Tree of Smoke

[Dave Monroe]

Just a Shout Away
Tim Krause

I finished reading Denis Johnson's new novel, Tree of Smoke, a few
weeks ago, and I can't remember when I've been this elated at having
read a work of contemporary fiction, American or otherwise, nor can I
think of another work in recent memory that is so formally ambitious
and assured (not always the same thing), so knowledgeable and dense
with information, and so generous in its profusion of life – of
character, action, and locale, of plot and suspense, of fleeting joys
and of pity, terror, and fear – as this. Tree of Smoke is arguably
that stalking horse of critics and academics, the First Great American
Novel of the Twenty-First Century, and it is easily the first lengthy
work of American prose fiction to address seriously certain facets of
American life and culture in the new millennium. For while Tree of
Smoke is a historical novel, beginning in 1963 and largely treating
the actions of a group of Westerners, Americans, and others, during
the United States' involvement in the Vietnam War, it uses its
historical subject to address a set of shockingly contemporary
concerns, such as the feasibility, management, and long-term impact of
an increasingly disastrous foreign war of choice; the value of
gathering intelligence for military and political ends, including the
hermeneutic, epistemological, and bureaucratic obstacles facing the
pure, unfiltered use of intelligence as a policymaking tool; the
complexities of America's geopolitical position, the intricate
difficulties for Americans when navigating foreign cultures, and the
tendency for American power to dominate rather than to seek consensus;
the awesome scope and the steep limitations of American political,
economic, cultural, and military power; and, finally, the effects of
war on its victims, both on the battlefield and off. For, like one of
its predecessors in the genre of encyclopedic, postmodern American
novels, Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow (1973), Tree of Smoke's
vision of the atrocities of a previous war echoes the atrocities of
the present. Pynchon looked back to the chaos of World War Two as a
means of analyzing America's colonial brutalities in Vietnam, while
Johnson's nightmarish Vietnam eerily suggests America's fraught,
hazardous, bloody foray into the Second Iraq War and the larger
struggle of the so-called War on Terror....

http://gcadvocate.org/index.php?action=view&id=229

'Tree of Smoke' Wins National Book Award

http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5gIKp6SMKuAR1cD8M3gd3OePuyDbgD8SU5LV80

Tree of Smoke
A Novel
Denis Johnson

Farrar, Straus and Giroux
624 pages
Size: 6 x 9
$27.00
Hardcover

http://www.holtzbrinckpublishers.com/FSG/search/SearchBookDisplay.asp?BookKey=4737000

Excerpt

http://www.holtzbrinckpublishers.com/FSG/Book/BookDisplayExerpt.asp?BookKey=4737000