Finished Tree of Smoke
I much enjoyed it. (This is not about to be the most intellectual of posts on a long novel.) It’s so different, consuming 720 pages of Denis Johnson instead of his short, sizzling fictions of Jesus’ Son. It’s not.. um.. shapely, which is my criticism of a lot of these big extravigant novels (They can’t all be The Sot-Weed Factor, alas!) but it had several characters who, if not seeming to ever have clear motivations (hence perhaps some of the criticism this book had for failures in characterization), were tugging your heartstrings by the end. And why write people with clarity of motivation in the Vietnam War?
He left Jimmy Storm in such a strange place; he left others (Trung, Bill & James Houston) without conclusions, though I was intrigued to hear that Bill Houston was in Johnson’s 1983 debut novel, Angels, which makes Tree of Smoke in some ways an incredibly belated and expansive prequel. How much of this did Johnson know about Bill Houston 20+ years ago, I wonder? I’ll have to hunt up Angels and take a look!
