Review: Jesus' Son/Tree of Smoke

Affecting, or Just Unpleasant?
Jesus’ Son/Tree of Smoke


Convention suggests that when evaluating a book, we begin by asking:
Q: In the classical sense of literature, does this work transport us? Does it carry us to a place where we want to be?
If the answer to the second question is “Yes,” than presumably the book is worth reading. The case of Jesus’ Son, published in 1992 by Denis Johnson, requires a third sub-question in order to determine enjoyment:
Q: Would you be happy to live in a cardboard box of unique description?
Johnson answer for a period of time early in his life was, “Yes, provided I was fucked up.” If your answer was similar, or if you have an interest in people who answered similarly, you will probably like his book. Jesus’ Son is of a genre immediately familiar to anyone who’s dropped in on an AA meeting: romanticized addict-noir.
Denis Johnson skins his prose cats differently, which is catnip to people who like peculiar prose. Some writers watch their windshield wipers whisk back and forth while listening to the electric motors whine; some notice the negative space left obscured outside their parabolic reach. In Jesus’ Son, Johnson’s wipers “stood up and lay down across the windshield without much effect.” In 1992, Johnson was talented at the one line twist, but doesn’t attempt to do more than gesture at a plot - the loosely threaded narrative arc of the 133-page short story collection unfolds with a power similar to his wipers. At first there is depravity, and then, towards the end, there is less of it.
In a story titled “Work,” Johnson narrates about getting high, hitting his woman when he sobers up, needing money to buy more heroin, and teaming up with a fellow junkie:
We balled up big gobs of wire in the center of each room, working for over an hour… we made a mound of white-jacketed wire in the top of his former home, pulling it up out of the floor. I felt weak. I had to vomit in the corner – just a thimbleful of grey bile. “All this work,” I complained, “is fucking with my high. Can’t you figure out some easier way of making a dollar?”
Later, at a bar:
“Nurse,” I sobbed. She poured doubles like an angel, right up to the lip of a cocktail glass, no measuring. “You have a lovely pitching arm.”
Johnson has a desperate penchant for women who provide care. Only mom can soothe the furies of boy; there are perhaps more clinical terms available to describe this. Johnson took nine years off after the commercial triumph of Jesus’ Son, and settled down with his third wife and home school his children. It was not time spent idly – his 614-page Vietnam War novel Tree of Smoke was published in 2007. It seems probable that he crafted a detailed outline before writing the book – the way it articulates the same devastatingly unguided masculinity of his earlier work is far more sophisticated.
Tree of Smoke works to illustrate hierarchy and power relationships between men. At the top is the enigmatic Colonel; a larger than life figure who’s schemes are the impeller drawing lesser men into action. As a rouse, the Colonel sets his “secret agent” cats-paw nephew Skip Sands to work doing nothing. On the other end of the diagram are brothers Bill and James Houston, an inebriate seaman and disturbed infantryman. When the story strays far from these four, the skeleton of the work protrudes awkwardly – the novel is bloated with hollow-eyed Machina characters, poorly integrated forays and dull ruminations on morality. Johnson has grand ambitions and the kitchen sink.
He is best when he’s working the same material that he’s always done. And he would be better if he had cut the dead weight surrounding the tender heart of Tree of Smoke. Johnson does not write beyond the major realization that presumably once led him away from self-destruction; he is eternally preoccupied with how the soft, loving woman’s world is held captive by irrationally destructive men:
Before very much longer the two brothers got into an argument with each other over nothing, and Bill Houston spilled a pitcher of beer right into the lap of somebody at the next table – a Japanese girl, who hunched her shoulders and looked sad and humiliated… The beer dribbled off the table’s edge while James fumbled to right the empty pitcher, saying, “It gets like this sometimes. It just does.”
The young girl made no move at all to adjust herself. She stared at her lap.
“What’s wrong with us,” James asked his brother, “are we fucked up or something? Every time we get together, something bad happens.”
“I know.”
“Something fucked-up.”
It gets darker:
When the others were finished she no longer needed holding down. James fell on his knees and put the point of his Bowie knife against the woman’s belly and said, “What’s your rank, sojer? You ever been showed what to do with one a these, sojer? You ever seen one before, sojer? What’s your rank, little sojer? What are you looking at? Do you think you’re my mother? You’re my mother, but who the fuck is my father?” He interrogated her until his hand was too weak to keep hold of the hilt.
The book ends with a letter written by the condemned Skip to a widowed humanitarian worker, with whom he had only an occasional and dispassionate affair. Skip writes of his exploits as an illegal arms dealer after the war, his three children and common-law Philippina wife, and then “Kathy, I believe I loved you. It never quite happened with anyone else.” Kathy remembers him vaguely as a dissembler and a liar, decides that she doesn’t really believe him, and quickly puts the episode aside to think instead about a speech she will deliver at a fundraiser for orphaned children.
Q: Who loves you, Denis Johnson?
A: Mommy loves you. Mommy loves you. Be good to her.