In his earlier works he deals with monumental disillusion, cultural disgust, questing, and excess, in often highly poetical language. He has said that he wants to be understood as a Christian writer. Johnson might be considered late Beat, in the manner of post– On the Road Kerouac. Jesus’ Son, a sort of pilgrim’s regress into drink, drugs, and spiritual suffering, is talismanic for many of the baby-boom generation. His most celebrated works are Jesus’ Son, a collection of short stories, and Fiskadoro, a post-apocalyptic novel. He has a following, based partly, by my guess, on a certain attractive heedlessness in his prose. Merwin’s), plays, and journalism (he might be called a conflict journalist, given the locations he’s chosen to report from). Johnson has written six previous novels, three books of poetry (his work has been likened to W.S. And this novel arrives just as grotesque revisionist interpretations of the Vietnam War are brought to bear in the public discourse about our present bloody adventure in Iraq.
Like the war itself, Tree of Smoke delivers an intense experience of loss, shame, futility, confusion-all without benefit of editorializing. In Tree of Smoke, which has been in the making for ten years, Denis Johnson is engaged in a dead serious attempt fully to apprehend the whole dreadful business, and in his evocations of settings and events he demonstrates real authority. Vietnamese characters appear in the montage as well, most of them collaborationists of one sort or another. It’s unusual-a gripping yet essentially plotless novel consisting of intercut segments of the lives of people caught up in the war, concentrating on four American men and a Canadian woman. Tree of Smoke is an ambitious, long, dense, daunting novel sited at the heart of a great American evil, the Vietnam War.
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