http://biblioklept.org/2007/12/02/tree-of-smoke/ Wed, 15 Feb 2012 02:38:50 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.com/ http://biblioklept.org/2007/12/02/tree-of-smoke/#comment-6736 Mon, 01 Sep 2008 20:17:31 +0000 http://biblioklept.wordpress.com/2007/12/02/tree-of-smoke/#comment-6736 [...] My initial review of Tree of Smoke last year was really a review of Will Patton’s masterful audio-recording of the novel (I was reading Ulysses for graduate school at the time and simply did not have the time to read both). I loved the experience; Patton did a great job, and I found myself wholly addicted to the narrative. When the advance copy of Tree showed up in the mail earlier this week, I immediately re-read the coda of the book in a single sitting. I would say the measure of a great narrative is not its core, its climax, or its beginning, but how well the conclusion is able to deliver the promises established throughout the book. Tree of Smoke delivers, and its ending continues to haunt the reader well after the book has been set aside. Readers like Myers may not get the payoff–he claims that “Johnson’s failure to understand [his character's] faith is such that when he uses it to end the novel on an uplifting note, the reader feels nothing.” However, I hardly think that a watery Hallmark-word like “uplifting” properly connotes the weight, pathos, and sheer pain that Johnson conveys and addresses at the end of the book (Myers’s shallow diagnosis leads me to believe he merely skimmed the novel). Ethics of literary criticism aside, the real triumph of Tree of Smoke is simply that Johnson manages to comment in a new way on a subject that, by 2007, had been done to death. Who knew that we needed another story about the Vietnam War? Denis Johnson, apparently. Read the book for yourself. Very highly recommended. [...]

]]> http://biblioklept.org/2007/12/02/tree-of-smoke/#comment-5517 Thu, 06 Dec 2007 15:46:28 +0000 http://biblioklept.wordpress.com/2007/12/02/tree-of-smoke/#comment-5517 [...] Contact Tree of Smoke [...]

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