I just got back from vacation in Rome, having done the old house swap routine again, which afforded me the opportunity to finallly read Denis Johnson’s new novel Tree of Smoke. My friend Jess had given it to me for my birthday, two months ago now, and there it sat by my bed, all 624 pages of it, waiting for the kind of time that only travel and jet lag allows.
Tree of Smoke is, as you have probably read, a novel about Vietnam, though that seems like a rather paltry description, like saying Anna Karenina is novel about a woman having an affair. Not that Johnson is a Tolstoy, or that he even has that much affinity for the Russians. But like the Count, and his dark sibling Dostoevsky, he is interested less in the surface of things (this world and its evils) than the people who struggle for grace in the grip of it. I won’t bore you with a detailed account except to say that the war is seen through the experiences of a host of individuals — a CIA operative, a couple of soldiers, a woman missionary who has lost her faith, a VC soldier who becomes a double agent — and that gives even the most jaded reader of Vietnam books some fresh perspectives. (The Tet Offensive of 1968, for instance, is seen from multiple perspectives and the overall effect is like looking into both sides of a fractured mirror.) There are some passages I would like to read again for fun, some just to see how he pulled them off, and some that I would like to memorize to read at a funeral.
Because death is both booby prize and ultimate gift in this book. As in his first novel Angels, Johnson makes room for the misbeggotten, men whose roads seem marked for a shallow grave almost from the beginning. In that book a man on death row sees a line from a Wallace Stevens’ poem written (rather improbably) in the gas chamber: “Death is the mother of all beauty.” In Tree of Smoke, tortured souls torture themselves (and sometimes, literally, other people) in search of fun or freedom or the face of God, which appears, and disappears, in many guises. By the book’s end I was reminded of another writer’s story: Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard To Find.” That bit of comic grotesquery ends when an escaped convict called The Misfit murders a grandma who won’t shut up:
“She would have been a good woman,” The Misfit said, “if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.”
“Some fun!” Bobby Lee said.
“Shut up, Bobby Lee,” The Misfit said. “It’s no real pleasure in life.”
Like O’Connor, Johnson is a Catholic; he converted late in life, after overcoming the alcoholism and addictions that color the characters of many of his works (the central figure of Jesus’ Son, known chiefly as Fuckhead, is a DJ stand-in; his arch from delirium to recovery mirrors the writer’s own). IIn that sense, Rome was actually the perfect place to read Tree of Smoke; much of the imagery is Biblical and angels and demons get their turns at bat.
I gather from press reports that Johnson doesn’t give many interviews these days, so I feel doubly blessed to have been able to spend a few days with him about 20 years ago, after the publication of his third book, The Stars At Noon . I asked him then about Catholicism, and the whole hell thing. “There is a hell,” he told me, “and we can go there all the time. I’ve been there by total selfishness.” His answer weighed on my soul; it was years before I confronted my own alcoholism and the story I wrote (for the Sunday magaine of the SF Examiner) resonated in other ways. It was the only story of mine that my father — a troubled soul and failed writer who took his own life — ever praised.
I have no idea if Johnson liked the story. It had one of those stupid coverlines — “The Soul of a Young Writer” — that some editor must have signed off on but that looks, in retrospect, like the kind of message you write with refrigerator magnets. For all I know my story was what convinced him to stop talking to the press. But it brought me into his world, in many senses, and it’s one I have been happy as hell to return to.