Category Archives: Literature

Tree of Smoke, by Denis Johnson

With the newest adaption of The Great Gatsby soon arriving at a silver screen near you, I’ve been interested to see various opinions of the novel appearing across the internet: it seems we agree that Gatsby is a great novel, but many of us didn’t enjoy it very much.

Denis Johnson’s Tree of Smoke—the 2007 National Book Award winner for fiction—may have given me a similar, Gatsby-esque experience.  Before Tree of Smoke, I’d read a tragicomic book called The Imperfectionists; I enjoyed reading it but regretted that I had.  Tree of Smoke is the opposite.

Could it be, however, that I’m only succumbing to the hubris inherent in wanting to enjoy important fiction?  Johnson’s tome has all of those telltale signs.  It won prestigious awards, ran on very long (700+ pages), lacked a coherent plot, jumped wildly between major characters and time periods, and ended with an irresolute sense of ennui.  Send in the clowns!

But not so fast.  There’s a difference between books that ridicule who we are (read: The Imperfectionists) and others that grieve over it.  The former type dehumanizes us, but the latter yields a quiet sobriety that brings us back to our better angels.  One of the characters in Tree of Smoke observes, “I know from experience that life is suffering, and that suffering comes from clinging to things that won’t stay.”  I find that to be a bitter axiom, but probably a true one.  Realistically, if our world is broken, what alternative do we have to clinging to things that won’t stay?  Better to cling and then lament than not to need at all.  Watching sports will only take us so far.

The Vietnam War provides the backdrop for the entirety of Tree of Smoke, although the novel is not really about the war.  Instead, Vietnam becomes a projection of our conflicted psychology that removes us farther and farther from our unified selves.  One soldier in the book wonders out loud, “It’s just stupid, man. Have you looked around yourself lately? This isn’t a war. It’s a disease. A plague.”  The late 20th century’s allegorical cave.

The main character of the book, to the extent that there is one, is Skip Sands, a CIA psy-ops agent whose role in the conflict becomes increasingly unclear.  Skip’s uncle, simply referred to as the “Colonel,” is a semi-rogue operative in the area; the novel begins with Skip serving his country by aiding him.  Soon after, Skip merely helps his uncle as the U.S.’s interests (whatever they might have been in Vietnam) recede from view, after which Skip finally serves no larger interests than his own.  (The “Tree of Smoke” itself is the Colonel’s master plan for spying against the Vietcong; however, although the Colonel calls the Tree of Smoke his “guiding light of a sincere goal for the function of intelligence,” the Tree of Smoke comes to represent the wisps of everything ambiguous about the war.)  The fascinating aspect of the arc of Skip’s moral decline is that he ends up crossing the line specifically because it doesn’t look like there is one.  None of us simply decides one day to be a monster; it grows on us.

Skip eventually is executed years following the Vietnam War for running guns throughout the far east.  Days before he faces his firing squad, he writes to an ex-girlfriend, “After I left Vietnam I quit working for the giant-size criminals I worked for when I knew you and started working for the medium size. Lousy hours and no fringe benefits, but the ethics are clearer. And the stakes are plain. You prosper until you’re caught. Then you lose everything.”  The author has already shown us, however, that Skip had lost everything long before he lost everything, even if (scarily) we’re not sure just when that first loss occurred.  Still, we cling to what won’t stay, and therefore we suffer for Skip while we avoid the mirror.

We encounter other people in Tree of Smoke, most notably two brothers who grew up in poverty in the Southwestern United States and are turned into savages by Vietnam, but the reality of death so thoroughly pervades the novel that it becomes a character in its own right.  (Remember how I said that this wasn’t a fun read?)  Often in Tree of Smoke’s jungles, death merges with the mud, the puddles, the humidity, the tangles.  “When death was around,” one grunt recalls, “you got right down to your soul.  These others felt it too.”  Maybe as a pastor I have to deal with death more frequently than most, but don’t we all feel death crowd in, at least sometimes?  We want to disagree with the Colonel who at one point warns his crew, “I tell you this sincerely: there’d better not be a man at this table who in any way fears death.  It’s all death anyway.”  But we’re listening to him.

The problem is not only that we can’t escape the seriousness of the question, but that somehow we know we shouldn’t.  The heaviness of the darkness is lost on most creatures, but not to us.  One person in Tree of Smoke stares out into evening and writes in his journal, “Night again, the insects are loud, the moths are killing themselves on the lamp.  Two hours ago I sat on the veranda looking out at the dusk, filled with envy for each living entity—bird, bug, blossom, reptile, tree, and vine—that doesn’t bear the burden of good and evil.”  We can try to drown out the tolling bells and the burden of good and evil, but it would be a less than human existence.  Hello, bug zapper.

Tree of Smoke ends strangely: it closes with Skip’s ex-girlfriend, who is just a minor character, stepping into center stage for the first time (after 700 pages!).  Perhaps Johnson’s focus straightforwardly shifts to her because she outlives all of the other actors in the novel.  The final sentences of the book portray a sense of desperation along with a concept previously unexplored in Tree of Smoke yet often conspicuous by the emphasis upon death as its photo-negative.  As the curtain falls, Johnson writes, “She sat in [a large group of people] thinking—someone here has cancer, someone has a broken heart, someone’s soul is lost, someone feels naked and foreign, thinks they once knew the way but can’t remember the way, feels stripped of armor and alone, there are people in this audience with broken bones, others whose bones will break sooner or later, people who’ve ruined their health, worshipped their own lies, spat on their dreams, turned their backs on their true beliefs, yes, yes, and all will be saved. All will be saved. All will be saved.”  Before these last words, who in Tree of Smoke said anything about being rescued?  But it’s another human question.

The Imperfectionists, Tom Rachman

It’s not often that reading a novel makes me angry—who gets mad at books?—but Tom Rachman’s The Imperfectionists made me angry.  While working through the book, I occasionally greatly enjoyed it, but it all curdled in the end.  The Imperfectionists caused me to wonder why I read fiction in the first place.  I watch movies, TV, and sports to escape, but those media plasticize me if I overdo it.  I swim in books to remember how to feel deeply, and The Imperfectionists only stirred me up like a bad Phillies game.

Set in the latter part of last decade, Rachman details the decline and fall of an English-speaking, International Herald Tribune-style newspaper (albeit without the New York Times backing) in Rome.  Various and mostly American expats shuffle around the deck in an effort to rescue some dignity while the vessel sinks, and Rachman relates the story of the paper through interlocking chapters that each focus on a different person from the news office.  (For this kind of structure, think Olive Kitteridge, A Visit from the Goon Squad, Cloud Atlas, etc.)  The characters in The Imperfectionists tend to be well articulated, and you’ll find nothing unpleasant about Rachman’s writing style.  However, most of the actors are quite petty and distasteful, which wouldn’t bother me, except that it doesn’t seem to bother Rachman, either.

Let’s read books about people’s lives falling apart—I prefer sad books to happy ones because they feel more real—but let’s agree that the disintegration of souls is something to lament, or else why note it in the first place.  From the publisher whose star falls with the demise of the paper to a foreign correspondent that writes increasingly empty pieces, The Imperfectionists depicts characters burning down their own wicks.  All well and good, but as I read through every person’s perfectly fitting collapse, an overall archness pervaded the novel in such a way the volume finally came across as an ironic tease.  (In order to keep readers from any lingering questions as to how completely these characters break down, a convenient summary list of the dramatis personae at the book’s conclusion supplies us with the disagreeable, off-camera denouements for each one.)  If too-perfect happy endings are trite, so are the immaculate sad ones.  Tragic novels, or even tragicomic ones like The Imperfectionists, require a measure of warmth and compassion for its characters or else it all just seems mean.  We appreciate the lovable drunks, but not the nasty boozers.

Case in point is a chapter in which the newspaper’s CFO fires one of her editors but believes that the fired editor doesn’t know that she herself gave the order.  The CFO then finds herself next to her ex-editor on a transatlantic flight in which his gentle manner and optimism about future job prospects attract her.  A naturally withdrawn divorcee, she over the course of the flight begins to imagine yielding herself to another in love for the first time in years.  After the flight, the two eventually drift to a hotel room stateside, and the former editor seduces the CFO until she sits naked on the side of the bed, beckoning for him.  Only then does his voice harden and he asks, “Why did you go and get me fired?  Explain me that.”  Chapter’s end.

I don’t dispute that we can be that bad, but only that we’re actually that good at being bad.  For the chapter about the CFO and the editor, if Rachman wants to demonstrate that a human being can’t fire another without consequences, I’d be interested to read that story, but not one where the comeuppance isn’t nearly as believable as the “crime.”  As the novel progresses and more lives dissipate—we read how crazy a crazy hoarder really is, about a man who can’t relate to people but whose canine best friend dog dies suddenly, and so on—I felt less and less sorry about what was lost, but more cheated: I prefer my nihilism less facile and tidy than The Imperfectionists.   Maybe the joke’s on me, but I get mad when I feel like I as a reader care more about the characters than the author.  I’m the one on the edge of the bed.

Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises
What a scoundrel, that Ernest Hemingway.  At least that’s what I think that many people think about him: Hemingway was a lush that had all the best times and travels, enjoyed more fun than anyone (except for the suicide part at the end), but was lucky enough to have won the cosmic lottery and received extraordinary gifts of prose that enabled the sun never to set upon his rambling, moveable feast.

Then the backlash: Hemingway was a lush, etc., but was lucky enough to trick everyone into believing that he had won the cosmic lottery and gained extraordinary gifts of prose, etc.  The Hemingway has no clothes.  On this contrarian view, Hemingway is only well regarded by his male readership because they wish they could be like him, and female readership with him.

Thank goodness for Words of Angehr, so that this whole mess will be sorted out once and for all.

This is my first Hemingway.  On the basis of The Sun Also Rises (1926), billed as his first masterpiece, is he a great writer?  The answer requires me to dip into Beatleology.  Ringo Starr, the drummer of the Fab Four, is considered one of the finest of the kind in rock and roll, and a distinctive one at that.  The problem is, Ringo apparently lacked some basic drumming skills for which he had to improvise alternate techniques that would hide his faults; these Starr cover-up moves were hailed as genius by legions and generations of imitators, although most of the imitators knew meat and potatoes drumming better than Ringo.  Sooooooooooo, is Ringo a great drummer?

Sure he is, and Ernest Hemingway is a great writer.  But not the greatest.  It’s his minimalist prose that makes some readers into true believers, and yes, Hemingway must have had bad experiences with adjectives when he was growing up.  The Sun Also Rises has a spare beauty of style that gives a toughness and clarity to its characters and narrative.  (I actually think West Texas is beautiful, so maybe I’ve been set up to be a Hemingway fan.)  At the same time, I suspect that his bag of writer’s tricks is smaller than some of his contemporaries’.  But hey, I’m beginning to really dig the Beatles.

Most importantly, however, the style of The Sun Also Rises serves the story magnificently.  A gang of disaffected, not-so-young-anymore Americans maraud around post-World War I Europe, looking for diversions as they hen-peck each other to death.  If that sounds a little bit nasty, it is.  The central axis of the novel is the doomed relationship between Jake, for whom a vaguely-described war injury has left him impotent, and Lady Ashley, whose beauty is failing ever so imperceptibly but inexorably.  This doomed, unconsummated affair attracts other “friends” that are animated by the sadnesses that spill over from Jake and Ashley.

Aside from Hemingway’s gifts as a writer, I’m glad I read The Sun Also Rises because despite (or perhaps because of) the meanness, the book is true.  I relate to Jake as he relishes the obvious anxiety of his friend Cohn:
At the station the train was late, and we sat on a baggage-truck and waited outside in the dark. I have never seen a man in civil life as nervous as Robert Cohn—nor as eager. I was enjoying it. It was lousy to enjoy it, but I felt lousy. Cohn had a wonderful quality of bringing out the worst in anybody.
We all have our Cohns, don’t we?

Still, Jake is honest enough to realize that the problem isn’t Cohn at all.  After Jake learns that Cohn and Ashley have become lovers, he ruminates,
Why I felt that impulse to devil him I do not know. Of course I do know. I was blind, unforgivingly jealous of what had happened to him. The fact that I took it as a matter of course did not alter that any. I certainly did hate him. I do not think I ever really hated him until he had that little spell of superiority at lunch. . .
Jake hates because he wants to.

I’ve heard people criticize Jake as facile and ill-formed, but in Jake, Hemingway comprehends the difficulty of staying hateful all the time and the inconsistency of the contrary.  It’s easier to dabble in genuine spite and then hide behind masks.  Later in the novel, at a dinner of the same crew that has occasionally savaged each other thus far, Jake relents: “There was much wine, an ignored tension, and a feeling of things coming that you could not prevent happening. Under the wine I lost the disgusted feeling and was happy. It seemed they were all such nice people.”

If only life were that simple, but Hemingway knows it’s not, which is why the book cuts as deeply as it does.  All of the characters in The Sun Also Rises end worse than they began—older, meaner, more dissolute—but at least they have the dignity to be sad about it, which is itself rather an act of courage.

W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz
Recently at church I remarked that to comprehend sadness requires great courage and resolve.  I admit that I’m often a coward, whether in relation to taking in the scope of the hurricane destruction of my hometown, New Orleans, the tsunami that brought havoc to Japan, or something like the Holocaust, the subject of W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz.  Too much.

Schindler’s List, another Holocaust remembrance, was a wonderful movie, but I only saw it once.  For all of the tragic beauty of the film, why would I endure witnessing panels from that genocide again?  So I’ve avoided Holocaust fiction, which is a large genre, for the same general reason.  Individual sadnesses seem easier to comprehend than mass ones.

I’m puzzled that I’ve now read a representative of Holocaust fiction—Sebald’s—but I suspect that Austerlitz itself gives the clue.  The title character of this novel—published here in translation from the German in 2001—is an old British academic strangely drawn to train stations.  One time, as Austerlitz wanders through a particular Paris depot, a sudden flashback overtakes him.  He vividly recalls sitting in the same area as a four year-old child waiting to be adopted by a childless Welsh couple.  Austerlitz has known that he was not native Welsh but had known very little of his previous life, where he was from and why he was given away.  The recognition of the Parisian train station, however, causes him to excavate his own past.  After psychologically torturous reconstructions, he finds his way back to the Czech Republic and to the now elderly nanny that long ago had set him on a train ultimately to Wales.  Austerlitz was Jewish, and as Hitler tightened his grip upon Eastern Europe, his parents spirited him away to safer shores; his father, an anti-Hitler agitator, was hunted down by the SS in occupied Paris, and his mother, a stage actress, perished in a concentration camp.

Before coming to understand his true identity and past, Austerlitz was a man haunted and distracted.  At the beginning of the novel, he tells a confidant “about the marks of pain which, as he said he well knew, trace countless fine lines through history.”   Full knowledge of his beginnings, however, turns this distant person into a devastated one:
In the end I was linked to other people only by certain forms of courtesy which I took to extremes and which I know today. . .  I observed not so much for the sake of their recipients as because they allowed me to ignore the fact that my life has always. . . been clouded by an unrelieved despair.
What a strange novel.  How strange of me to read it.

I know next to nothing about W. G. Sebald, who had enjoyed a long literary career but died before Austerlitz was released.  Why would he tell such a story?  Why does Austerlitz compulsively seek knowledge that will unravel him?  And less importantly but still interestingly for me (of course), why would I read such a book?  I think the answer is the same for all three questions, namely that human beings possess the peculiar quality of desiring ugly truths over pretty falsehoods.  At least the (sometimes) courageous ones do.  Why live if we don’t want to know?

Edna O’Brien, Saints and Sinner: Stories
During the falls of my freshman and sophomore years of high school, while then-athletes and soon-to-be couch potatoes banged into each other with football pads, I ran cross country instead.  Preferring the thoughtful elegance of basketball—my winter sport—to the pseudo-Darwinism of the gridiron anyway, I was glad to have passed on the sport of mules.  (Just kidding, you former football players and current couch potatoes, and could you please pass the French Onion dip?)

Still, I hated cross country.  It’s a great sport, builds character, separates the men from the boys (unless girls’ cross country), etc., but there sure was a lot of running involved.  Plus, cross country always began in August.  In New Orleans.  At 3.30pm.

Dave Rice was my cross country coach, and he was a great guy.  He lived right across the street from my school, had coached since the 19th century, and truly dedicated his life to generations of students.  Coach Rice also had a very peculiar command of the English language, as is the case with many New Orleanians.  One word that in particular sparked reaction occurred on days where instead of steady jogging, we’d do long series of sprinting, then jogging, then sprinting, then walking, the sprinting, then fainting, then sprinting, then “Clear!!!” [zap] “Clear!!!” [zap], then sprinting, then driving home.  On such days, we cowered before the prospect of certain exhaustion that leered before us, but the sheer despair that enveloped us was slightly ameliorated by the fact that Coach Rice called this sprint-stop-sprint routine “fartleks.”  “Fartlek” is pronounced just like it’s spelled, and we were astounded and delighted that “fartlek” was one word that Coach Rice nailed.  The spasmodic laughter that struck us 15 year-olds every time Coach Rice pronounced “fartlek” was thunderous.  “Time to do fartleks, boys!”  “Do what, Coach?”  “Fartleks!”  “I thought that was for Tuesdays?”  “No, today we’re fartleking!”  “Doing what?”  “Fartleks!”  “How long?” “One hour of fartleks!”  “By ourselves or together?”  Et cetera, for as long as we could put off the misery of interval training.  The roar of our laughter was only dampened by the sobering knowledge that we were wasting oxygen that would have come in very handy later on.

Adolescence aside, fartleks were excruciating.   You fully invest in an all-out run, exhausting yourself, but then you only have moments to recover before doing the same thing all over again.

I find reading short story collections to be like fartleks.  I can handle novels far more easily: they’re a leisurely jog with only gentle inclines, merciful slopes, steady pacing, then kick it up at the end.  Books of short stories, on the other hand, require me in the space of only a few pages to give myself over to a set of characters, a plot, and a setting that will soon end, and then I take a deep breath just for a moment before sprinting ahead into a completely different fictional world.  I’m spent many times over by the end of the work.

For all of my giggling and grousing about high school fartleks, however, I still do interval training every week or so when I jog in Tech Terrace Park.  Sure, there’s nothing as tiring, but regular jogging isn’t as exhilarating as fartleks, either.   I guess that’s why, despite the debilitating demands, I love to read short story collections.  (Life is short; read hard.)

Casting around for a book of short stories, I found Saints and Sinners: Stories, written by Edna O’Brien, a grande dame of Irish literature.  O’Brien has written many things, including the controversial-for-the-time The Country Girls in 1960, and is a master of Irish English.  (I would have loved to have overheard a conversation between her and Coach Rice.)  So many things came together to turn me into a homer for this volume: the short story genre itself, verdant prose, Irishness, a title that appealed to my hometown sensibilities and current vocation, Kindle friendly.  I’m in!  Saints and Sinners is wonderful.  I’m working through piecemeal John Cheever’s Pulitzer-winning short story compendium, and while it’s longer than Saints and Sinners, I’m not sure it’s better.

For starters, short stories are sour if they don’t get the details right.  Interestingly, I tend to believe that Irish writers in particular have an ear for the little things.  In “Send My Roots Rain,” a vignette about an aging single woman, with a boyfriend one night she “watched a video of Elvis that she had rented, sitting in her front room by a warm fire and drinking red wine from the good glasses.”  Now, Mrs. Siegel taught me in fifth grade that using the word “good” in fiction is banal, but the “good” in this O’Brien sentence is sublime.  We have here close third-person narration, in which the voice of the narrator approximates the perspective of the main character.  Consider, then, that rich people don’t differentiate between the “good” wine glasses and “bad” wine glasses.  It’s just wine glasses to them.  Ditto, actually, for the truly destitute: it’s just a glass, and be thankful you have one.  But imagine, however, a woman rich enough to have a couple of “good” wine glasses, yet poor enough to have to save them for special occasions, and aware enough to know that every time she enjoys a Cabernet there’s a choice to me made.  Envision this woman, as her boyfriend pops a video (Elvis, no less) into the VCR, being called to the couch just as she opens the cabinet and quickly calculates whether the evening will be a “good” glass or “bad” glass kind of night.   Picture the pathos and loneliness that must be woven into a life beset by such decisions.  Finally, understand that what took me three sentences to explain, O’Brien captures simply in “good.”

Another example of O’Brien’s mastery of detail: “Green Georgette” tells of an impoverished young girl who chances into a car ride with the wealthiest and gaudiest woman in town, whom the girl has always idolized from a distance.  Who else but a small girl in this type of situation would reflect, “I try to maneuver a seat in front of her, so that I can turn round and stare at her, and take note of her little habits and how often she swallows. She blinks with such languor”?  As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago at church, I’m still relatively new to the world of girls, but I know that if either of my daughters would as pre-teens be enraptured by a genteel lady, they alone and they in particular would notice the languor of her blinking.

Details aside, O’Brien likewise possesses a sure hand when it comes to place, as seemingly all Irish writers do.  (What is it about Ireland that makes Irish writers so Irish?) Strangely, though, Irish attachment to place seems to me consistently and deeply ambivalent.  One character in Saints and Sinners observes, “The odd thing was that you can be attached to a place, or a person, you don’t particularly like, and [I] put it down to mankind’s addiction to habit.”  I’ve never read an Irish fiction or poem that doesn’t say something like this.  At least from an outsider’s (read: my) perspective, the remarkable aspect of Ireland-as-place in the eyes of its natives is its givenness.  By contrast, seldom is Ireland a comfortable proposition, but neither is anyone else.  One person in “Shovel Kings” speaks of another, “He doesn’t belong in England, and ditto Ireland.”  Of course, the man in question is Irish.

Perhaps it’s this sense of unease yet connection to place that draws me to Irish literature.  Place-but-displacement is a profoundly Biblical idea.  Ireland may be wretched, but it’s home, except that it can’t be.  Ditto England, or America, or wherever.  In a fallen world, our connection to place always transmits with static, the clear signal just beyond any twist of the dial.  Most people in Saints and Sinners wrestle with this dialectic, and one even registers that ambivalence for place is actually a reaching for a better country: “Soon as I can walk I will set out.  To find another, like me.  We will recognize each other by the rosary of poppies and the speech of our eyes.  We, the defiled ones, in our thousands, scattered, trudging over the land, the petrified land, in search of a safe haven, if such a place exists.  Many and terrible are the roads that lead to home.”  It’s no coincidence that the woman voicing these words—the story is “Plunder”—has been sexually brutalized to death.  There must be a better place for us.

It takes some audacity to title a book Saints and Sinners; it’s pulpy to a fault, unless the meat of the book is anything but.  I’m glad that Edna O’Brien took the risk on a could-be-bad title.  I don’t know if she harbors any religious convictions, but that’s really beside the point; fittingly, Saints and Sinners through short fiction tells a meta-story of creation, fall, and redemption.  Truly we are sinners, and it’s a symptom of the disease that we may not even know it.  The tragic spinster of “Sinners” has died before her death, for “her heart had walled up a long time ago, she had forgotten the little things, the little pleasures, the give-and-take that is life.  She had even forgotten her own sins.”  This person is walking dead, and guilty.

Another story in Saints and Sinners ends with a vision of heaven.  In “My Two Mothers,” a middle aged-woman mourns the loss of her surrogate mother, but she experiences a grieving not untouched by hope.  She muses, “I wait for the dream that leads us beyond the ghastly white spittoon and the metal razor [of a hospital], to fields and meadows, up onto the mountain, that bluish realm, half earth, half sky, . . to begin our journey all over again, to live our lives as they should have been lived, happy, trusting, and free of shame.”  This is a universal longing and hope, I believe.

The tragedy, however, is that our hope of heaven is assailed by our own guilt and despair.  Can we ever somehow return and  live our lives as they should have been lived, and can we ourselves truly live as happy, trusting, and free of shame?  Is that possible, and—haunting to consider—would we even deserve it?  O’Brien answers these questions in a different story than “My Two Mothers,” as the answer must come from a different story, this time from “Black Flower.”  And could the answer come in anything but a prayer?  “How beautiful it would be if one of us could step forward and volunteer to become the warrior for others.  What a firmament of love ours would be.”