Tree of Smoke - Denis Johnson

Denis Johnson (1949-)

This book is not on the list, but since I'm in love with Denis Johnson, and it's November...I decided to take a short break from the list and read actual good books for a change and as always Denis Johnson does not disappoint.

Tree of Smoke encompasses 20 years around the aftermath of the Vietnam war, beginning with the assassination of JFK and ending in 1983 where the casualties of the war still limp from place to place, soul searching for a sense of meaning in a wanderlust that leads his characters to be forever pilgrims in a heartbreaking world of chaos.

The book focuses on the the elusive and shattering experience of a war without meaning on the many lives it engulfs, heroes that begin their trek with a sense of purpose and order only to come up against a world impervious to order and hostile to meaning.

Skip Sands, an officer of sorts for the CIA has become the renegade operative following orders from his strange and erratic uncle, a Kurtz type from Conrad's Heart of Darkness, creating his own rules and running his own missions. Tree of Smoke is his mission of disinformation that he intends to unleash on the VC, but in a land where all information is suspect, where there are no rules nor understanding of protocol, his disinformation only serves to make the murky haze of any sort of substantial truth even harder to find as the swirling disinformation traps them all in a quagmire of uncertainty.

James Houston and his brother Bill both enlist. Both anticipating the glory that still resonates from the last great war, both finding instead a world that crushes them stripping them of their souls. Bill gets out as soon as possible only to find himself aimless, lost in the do-nothing streets of Arizona, while James becomes addicted to Vietnam signing up for one tour after another, requesting assignment with the more fringe battalions where there are even less rules and where they operate in a system of cowboy survival.

Kathy Jones is a nurse in a small Vietnamese village, struggling with her faith, struggling with the hopelessness of loss, struggling with the stench that invades everything the smell of blood and offal and the inescapable pain and heartache of an endlessly torched world without a savior.  After Tet, she makes her way to a veterinary clinic in hopes of finding medication for the now many displaced and orphaned children only to find the proprietors overcome with grief over the loss of their monkeys. As they sit surrounded by devastation the scientists reminisce about their monkeys while children in the streets are dying. Kathy, a stoic, a survivor continues to nurse men, women and children in one Vietnamese hamlet after another, waiting for the end of the war.

By 1983, not one of the many characters has remained fully intact. The shrapnel of Vietnam has penetrated their souls and bones to the very marrow, leaving empty shadow people to make sense of their lives and pick up the pieces over and over again. Just as there was no definitive winner to the war, there is also no definitive end; the war is carried with the survivors, ruminated like cud, never to be fully digested.

"She sat in the audience 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, worshiped 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."

Ethan Frome - Edith Wharton

Edith Wharton (1862-1937)

So the other day I was going through my Western Canon list, lovingly looking at all the crossed off books, fondly rereading or attempting to read my notes in my almost indecipherably small handwriting (which I use to compensate for my abysmal spelling) when I came across a blank spot...how had I managed to not actually read Ethan Frome? So I grabbed a copy from the library and sat down to what would be an anticipated horrible time.

I guess I have avoided Ethan Frome because the spoiler is bandied about by just about everyone. Why would I want to read a book about a botched suicide that takes place in the silent snowdrifts of New England? Well I wouldn't really, but it's on the list so here it goes.

This book, as expected, was my least favorite of Wharton's novels, although her novels tend to be depressing, fraught with the societal restrictions and conventions that must always keep her heroes and heroines struggling against insurmountable odds,  impoverished and hopelessly misunderstood...this novel or "nouvelle" as she called it was her attempt to teach herself French...and that is sort of the vibe you get while reading it. Something that begins as an exercise in French with a simplistic plot line that lends itself to easy translation into a foreign language doesn't bode well.

I was rereading my review of the Custom of the Country  and found this little gem: " I even found myself whispering under my breath "please Edith Wharton....just make a huge rock fall out of the sky and land on her...not killing her but leaving her horribly maimed and crippled and yet alive enough to live out her endless years in the anguish of being truly hideous..." That is basically the plot of Ethan From...minus the rock...so what's not to love?"

1) The story of  Ethan Frome is pieced together by a young engineer, temporarily trapped first by a strike and then by inclement weather in a small town in western Massachusetts.  The engineer after noticing this strange crippled man shuffling about his business one day finds himself sitting next to him in Frome's wagon hearing his life story. Plot lines like this always feel forced, although Isak Dinesen could pull off the story within a story trope pretty well...Wharton tends to need 300 pages to warm up...so shrinking everything down to 140 pages and having an unnamed Engineer do most of the work seems slightly  unjust and unsatisfying...

2) Most Wharton characters are established individuals, very rarely did I come across a Dickensian type characterture bumbling through the story line...but one of the things I like least about this book is the way Zeenia's character is treated. First she's the buxom cousin that has come to help Ethan tend to his dying mother...and then in a nanosecond she's a toothless hag of a women, constantly sucking her false teeth and clutching around in her least attractive garb, a histrionic personality that suffers constant aches and pains that can never be cured or even identified...  But because she is so grotesque and horrible...does it justify Ethan's actions? Being caught between an aging wife that isn't what she used to be and a younger more beautiful cousin Mattie  isn't really an interesting story it feels more like a painful rom-com that centers around justifiable infidelity.

3) The big idea is that they are going to sled themselves into a tree (Ethan and Mattie) rather than face being apart, which is being imminently forced on them by evil heinous Zeenia...hitting the tree is supposed to kill them instantly while they leave this world held in a perpetual embrace...and yet they botch it. It's not really they're fault though...sledding into a tree is probably the least quantitatively effective way of dying. I have sled into many a tree and street lamp for that matter...and while there where moments when I wish I had died as I crawled home praying there would be no residual scarring or injuries and that my legs would continue to grow at an even rate...I never even came close to the euphoric death scene they have pictured...which makes me wonder if Wharton had ever been sledding herself or if this was just one of those things somewhat unruly people did for fun somewhere west of Massachusetts...

As a treatise on the stunted lives filled with flaccid hope and perpetual regret that the people of small impoverished towns must face and attempt to absolve in their day to day lives, Ethan Frome does create a world where there is no escape, where one is forced into one life altering course after another, there is no individual power to rise above the elements of fate. Like most Wharton characters Ethan is caught between what he sees as a potential future of happiness and the perpetually bleak reality of his life, tantalizingly close enough to foster hope and yet always just slightly beyond reach.  The desire for change and freedom are constantly undermined as the gravestones around his house seem mockingly to say "we never got away - how should you..."

Fiskadoro - Denis Johnson

Denis Johnson (1949-)

Once again, reading Denis Johnson makes me happy to be alive. His writing is like something I have never come across before; it is free and unique and creates worlds that are easily inhabitable. His characters are presented in ways that make them not only familiar, no matter how marginal and foreign they actually are, but they become people you know, people you empathize with, even if they are drug addicted peeping toms. Somehow you find yourself relating to his characters in an almost intimate way.

Fiskadoro is a post-apocalyptic tale about a world left ravaged by World War III, or some form of nuclear catastrophe, wiping out most of civilization and leaving the little that remains to live in a primitive world absolved of memory. The people that remain try to create some form of order to their lives. In a world now devoid of rules and regulations, they suffer loss, anguish and alienation and try to pick up the pieces of who they are and where they've come from, while the memories of their past life slowly dissolve leaving them existing in a state of tabula rasa; their memories left to entropy in the hot sand of the Florida Keys.

The Florida Keys, are now called "Twicetown" because twice atomic bombs were dropped that somehow never detonated, and now these bombs provide the backdrop for all societal gatherings, weddings and funerals that take place in the "town center" which has slowly grown around the bombs. The town is really an evolving barrios, created from anything scavenged the locals can find; the detritus of a foreign world and past life. Old car seats make couches in the roughly constructed huts and abandoned xerox copiers become podiums, while occasionally old radios spit out bits of Bob Marley and Jimi Hendrix, men now seen as prophets or potential messiahs.

The book follows three main characters, Fiskadoro, a 14 year old boy, that like any young boy is trying to find a place for himself in a world with a strange mercurial order. He is slightly embarrassed of his name, which translated can mean fisherman, but which he wishes was translated as harpooner. He is shy, infatuated with women, but too embarrassed to avidly pursue them, instead he decides to take up clarinet playing, being the sole proprietor of one of the only two clarinets possibly to survive the Armageddon.

Fiskadoro asks the manager of the Miami Symphony Orchestra, which is comprised of about 4 people, to teach him to play the clarinet. The manager, Mr. Cheung, agrees and although the lessons seem to go nowhere, Fiskadoro being more enthusiastic than talented, Mr. Cheung slowly becomes a pillar of stability in the boys life. As Fiskadoro's life, built on the sandy dunes of vapid understanding, slowly crumbles around him, one day he walks farther along the beach than ever before, following a swamp girl into the unknown.

"Below the level of the dune the wind was stuck. It was like being swallowed alive. The air choked him, and he recognized the odor - it was hers; she smelled like the swamps, like her birthplace and her home. To follow her over the dunes and out of earshot and eyesight of his people, his head spinning and his throat blocked with the honey of tears, was not to know whether he would live or die. Don't look what I'm doing! he begged the dark sea."

Mr. Cheung is the only protagonist who can tangibly feel that there's something missing. An answer, always out of reach, to the question of why and how. He remembers burning copies of the constitution as a young boy to try and stay warm. His family each took two paragraphs to memorize, and now to soothe himself he repeats the constitution, or names the 50 states, places that no longer exist and terms that are now utterly meaningless. He constantly searches for an answer, his mind racing to make sense of the incompleteness and longing for a past he can't recover. His efforts to find something that will explain the End of the World are perpetually thwarted only leaving him more confused and lost, floating without a lifeline in the detritus of a ravaged history.

The last protagonist is Mr. Cheung's impossibly old grandmother who although has survived through the catastrophe can no longer communicate her thoughts. Mr. Cheung constantly regrets that she never told him the story of her life before it was too late and she only uttered strange guttural noises or sat with her lips moving, producing no sound as if no longer able to remember how to communicate.

"...her leathery old Chinese monkey face collapsing into her secret deliberations, her jaw slack, her smokey breath audible in the silences between Sydney Bechet exercises, and her black eyes so totally opaque he couldn't tell if they were sightless, dead, or coldly burning."

 His grandmother had fallen asleep one night in Key West in a world fraught with conspicuous consumption and politics, only to awake the next morning in a world that had ended and "thenceforth to live her life in the southernmost region of the Quarantine, in a time between civilization and a place ignored by authority."

But the grandmother hadn't always been a "sucked-out old woman with the face of a monkey and the skin of someone who had drowned," she had once been a beautiful girl named Marie, and while she sits in her chair chewing on the wrong end of a cigarette  she slowly ruminates about the past and how she's managed to survive. Her memories are disjointed vignettes, cryptically describing her survival; yet leaving so many questions forever unanswered. Unable to articulate her memories or even distinguish between the real and the imagined, the past and present are a blur of consciousness, she knows only that she survived. She knows only that survival cost her everything, and that she abandoned her family, her will and her past in order to continue living.

What I found to be really terrific about this book was Johnson's ability to create a post-apocalyptic world that rather than being dominated by fear, looting and a "Wild Wild West" mentality, instead is dominated by confusion. The people that survive are left to pick up the pieces while language slowly blends into a pigeon English, a poorly constructed patois of English and Spanish telling of the societal decay that has kept them locked in a dreamless void of understanding. His characters exist in a disembodied dream state, but rather than the apathy of post modernism and the angst of existential nihilism they embody a new way of living embracing the only philosophy that makes sense: survive.

According to the May 1, 1985 New York Times review of this book: "Fiskadoro is not the easiest novel to describe. It's the sort of book that a young Herman Melville might have written had he lived today and studied such disparate works as the Bible, "The Waste Land," "Fahrenheit 451" and "Dog Soldiers," screened "Star Wars" and "Apocalypse Now" several times, dropped a lot of acid and listened to hours of Jimi Hendrix and the Rolling Stones. It's a wildly ambitious book, full of mythology and philosophical speculation about the nature of time and memory and the endurance of language and art. At times it's beautifully poetic, at times insanely rhetorical, but its strange, hallucinatory vision of America and modern history is never less than compelling."