Tree of Smoke

[Richard Ryan]

Yikes - it doesn't get worse than that!  (Well it does, but worse
doesn't usually win major awards...) Reads like bad Robert Stone....

----- Original Message ----
From: Monte Davis <monte.davis at verizon.net>
To: Dave Monroe <against.the.dave at gmail.com>; Pynchon-l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Sunday, November 18, 2007 10:02:04 AM
Subject: RE: Tree of Smoke



> Tree  of Smoke is arguably that stalking horse of critics and 
> academics, the First Great American Novel of the Twenty-First 
> Century

No... please... no...

For another view, see B. R. Myers in the Atlantic, sampled at

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/prem/200712/vietnam

Myers doesn't often do much for me, but I had picked up Tree of Smoke
 in a
bookstore and put it down again in five minutes because the prose is
 <Roger
Fry mode on> painfully, mind-numbingly tin-eared.

"From all around came the ten thousand sounds of the jungle, as well as
 the
cries of gulls and the far-off surf, and if [Bill] stopped dead and
 listened
a minute, he could hear also the pulse snickering in the heat of his
 flesh,
and the creak of sweat in his ears."

 "Let's face it, our whole civilization is a layer of sediment. In the
 end
some mongrel barbarian wakes up in the morning and stands with one foot
 on a
rock and the other on the kicked-over vessel of Kennedy's eternal
 flame. And
that vessel is cold and dead, and that sonofabitch doesn't even know
 he's
standing on it. He's just taking a piss in the morning. When I get up
 in the
morning and step behind the tent to break wind and void my bladder,
 whose
grave am I pissing on?"

"Eight of the villagers attended, seven old men and someone's
 grandchild all
sitting in candlelight around the temple's centerpiece without a corpse
 to
look at, only a small crowd of bric-a-brac, mostly wooden Buddhas
 painted
gold."


Pulse snickering in heat? Crowd of bric-a-brac? Fasten your seatbelts:
apparently it's going to be a very badly written century.