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.

Teaching college students can be depressing. It’s the end of the semester and I am already hearing a shocking array of excuses for why work is not being handed in and class not being attended (my favorites so far have included a severed thumb, a dead rabbit and a dream involving a paint factory) and I am starting to refer students to the MP-YP scene in Boogie Nights. They seem at times like a generation mired in excuses.

And yes they can often seem a generation mired in itself as well. Several times, in my memoir class, I have had students (usually the same ones) ask me of the reading we are doing: Why should I care about this person? The person in question being Nabokov and Paula Fox and most recently, Robert Graves, whose autobiography, Goodbye To All That, left some of them gobsmacked. Graves was, after all, describing events of almost one hundred years ago. But hearing that something “doesn’t speak to my experience” is depressing in a college setting (where I thought you went to learn about others’ experiences), especially when coming from aspiring writers (who are supposed to be curious about all manner of experience). Forget about the fact that the aftershocks of WWI are still being felt today: in the Balkans, the Middle East, the arts, psychology…

So I asked those students to come up with some ideas for what might be their WWI; what event could have the same effect on their generation that the Great War did on the Lost Generation? And the answers were surprising. Yes, at least one mentioned 9.11 and the events that followed, the endless war. But more mentioned some form of global apocalypse (climate change, vanishing resources) while the number two candidate for chief concern/generation shaping event was…isolation.

This might surprise any parent of a teenager (and most of my students are just leaving Teendom) who think this is a different kind of lost generation — lost in iPods, cell phones, laptops. The good news, I guess, is that many are aware of it and hate that the ideal of unification, of some shared experience, has been lost to forms of endless self-expression and self-reference. The feeling I had was that the two concerns — apocalypse now and ostrich defense — were related and some are dying to lift their heads up, even if they are afraid of smelling the smoke.

I picked up a book entitled My First Movie: 20 Celebrated Directors Talk About Their First Film and on the first page found the Coen brothers reminiscing about their early education in film: a local TV program that featured Fellini films beside Roman sandal movies like Son of Hercules. This was followed by college, specifically the film society at the University of Minnesota “that showed the kind of stuff you wouldn’t normally be exposed to,” said Joel: “Godard and the Marx Brothers — who were both kind of hip at the time.”

“I guess that doesn’t exist any more,” Ethan added. “But for a period people would show black and white 16mm prints on some crappy projector in a basement in the university building somewhere. I guess video ended that.”

Do we value those early movie experiences more because of how hard it was to have them? I’m still trying to get used to the idea that everything is available all the time, thanks to the internet. I can’t quite imagine what it’s like growing up with the idea that I can have/see/listen to anything just by Googling the title, or going to Netflix. (Though don’t bother searching for “Son of Hercules” — there were a million Steve Reeves movies with something like that in the title and I think JC meant the name to stand in for all such body-building, history-bending epics.)

When I was a senior in high school, attending a “free school” in Auburn, California, my English teacher told me that if Truffaut’s Stolen Kisses was ever playing anywhere (the campus at UC Davis, say, or one of the art house cinemas in San Francisco) I would have to drop everything and go. And not long after that I did: I can’t remember if I hitchhiked to SF (three hours) or took a bus, but I went to the Cento Cedar cinema on Polk Street and saw Stolen Kisses on a double bill with the 400 Blows. And then hitchhiked home…

I wonder now if my English teacher had wanted me to see the film (in which Jean Pierre Leaud plays an older version of the kid in 400 Blows, a young man with female trouble) because he was encouraging me to cheat on my girlfriend (we all have ulterior motives) or he was just trying to give some direction to my rather directionless life. The ultimate message of Truffaut’s romance (maybe all Truffaut romances) is of the carpe diem variety: All kisses, all love, are stolen from death. Get it while you can.

That’s a good thing to hear when you’re 17 (hell, that’s a good thing to be reminded of when you’re 67) but I wonder if the lesson was all the more memorable for me because I had to stand on an off-ramp in the rain just for the privilege of hearing it. Would it be the same, watching in on my iPod while instant-messaging my friends?

Please promise to kill me before I become a grumpy old man.

Watching the candidates arrive at the Democratic presidential debate in Las Vegas was a reminder of how debased the political process has become since Mailer’s time. If you’ve never seen the Nixon-Kennedy debates you’ll be surprised not by Nixon’s five-o’clock shadow but the detailed, substantial and sound-bite free answers of both candidates. Watching this gang of hopefuls try to hit the right notes, without saying anything that could be offensive to anyone, was like watching Wolf Blitzer try to herd cats.

After a cheesy advance job that treated the debate like a sporting event (with all the commentators agreeing that Hillary had to get tough) the leading lady came out with some scripted gag about her pantsuit being asbestos. Then she was asked about her iinability to give a straight answer to almost any question (the “politics of parsing”), and answered with bland boilerplate about the American people. Everyone talks about the American people as if they were a coherent mass, one that tunes into CNN when they could be watching House or reruns of Mad Men.

“The American people don’t give a darn about any of this stuff,” Joe Biden declared. Jobs, drug dealers in the hood, soldiers in Iraq — these are the sorts of things Americans are worrying about. Chris Dodd said “There is a shrillness to the debate,” though I found it more fuzzy than shrill.

There were a few surprises. Bill Richardson, when speaking of the looming energy crisis, actually mentioned those American people making sacrfices. And Dennis Kucinich sometimes sounds like the sanest person in the room, as when he said he voted against the Patriot Act “because I read it.” (And yes, he has the hottest wife too.)

But it was mostly a bloodless affair. Hillary Clinton is the kind of person who talks about being excited without ever actually seeming that way. The curse of the front runner, the presumptive candidate, is that she cannot risk seeming too lifelike. No one needs to worry about their make-up anymore. Everyone looks fine, if fainter despite all the color.

News of Norman Mailer’s death greeted me this morning as I went trawling for reports related to my wife’s new job. ( I don’t believe that Mailer ever appeared in the pages of Reader’s Digest, though I could be wrong.) I’ve written far too many obituaries in this space but most of the famous dead people I have known or seen have been younger, often dead for no good reason. Mailer was 84 and by anybody’s measuring had lived a very full life.

I remember being a freshman in high school and carrying around a copy of Cannibals and Christians, hoping to impress somebody in Auburn, California. I couldn’t make head nor tails of much of it, being unfamiliar with most of the writers and politicians he was lancing within its pages, but I do remember reading a rather combative interview he conducted with himself and thinking, “I didn’t know you could do that!”

Years later I could always start a brawl in San Francisco just by mentioning that I liked some of his books and his pugnacious attitude. I was living with some hippies in the Haight and they had a long list of things posted in the kitchen that you weren’t supposed to buy at the store (Nestles products, Del Monte, Dupont, other fascist brands) and I think there was an invisible list somewhere of writers we weren’t supposed to read, either. Mailer was on top of that list, largely because of attitude towards women’s liberation and his prejudices against homosexuality.

But what I admired was the way he confronted his critics — broken bottle in one hand, a lit cigarette in the other — that often showed a greater sense of humor than that of his enemies. When his second novel was excoriated by critics he took out a full page ad in the New York Times trumpeting the negative reviews (“A bunch of bums!” — Bosley Crowther). He criticized the Broadway production of Waiting for Godot before he actually saw it in his column in the Village Voice. After seeing the production, and being knocked out, he rode downtown in the back of a cab and glumly acknowledged his wife of the moment when she said, “Baby, you blew it.” He took another full page out (this in the Voice, I believe) saying how wrong he was and how great was Beckett.

I have forced my students to read Armies of the Night, and tried to show them how brave it was to allow yourself to look like such a fool, as he does through most of his weekend in Washington. And how getting yourself arrested to aid the nascent anti-war cause, doubly difficult for a member of the “greatest generation” who served in the South Pacific during WWII, when you could be enjoying a nice cocktail party back in Manhattan, was an act of courage of Thoreau-like proportions. He may have been cross-eyed at times but he had vision: he could look out across a political rally for JFK and see America’s past, back to the buffalo on the plain, as clearly as he saw the winos in the park gaping at the prince. And he didn’t need drugs to do it (though he didn’t mind them when he found them).

When we moved to Brooklyn Heights in the early nineties I used to spy him occasionally near the Promenade. He complained when the old coffee shop on Montague and Hicks became a modern yuppie brunch place, with five dollar cappucinos, and seemed to perpetually scowl.

Peg and I ran into him one night when we were leaving a friend’s apartment next door to his house on Columbia Heights. It was raining sideways, gale force winds blowing water up under out umbrellas and coats as we ran like babies from the storm. And there came Mailer: no umbrella, no coat, soaked to the skin, looking like some cross between Picasso and Popeye, and he was frowning at us in our discombobulation. He was vanishing breed, like those buffalo, and we will not see his like again.