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• W948873224 abstract "In epilogue to Denis Johnson's Tree of Smoke, which won 2007 National Book Award for fiction, William Skip Sands, former CIA Psy Ops agent engaged against Vietcong, but by 1983 awaiting execution Malaysian prison on gun-running conviction, writes letter to his lover from his days country, Kathy Jones, who presently works for refugee relief agency Minnesota, saying, If I had to I wouldn't run (610). These are Skip's last words novel, and while he's likely referring to his own increasingly-chaotic and morally-conflicted experiences while Southeast Asia--first Philippines, and then Vietnam during late '60s--that impetus to do again, or to repeat/revisit past, here ternis not just of recent historical past of Vietnam War, but that whole (and one would think already quite complete) sub-genre of narratives (novels, films, non-fiction accounts, etc.) which that event spawned (from Stone's Dog Soldiers to O'Brien's Things They Carried, from Coppola's Apocalypse Now to Kubrick's Full-Metal Jacket), seems also to inform Johnson's recent production. Hence, this begs question (as some initial reviewers of Tree of Smoke did, notably those who panned for what they saw as its derivative, over-done nature): we really need yet another big book (this one runs whopping 614 pages) Vietnam and our doomed adventure there? Well, no, and yes. While Tree of Smoke encompasses dizzying array of characters (some whose contours become so blurred it's hard to distinguish them at all), labyrinthine plot that stretches chronologically from death of JFK to Reagan '80s, hallucinatory prose style that seems to mimic sensually jungle fever of its setting, and pastiche of inter/meta-textual allusions to its literary and cinematic predecessors, Johnson's novel nevertheless takes Vietnam story to proverbial end of road, and then beyond such into an at least metaphorically post-apocalyptic historical or societal milieu. That is, as critic Todd Gitlin puts reference to such postmodern American novels and their cultural contexts, such recombinant fictions like Tree of Smoke reflect kind of anticipatoiy shell-shock. It's as if bomb has already fallen (36). And perhaps has---for Tree's characters (like Skip; Col. Francis X. Sands, his legendary uncle; Kath Bill & James Houston; and Jimmy Storm, to cite just few of principals), and certainly following their respective war-era lives and times, exhibit a passive adaptation to feeling historically stranded--after 1960s, but before what? Perhaps bomb ... (Gitlin 36). Or, as one reviewer claims, the apocalypse is more often personal than planetary (Connors 253) for Johnson's characters, and it's how they manage to live after The End that Tree best charts. Thus, Johnson's book, albeit treading some old, trampled, even defoliated ground, is ultimately less Vietnam than is of aftermath or psychological and emotional fallout that afflicts those who survived it, those on periphery of it, and those left to chronicle our own post-historical present--and with that it holding some particularly-resonant parallels to or unsettling echoes of current American [debacle] Iraq (see Kakutani E.25). One reviewer of Tree of Smoke, commenting on its large-scale narrative effects, which include compressing long stretches of time into single paragraph, or masking crucial events impregnable lacuna, asks us to [i]magine Don DeLillo and Joseph Heller fused (Poole 53) same book. reference to latter novelist seems particularly relevant, since like Heller's Catch-22 (1961) is less World War II than unreal reality or frightening rationality (Pratt 298, 299) of Vietnam War that prefigures, Johnson's Tree of Smoke is less about Vietnam, or in only very superficial sense (Beck 86), than an ominous look forward into post-apocalyptic landscape, both regional and global, toward millennium's end. …" @default.
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• W948873224 date "2012-09-22" @default.
• W948873224 modified "2023-09-23" @default.
• W948873224 title "Apocalypse Now, & Again: Johnson's Tree of Smoke and the Vietnam War Narrative Revisited" @default.
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