters are too one-dimensional. Interesting that, because I also found them inscrutable, but I thought it was the author's purpose to pen them that way. After all, the entire war was inscrutable from my viewpoint and the sense of distrust among the characters seemed absolutely correct. No one knew who the enemy really was or even if there was one!

At the center of the story is Skip Sands, a CIA agent whose mission and cover seem to be known to everyone except him. Brought into this mess by his uncle, known only as The Colonel, Sands meets and falls in love with Kathy who seems to be the conscience of the book. There are South Vietnamese who don't know which side to take for the safety of their families, North Vietnamese spies and two brothers from the midwest, one more naive than the other, believing at first that they really are there to save the world from communism. Behind it all is the sad history of the turbulent '60's and '70's, beginning with the assassination of JFK, the civil rights and antiwar movements, more assassinations and the final outcome. Here we are 40-some years later and we haven't learned a thing.

I have several other books I'm reading/listening to but Don tells me (kindly) that my posts are sometimes too long so I'll sign out for now and go see how Barack is doing in Guam. Meanwhile if any of my friends out there know how to post to a blog with just one paragraph and give the reader the choice of clicking to continue, I'd like to know how to do that. Then the challenge for me would be to keep you reading!