Pig Bodine where are you?

I understand from the reviews that Denis Johnson’s Vietnam novel Tree of Smoke isn’t very good. The characters are flat. There’s no plot. Some of the facts are wrong. I’m only a couple hundred pages into it, so that could all turn out to be true, but I have just finished reading Elizabeth Rubin’s cover story in the New York Times Magazine about Afghanistan and I’m seeing the same characters in the same settings doing and thinking the same things. It doesn’t take much imagination to put Johnson’s characters in Rubin’s report or vise versa. That doesn’t mean the book has anything new to say about Vietnam. I have read most of the other books, so I don’t expect to learn something new. But Johnson's characters have that self-unawareness that is so hard to portray and hard to understand, but is nonetheless true. Not just the fog of war, but the fog of life. A lot of the fog is self-induced either through organization (CIA/Military intelligence), drugs (your choice) or insanity.

Tree of Smoke has been compared with Catch 22. I don’t think it has such a profound message at Catch 22. It's more about the individual experiences of war and how people are kept in the dark or keep themselves in the dark about what's going on in their own lives.

I keep hoping Pig Bodine, the legendary sailor from Thomas Pynchon’s V, will come staggering out of a Saigon alley to slap one of these guys in the face. It would add a little much-needed humor. And also it would prove that Johnson understands how thin is the veil between delusion and clarity. Tree of Smoke is fundamentally surrealistic because the characters have such a severely constricted knowledge/awareness of themselves and the events going on around them, but it's never really just slap-dash weird the way Pynchon is.