I listen to audiobooks as well as reading the physical pages. I have not gotten much into ebooks, but that's probably because I don't own a Kindle, don't plan on owning a kindle, and I'm not sure I would like to use it at all. I prefer to do my reading on something that won't short circuit if I fall asleep and drool all over it.
So back to the audiobooks. I have gone through countless through the year thus far, from Dan Brown's Digital Fortress (I would only recommend this to the 17 hardcore Dan Brown fans out there. The man can imagine a compelling plot, but the writing itself is shit for the most part and does not give the reader any credit) to John Grisham novels - I think I've completed nearly everything that hasn't been turned into a movie.
Recently I picked up Tree of Smoke from the BPL, having attempted to read this book in hardcover about a year or two ago when it first came out. It was a tough one to get into at the time for me and I dropped it. The audiobook, read by Will Patton (Armageddon, Gone in 60 Seconds) was much, much better. I've always liked the way Johnson does everything. His writing is superb, from Jesus' Son to Fiskadoro to a few short plays I've seen in McSweeney's. And to be accompanied by Patton's performance really made this audiobook work.
The book itself, is set in Vietnam. Being much too young to have experienced the war the way so many others had, I've studied the war. I've read everything Tim O'Brian has written about Vietnam since I was first made to read The Things They Carried and carried my way forward through all of the post-war novels which I felt were equally as good. I've watched Apolcalypse Now far too many times and still occasionally run quotes from it in my head at random.
But Tree of Smoke is not about that Vietnam. There is no constant firefight keeping the troops on their toes. For the most part, there are no troops. The lead character is Skip Sands, a CIA operative who is tasked with intelligence sorting and gathering, though the tasks he is. Skip's uncle, known as The Colonel, is described as Coppolla's Kilgore about another decade down the line and with vast amounts of knowledge from Langley.
The story is one of the human condition in an environment as throuroughly fucked up as Vietnam was. Johnson writes truthfully from every angle. From the locals, to babyfaced troops fresh from training, to VC double agents, to CIA assholes running what amounts to a version of Internal Affairs, to the women who were left at home in the square states while their sons went to fight, Johnson tells the version of the truth he sees and leaves room for what he didn't want to write about. He doesn't lead you into a determination of a character through dialogue and action - he allows the characters dialogue and action to flow in a way that forces to you to try and work out the motivations and end goals.
There is no spoon-feeding here, you've got to want to figure these characters out. And in the end, I'm not sure I was able to. The story ends in a far more realistic way than anything about Vietnam that's ever been in a movie - where these characters end up, how thier lives are ended or allowed to continue.
I'm already ready to read Johnson's newest book Nobody Move.
Oh yeah - for those of you who aren't familiar with Denis Johnson's work (and seriously - why not? Pick up Jesus' Son and read it cover to cover tomorrow. Shouldn't take you more than an hour or two) and are more concerned about what Oprah or Good Morning America are suggesting you read - Tree of Smoke did win a National Book Award. So it's got that going for it, which is nice.
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