For someone who spends so much time comparing HBO’s The Wire to reading a great novel, it might sound odd to say that reading Denis Johnson’s Tree of Smoke is a lot like watching The Wire. There’s a huge cast of characters and the POV shifts constantly between them. The canvass is huge, Vietnam and environs from 63 through 70 and then a single skip ahead to 83, and roughly follows a wide variety of souls who get caught up in an effort to run an unauthorized psychological operation in the hopes of ending the war. A further plot summary would probably make it sound like a wartime spy thriller, and there’s that part of it, but it’s layered under ruminating and literary prose of a high order. The signposts of plot and action serve as guides, but the thrust of the story is how the various characters buy into their missions and how the futility of it all, even once recognized, destroys them. The edges of the puzzle pieces are vague in the beginning and how it will all fit together is far from clear. In the early going the reward is in the individual scenes, the thumbnails of characters as they are before they become wrapped up in things they can not escape.
For the airport reader the book demands faith and perseverance until the connections become more apparent, but it’s a worthy endeavor. I tend to judge the degree to which something is literary by weather or not I could get my girlfriend to read it. In this case, I’m guessing I could not. The emphasis on character exploration rather than plot progression in the early going would probably force her to put it down, which is a shame. Long after you forget the plot of a hundred other books, you’ll remember the people you meet in this one.
