It took me over a couple hundred pages to get into this book.  At somewhere near 300 I finally found something that really jumped out at me.  Some dude, Hanson, was freaking over the Tet offensive.  I’m not sure I was reading the book correctly.  Maybe there were some metaphors or underlying messages I was supposed to be enjoying.  The back of the book says things like, “Johnson has wry humor,” and, “Deeply funny.”  I am not sure if these are exactly what is written on the back of the book.  I’ve already donated my copy of it to the Los Angeles Public Library on San Vicente Ave across from this big blue pile of shit design building.  Phillip Roth is quoted on the back of the book.  The quote implies he read the book.  In some ways I wonder if Phillip Roth even bothers reading anymore.  I can’t picture him shopping for books anywhere besides Barnes & Noble and Borders.  In my mind I see him walking into one of these stores saying, “This store sucks,” and then walking out.

While I was reading Tree of Smoke half of me thought, “This is shit.  How’d this win the national book award?”  The other half thought, “Shit, Denis Johnson is a genius.  He somehow strung me along for 600 pages even though I didn’t really like the story.”

There were segments I liked.  The whole young boy fucks some girl, goes to war, misses girl for a week, hangs out, fucks prostitutes, ignores girl’s letters from back home, signs up for more tours of duty, gets head fucked up, does bad shit, comes home, keeps doing bad shit, etc…this type of story always eats me up even if it’s been rehashed before.  Most of the CIA segments were a yawn.  There was this uncle who played football at Notre Dame.  He was pretty cool.  I can’t really remember what happened in Apocalypse Now, but I feel like this Uncle was all the characters of Apocalypse Now wrapped into one.  I could be wrong.  I remember some dude floating in the water with face paint.  That’s all I remember about the movie.  Still, I imagine Denis Johnson wrote his book while playing the movie on repeat.

Overall, I kept thinking, “Fuck this shit, I’m going to win the National Book Award.”  It seems easier to win the National Book Award after reading this book.  There are a series of steps I will have to take.  I will probably have to punch some of my friends in the face.  For a long time Denis Johnson was a poet.  He might have been a faggot.  I imagine he tells his wife sometimes, “Damn, remember when I wrote poetry.  I was a faggot.”  Or maybe he says, “Poetry was good to me.  Many women slept with me because I pretended to write them poems.”  I don’t think I’m going to write poetry.  I think I will write eleven one-hundred page books and then write a three-thousand page book that the judges of the National Book Award won’t have time to read.  Then they’ll decide the three-thousand page effort is worth a trophy so they’ll give me a trophy.  Yep, I guess I have to go write twelve books now. 

I’d also like to add that when I finished this book there was an African American young man sitting across from me reading Dale Carnegie books.  Get money.