Not precisely a wild boar, but it presented itself as something to be looked at, clinging by its left hand and both feet to the tree’s trunk and digging at the thin rind with an air of tiny, exasperated haste. Now he saw that it was some sort of monkey, not much bigger than a Chihuahua dog. He kept his vision on the spot where he’d seen it among the branches of a rubber tree, putting his hand out for the rifle without altering the direction of his gaze. This is our introduction to the book’s hero, Seaman William Houston, who is wandering alone through a jungle looking to shoot a wild boar.

I might have never persevered with Tree of Smoke if it weren’t for the knockout scene at the very beginning of the book, which I like so much that it’s a pleasure to type it in full here. I have never liked a Denis Johnson book before, not even his slim Jesus’s Son, which felt a little too stylishly “heroin-chic” for my tastes. The plot is easy enough to follow, the prose is clear and unpretentious, and the author’s compassion for his characters gives the stark war story an uncanny human glow. This puts me in a funny position, because I’m usually all too eager to pile on the hate when a long and incomprehensible novel is over-praised, and yet I am not having a similar experience at all with Tree of Smoke (though I must confess that I have still not finished the book). Karen Karbo cited the thick 624-pager to Galley Cat as an example of “brick-lit”, and Otto Penzler refers to it in the New York Sun as “impenetrable, disjointed, confusing, structurally inept, and filled with characters as well-defined as phantasms”. The well-reviewed Tree of Smoke has been generating a bit of backlash lately. I’ll be dressing up for the occasion (which proves that I’m excited, because it takes a lot to get me to dress up) and I’ll be rooting for David Kirby’s The House on Boulevard Street to win the poetry award and Denis Johnson’s Tree of Smoke to win the fiction award. I’m excited to be attending the National Book Awards ceremony this Wednesday evening in New York City, along with a few other bloggers who will be providing reports in formats ranging from high-tech real-time ( that’s Ed) to low-tech whenever-I-get-around-to-it time (that’s me).

Tree of smoke by denis johnson