I believed the hype. One of the dangers of being a train commuter is that, for a myriad of reasons -- your energy level, space in your bag, talker/cell phone annoyance, to name just a few -- you can find yourself reading and thinking more about news analysis and spin rather then the news itself. My dilemma is that despite all of the reading time the MBTA train ride from Ashland to Back Bay provides, there are always more books then I want to read then there is time to read them. Thus, I rely on book reviews to help me determine what is worthwhile.
Case in point: for a few weeks in the summer of 2007, all anyone could talk about was Denis Johnson's Tree of Smoke. I had never heard of Denis Johnson before, but from what I could gather, he was a great writer with a commanding style that he used to examine very bleak, personal stories about down and out protagonists. Until now: Tree of Smoke was said to be his Great American Novel, a generational-spanning Statement book was supposed to be about the Iraq via Vietnam in the same way that Gravity's Rainbow is about Vietnam via WWII. So said my usually reliable sources: the Boston Globe, the Boston Phoenix, and Harper's (subscription required). The National Book Award was mentioned. My ears perked up; this sounded like something to get excited about! Hell, the phrasings that were quoted in the Harpers review were electric, his fantastical phrasing appearing to tweak conventions while remaining open to, and even courting, the possibility of epiphanies. As John Jeremiah Sullivan writes in Harper's: "On the level of language alone, paragraphs sparkle with little amazements. The Colonel brings word that Skip's mother has died: "Palms up, he held the cablegram like a big delicate ash." A dog "attacked its privates with a volcanic, ecstatic grunt-music." A water buffalo extricates itself from a mud hole "like some geologic fact." A man "expelled a wad of tobacco from his mouth and it bounced on the pavement like a small turd."
So I was already prepared to snap it up the moment that the paperback version arrived in stores, but what sealed the deal was a typically snarky high-brow review from B.R. Myers in the Atlantic Monthly. (I was a big fan of the Atlantic Monthly back before they moved their entire staff to Washington D.C. and started writing exclusively about politics.) Mr. Myers has two main bones to pick with ToS. Firstly, he derides the lack of complexity and realism of the characters, spending several paragraphs picking apart Johnson's descriptions of them as being shallow before pronouncing "Anyone expecting a psychological novel from characters so lacking in complexity deserves to be disappointed." As a capper, he condemns the action "inauthentic", citing several example of scenes that he believes would never happen in real life (conveniently disregarding the fact that this is a work of fiction.) His second problem is with Johnson's writing itself, claiming that he has "no sense of style, of what words are right for a given context", again citing examples that, divorced from the book, seem to prove his point. He feels that the incongruous use of words, no matter what their magical effect, is wrong, because "There can be no deep thought without the proper use of words..." and extrapolates this out to a theory that the "rotting " of the "application of word to thing" has been contributing to the sorry state of America. He quotes Ezra Pound stating:
| The individual cannot think and communicate his thought, the governor and legislator cannot act effectively or frame his laws without words, and the solidity and validity of these words is in the care of the dammed and despised literati ... when their very medium, the very essence of their work, the application of word to thing goes rotten, i.e. becomes slushy and inexact, or excessive or bloated, the whole machinery of social and of individual thought and order goes to pot. |
Now, I have some quibbles with this line of thinking, for these are the very same people who decry postmodernism in all of its shapes and forms in favor of a unrelentingly sober realism. My first thought is that who defines the "application of word to thing"? For instance, what is poetry if not wringing unexpected meaning out of the unexpected conjunction of words -- see Wallace Stevens, for one example. And if not poets, why not prose writers? Why not novelists? This reductive view of literature by small-minded reviewers is one of the reasons I spend the time to write up my own reviews in the first place.
So, Mr. Myers review simply made me shake my head, laughing at how far the Atlantic Monthly has fallen, laughing at the stultifying imagined future of their book review section. (a while back, their major book review was of a re release of the P. G. Wodehouse books -- he of "Jeeves" fame. Now that's relevant.) Perversely, it got me even more fired up for the novel, because if a magazine whose opinion I respected so little didn't like the book, then it had to be good!
As I had read, I found the beginning to be exciting and pithy. Johnson's writing is indeed exciting, and there were many underlined passages in the first 75 pages or so. But my excitement started to wear away as I continued to read. Tree of Smoke is not exactly a thriller, and there are 50 pages at a stretch where you wonder what Johnson is trying to get at. Individual passages are entertaining, and many are masterful, but connected together as a whole, the story falls flat. With a few notable exceptions, Mr. Myers was correct when he stated that "not once does the reader feel fear or tension."
Starting to feel betrayed by my reviewers, I vowed to continue reading and to pay closer attention. However, this task was made all the more difficult because the close of the book is a real slog, mainly because I didn't really care about the characters. For example, towards the end, Johnson obviously wants Skip to be a character of pathos: his decisions have lead him to an awful situation, and one can recognize the formal mechanisms the author has set up for this to happen. But instead the scenes are cold; if there was anything that had attached me to him over the previous 300 or so pages, I would not have been devoid of the emotional connection you should have made with a protagonist by the end of a novel.
Which isn't to say that the book is all bad. On the contrary, there is much to enjoy in Tree of Smoke. Specifically, the beginning of the book, the Philippine scenes, the German assassin, and some of the Colonel's pontificating is fascinating. And in the scenes where he depicts directionless people with no place to go, you can really see how he earned his reputation. The main thing I took away from ToS is an appreciation for the magical way in which Johnson turns his phrases. It's these juxtaposition of words that, while not conforming to the narrow reality of what Mr. Myers expects out of his fiction, expands the perception of others.
However, as a whole, the book is a mess, and i'm amazed at the amount of reviewers that praised it so highly. It ended up winning a National Book Award, which is simply stunning to me, given how many times I was simply bored while reading it. Perhaps Mr. Myers was right when he writes: "... once we Americans have ushered a writer into the contemporary Parthenon, we will lie to ourselves to keep him there."
So I suppose the lesson here, once again, is to question everything. And don't write off the Atlantic Monthly completely.
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