Review of TREE OF SMOKE (audiobook 2007) by guest blogger Star Lawrence
Author, Denis Johnson; read by Will Patton
TREE OF SMOKE, on 18 disks, is by turns elegiac, amped-up, circularly crazy like all wars, and mysterious with, as one character said it, reality pushed so far to the edge it becomes a dream.
Like Apocalypse Now in some ways, TREE OF SMOKE centers on a hard-drinking, philosophical Army colonel-turned-CIA man gone native and his nephew Skip--also CIA, but a more gentle soul and linguist, who gets ensnared in the demonic logic of war and pays the price.
Two brothers from Phoenix are also featured, one who gets kicked out of the Navy and almost straight into the Arizona penal system and the other who keeps re-upping in the Army and descends into the lawless hell of the bush and the tunnels.
The narrator is actor Will Patton, a favorite of mine, whose soft, Southern cadences and subtle dialects both lull and scratch insistently at the subconscious of the listener. I felt like writing him a fan letter after listening to TREE OF SMOKE.
The title, by the way, comes from the Bible and is said to double as a name for an atomic explosion. But it also could be the wavering gray area where the exactitude of reality blends into the forest of nightmares.
Star Lawrence is also a health writer and author of the blog HEALTH'Sass.
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