All smoke; little fire

Having slogged through the swamp that is Tree of Smoke, Denis Johnson’s prodigeous novel of Vietnam, I am unfortunately confirmed in the judgment from my Feb. 24 posting. Johnson does a remarkably good job of seeing the world through the constricted first person narrator viewpoints of the various lowlife characters, many of whom apparently cannot think far beyond the world immediately before them. That’s a great talent for any writer, though he trashes the carefully wrought effect from time to time by injecting the omniscient narrator unexpectedly to no apparent purpose other than to jerk the reader out of the story and remind him that Denis Johnson is writing this book.

I’m sure the author would squirm to hear this, but this is a Pynchon-esque book in search of Thomas Pynchon. It is the book Pynchon could have written about Vietnam if he’d wanted to. That’s not necessarily to praise the book. Pynchon’s later books have been flabby at best. (I enjoyed Mason & Dixon better as a song by Mark Knopfler – the title song of the Sailing to Philadelphia CD – than in print.) But even his pallid later characters have a vigor that Johnson can’t seem to crank up in his personae. They approach the threshold of outrageously bizarre behavior and you think, “this time he’s going over the edge,” only to watch them fall back into the ordinary time after time, but not quite far enough to be ordinary realistic characters. They exist in a netherworld of smoke.