![]() ![]() Johnson’s earlier novels, about Americans in purgatory, waiting impatiently, even expectantly, for the coming apocalypse. ![]() It is a story about bad intelligence and military screw-ups and people who have lost their way, a story like so many of Mr. Though “Tree of Smoke” is hobbled by a plot that starts and stops and lurches wildly about, it’s a powerful story about the American experience in Vietnam, with unsettling echoes of the current American experience in Iraq. ![]() Johnson somehow manages to take these derivative elements and turn them into something highly original - and potent. ![]() Denis Johnson’s wildly ambitious new novel, “Tree of Smoke,” reads like a whacked-out, hallucinogenic variation on such whacked-out, hallucinogenic Vietnam classics as Francis Ford Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now,” Michael Herr’s “Dispatches,” Robert Stone’s “Dog Soldiers” and Stephen Wright’s “Meditations in Green.” It features a central character who comes to see himself as a combination of the Quiet American and the Ugly American, and another who comes across as a latter-day version of Kurtz in Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness.” ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |